On the third day they came down to one of those fjords which tongued inland, fringing the coast. There had been no lack of hunting in the narrow valleys through which they had threaded, so both men and wolverines were well fed. Though animal fur wore better than the now tattered uniforms of the men.
“Now where?” Shann asked.
Would he now learn the purpose driving Thorvald on to this coastland? Certainly such broken country afforded good hiding, but no better concealment than the mountains of the interior.
The Survey officer turned slowly around on the shingle, studying the heights behind them as well as the angle of the inlet where the wavelets lapped almost at their battered boot tips. Opening his treasured map case, he began a patient checking of landmarks against several of the strips he carried. “We’ll have to get on down to the true coast.”
Shann leaned against the trunk of a conical branched mountain tree, pulling absently at the shreds of wine-colored bark being shed in seasonal change. The chill they had known in the upper valleys was succeeded here by a humid warmth. Spring was becoming a summer such as this northern continent knew. Even the fresh wind, blowing in from the outer sea, had already lost some of the bite they had felt two days before when its salt-laden mistiness had first struck them.
“Then what do we do there?” Shann persisted.
Thorvald brought over the map, his black-rimmed nail tracing a route down one of the fjords, slanting out to indicate a lace of islands extending in a beaded line across the sea.
“We head for these.”
To Shann that made no sense at all. Those islands … why, they would offer less chance of establishing a safe base than the broken land in which they now stood. Even the survey scouts had given those spots of sea-encircled earth the most cursory examination from the air.
“Why?” he asked bluntly. So far he had followed orders because they had for the most part made sense. But he was not giving obedience to Thorvald as a matter of rank alone.
“Because there is something out there, something which may make all the difference now. Warlock isn’t an empty world.”
Shann jerked free a long thong of loose bark, rolling it between his fingers. Had Thorvald cracked? He knew that the officer had disagreed with the findings of the team and had been an unconvinced minority of one who had refused to subscribe to the report that Warlock had no native intelligent life and therefore was ready and waiting for human settlement because it was technically an empty world. But to continue to cling to that belief without a single concrete proof was certainly a sign of mental imbalance.
And Thorvald was regarding him now with frowning impatience. You were supposed to humor delusions, weren’t you? Only, could you surrender and humor a wild idea which might mean your death? If Thorvald wanted to go island-hopping in chance of discovering what never had existed, Shann need not accompany him. And if the officer tried to use force, well, Shann was armed with a stunner, and had, he believed, more control over the wolverines. Perhaps if he merely gave lip agreement to this project … Only he didn’t believe, noting the light deep in those gray eyes holding on him, that anybody could talk Thorvald out of this particular obsession.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” The impatience arose hotly in that demand.
“Why shouldn’t I?” Shann tried to temporize. “You’ve had a lot of exploration experience; you should know about such things. I don’t pretend to be any authority.”
Thorvald refolded the map and placed it in the case. Then he pulled at the sealing of his blouse, groping in an inner secret pocket. He uncurled his fingers to display his treasure.
On his palm lay a coin-shaped medallion, bone-white but possessing an odd luster which bone would not normally show. And it was carved. Shann put out a finger, though he had a strange reluctance to touch the object. When he did he experienced a sensation close to the tingle of a mild electric shock. And once he had made that contact, he was also impelled to pick up that disk and examine it more closely.
The carved pattern was very intricate and had been done with great delicacy and skill, though the whorls, oddly shaped knobs, ribbon tracings, made no connected design he could determine. After a moment or two of study, Shann became aware that his eyes, following those twists and twirls, were “fixed,” that it required a distinct effort to look away from the thing. Feeling some of that same alarm as he had known when he first heard the wailing of the Throg hound, he let the disk fall back into Thorvald’s hold, even more disturbed when he discovered that to relinquish his grasp required some exercise of will.
“What is it?”
Thorvald restored the coin to his hiding place.
“You tell me. I can say this much, there is no listing for anything even remotely akin to this in the Archives.”
Shann’s eyes widened. He absently rubbed the fingers which had held the bone coin—if it was a coin—back and forth across the torn front of his blouse. That tingle … did he still feel it? Or was his imagination at work again? But an object not listed in the exhaustive Survey Archives would mean some totally new civilization, a new stellar race.
“It is definitely a created article,” the Survey officer continued. “And it was found on the beach of one of those sea islands.”
“Throg?” But Shann already knew the answer to that.
“Throg work—this?” Thorvald was openly scornful. “Throgs have no conception of such art. You must have seen their metal plates—those are the beetle-heads’ idea of beauty. Have those the
