the sand beside him, "and
think only of your friend in the ship, in his natural surroundings.
Try to hold that picture constant in your mind, letting no other
thought trouble it."

"Do you mean--send a message to him mentally!" Raf's reply was half
protest.

"Did I not so reach you when we were in the city--even before I knew
of you as an individual?" the scout reminded him. "And such messages
are doubly possible when they are sent from friend to friend."

"But we were close then."

"That is why--" again Dalgard indicated the mermen. "For them this is
the natural means of communication. They will pick up your reaching
thought, amplify it with their power, beam it north. Since your friend
deals with matters of communication, let us hope that he will be
sensitive to this method."

Raf was only half convinced that it might work But he remembered how
Dalgard had established contact with him, before, as the scout had
pointed out, they had met. It was that voiceless cry for aid which had
pulled him into this adventure in the first place. It was only fitting
that something of the same process give _him_ help in return.

Obediently he stretched out on the sand and closed his dim eyes,
trying to picture Soriki in the small cabin which held the com,
slouched in his bucket seat, his deceptive posture that of a lax
idler, as he had seen him so many times. Soriki--his broad face with
its flat cheekbones, its wide cheerful mouth, its heavy-lidded eyes.
And having fixed Soriki's face, he tried to believe that he was now
confronting the com-tech, speaking directly to him.

"Come--come and get me--south--seashore--Soriki come and get me!" The
words formed a kind of chant, a chant aimed at that familiar face in
its familiar surroundings. "South--come and get me--" Raf struggled to
think only of that, to allow nothing to break through that chant or
disturb his picture of the scene he had called from memory.

How long that attempt at communication lasted the pilot could not
tell, for somehow he slipped from the deep concentration into sleep,
dreamless and untroubled, from which he awoke with the befogged
feeling that something important had happened. But had he gotten
through?

The ring of mermen was gone, and it was dawn, gray, chill with the
forewarnings of rain in the air. He was reassured because he was
certain that in spite of the gloom his sight was a fraction clearer
than it had been the day before. But had they gotten t