f shelter which would appeal to
it for a lair. And snake-devils did not den alone!

"Try by the river," Sssuri gave advice. Like Dalgard, he accepted the
necessity of the chase. No intelligent creature ever lost the chance
to kill a snake-devil when fortune offered it. And he and the scout
had hunted together on such trails before. Now they slipped into
familiar roles from long practice.

They took a route which should lead them to the river, and within a
matter of yards, came across evidence proving that the merman had
guessed correctly; a second claw print was pressed deep in a patch of
drifted soil.

Here the buildings were of a new type, windowless, perhaps
storehouses. But what pleased Dalgard most was the fact that most of
them showed tightly closed doors. There was no chance for their prey
to lurk in wait.

"We should smell it." Sssuri picked that worry out of the scout's mind
and had a ready answer for it.

Sure--they should smell the lair; nothing could cloak the horrible
odor of a snake-devil's home. Dalgard sniffed vigorously as he padded
along. Though odd smells clung to the strange buildings none of them
were actively obnoxious--yet.

"River--"

There was the river at the end of the way they had been following, a
way which ended in a wharf built out over the oily flow of water.
Blank walls were on either side. If the snake-devil had come this way,
he had found no hiding place.

"Across the river--"

Dalgard gave a resigned grunt. For some reason he disliked the thought
of swimming that stream, of having his skin laved by the turgid water
with its brown sheen.

"There is no need to swim."

Dalgard's gaze followed Sssuri's pointing finger. But what he saw
bobbing up and down, pulled a little downstream by the current, did
not particularly reassure him. It was manifestly a boat, but the form
was as alien as the city around them.

4

CIVILIZATION

Raf surveyed the wide sweep of prairie where dawn gave a gray tinge to
soften the distance and mark the rounded billows of the ever-rippling
grass. He tried to analyze what it was about this world which made it
seem so untouched, so fresh and new. There were large sections of his
own Terra which had been abandoned after the Big Burn-Off and the
atomic wars, or later after the counterrevolution which had defeated
the empire of Pax, during which mankind had slipped far back on the
road to civilization. But he had never experienced this same