“Then what’ll we do there?” Shann persisted.
Thorvald brought over the map, his black-rimmed nail tracing a route down one of the fiords, 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. He 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 intricately carved pattern 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’s definitely a fabricated 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 slightest resemblance to this?”
“Then who made it?”
“Either Warlock has—or once had—a native race advanced enough in a well-established form of civilization to develop such a sophisticated type of art, or there have been other visitors from space here before us and the Throgs. And the latter possibility I don’t believe—“
“Why?”
“Because this was carved of bone or an allied substance. We haven’t been quite able to identify it in the labs, but it’s an organic material. It was found exposed to the weather and yet it is in perfect condition, could have been carved any time within the past five years. It has been handled, yes, but not roughly. And we have come across evidences of no other star-cruising races or species in this sector save ourselves and the Throgs. No, I say this was made here on Warlock, not too long ago, and by intelligent beings of a very high level of civilization.”
“But they would have cities,” protested Shann. “We’ve been here for months, explored all over this continent. We’d have seen them or some traces of them.”
“An old race, maybe,” Thorvald mused, “a very old race, perhaps in decline, reduced to a remnant in numbers with good reason to retire into hiding. No, we’ve discovered no cities, no evidence of a native culture past or present. But this—“ he touched the front of his blouse—“was found on the shore of an island. We may have been looking in the wrong place for our natives.”
“The sea . . . “ Shann glanced with new interest at the green water surging in wavelets along the edge of the fiord.
“Just so, the sea!”
“But scouts have been here for more than a year, one team or another. And nobody saw anything or found any traces.”
“All four of our base camps were set inland, our explorations along the coast were mainly carried out by flitter, except for one party—the one which found this. And there may be excellent local reasons why no native ever showed himself to us. For that matter, they may not be able to exist on land at all, any more than we could live without artificial aids in the sea.”
“Now — ?”
“Now we must make a real attempt to find them if they do exist anywhere near here. A friendly native race could make all the difference in the world in any struggle with the Throgs.”
“Then you did have more than the dreams to back you when you argued with Fenniston!” Shann cut in.
Thorvald’s eyes were on him again. “When did you hear that, Lantee?”
To his great embarrassment, Shann found himself flushing. “I heard you, the day you left for Headquarters,” he admitted, and then added in his own defense, “Probably half the camp did, too.”
Thorvald’s gathering frown flickered away. He gave a snort of laughter. “Yes, I guess we did rather get to the bellowing point that morning. The dreams—“ he came back to the subject—“Yes, the dreams were—are—important. We had their warning from the start. Lorry was the First-In Scout who charted Warlock, and he’s a good man. I guess I can break secret now to tell you this his ship was equipped with a new experimental device which recorded—well, you might call it an ‘emanation’—a radiation so faint its source could not be traced. And it registered whenever Lorry had one of those dreams. Unfortunately, the machine was very new, very much in the untested stage, and its performance when checked later in the lab was erratic enough so the powers-that-be questioned all its readings. They produced a half dozen answers to account for that tape, and Lorry only caught the signal as long as he was on a big bay to the south.
“Then when two check flights came in later, carrying perfected machines and getting no recordings, it was all written off as a mistake in the first experiment. A planet such as Warlock is too big a find to throw away when there was no proof of occupancy. And the settlement boys rushed matters right along.”
Shann recalled his own vivid dream of the skull-rock set in the lap of water—this sea? And another small point fell into place to furnish the beginning of a pattern. “I was asleep on the raft when I dreamed about that skull-mountain,” he said slowly, wondering if he were making sense.
Thorvald’s hand came up with the alert stance of Taggi on a strong game scent.