Hunted and hunters were at the foot of her valley now. Suddenly, black smoke erupted from the rear of the pursued flitter. It nosed upward. It hovered reluctantly, then dove, slantingly, to strike the tumble of boulders along the river's edge, not far from her refuge.

Chris gasped as she beheld a figure, halfleaping, halfstaggering out of the badly smashed flitter. She could scarcely believe that even a Catteni had survived that crash. Wideeyed, she watched as he struggled to his feet, then reeled from boulder to boulder to get away from the smoldering wreck.

With a stunningly brilliant flare, the craft exploded. Fragments whistled into the underbrush as far up the slope as her retreat, and the idiotic thornbushes She had recently triggered sprayed out their lethal little darts.

The smoke of the burning flitter obscured her view now, and Chris lost sight of the man. The other flitters had reached the wreck and were hovering over it, like so many angry KingKongish bees, swooping, diving, trying to penetrate the smoke.

An afternoon breeze swirled the black clouds about and Chris caught glimpses of the man, lurching still further from the crash. She saw him stumble and fall, after which he made no move to rise. Above, the bees buzzed angrily, deprived of their prey.

Catteni don't hunt each other as a rule, she told herself, surprised to find that she was halfway down from her perch. They fight like Irishmen, sure, but to chase a man so far from the city?

The crash had been too far away for Chris to distinguish the hunted man's features or build. He might just be an escaped slave, like herself. If not Terran, he might be from one of the halfdozen other subjugated races that lived on Barevi. Someone who had had the guts to steal a flitter didn't deserve to die under Catteni forcewhips.

Chris made her way down the slope, careful to avoid the numerous thorn thickets that dominated these woods. She had once amused herself with the whimsy that the thorns were the gorupear's protectors, for the two invariably grew close together.

At the top of the sheer precipice above the falls of the river, she grabbed a long vine which she had hung there for a speedy descent. On the river bank she stuck to the dry, flat rocks until she came to the steppingstones that allowed her to cross the river below the wide pool made by the little falls. Down a gully, across another thombushfilled clearing, and then she was directly above the spot where she had last seen the man.

Keeping close to the brown rocks so nearly the shade of her own tanned skin, she crossed the remaining distance. She all but tripped over him as the wind puffed black smoke down among the rocks.

"Catteni!" she cried, furious as she bent to examine the unconscious man and recognized the gray and yellow uniform despite its tattered and blackened condition.

With a disdainful foot, she tried to turn him over.

And couldn't. The man might as well have been a boulder. She knelt and yanked his bead around by the thick slategray hair which, in a Catteni, did not indicate age. Maybe he was dead?

No such luck. He was breathing. A bruise mark on his temple showed one reason for his unconsciousness. For a Catteni, he was almost goodlooking. Most of them tended to have brutish, coarse features, but this one had a straight, almost patrician nose, even if there was a lot more of it than an elephant would want to claim, and he had a wide, wellshaped mouth. The Catteni to whom she had been sold had had thick, blubbery lips, and she'd heard rumors— never mind about them!

A sizzling crack jerked her head around in the direction of the wreck. The damned fools were firing on the burning wreck now. Chris looked down at the unconscious man, wondering what on earth he had done to provoke such vindictive thoroughness. They sure wanted him good and dead.

The barrage pulverized the flitter, leaving the fire no fuel. The wind, laden with coarse dust, blew odorously from the wreckage. The man stirred and vainly tried to raise himself, only to sink back to the ground with a groan. Chris saw the flitters circling to land on the plateau below the wreck.

"Going to case the scene of the crime, huh?" It was completely illogical, Chris told herself, to help a Catteni simply because there were others of his race out to get him. But... she backtracked, just in case he had left any trace for them to follow. She went back as far as she could on the raw rock. Where dirt began, ash had settled in a thick layer, obliterating any tracks he might have made. After all, the Catteni might stumble on her if they thought their victim had escaped the crash.

He had got to his feet when she returned. She tried to lend her support but it was like trying to guide a mountain.

"Come on, Mahomet," she urged softly. "Just walk like a nice little boy to the river, and I'll duck you in. Good cold water'll bring you round."

A sharp, distant gabble of voices made her start nervously. God, those Catteni had got up that rock face in a hurry. She'd forgotten they could take prodigious leaps on this lightgravity planet.

"They're coming. Follow me," she said in lingua Barevi.

He groaned again, shaking his heavy head to clear his senses. He turned toward her, his great yellow eyes still dazed with shock. She would never get used to such buttercolored irises.

"This way! Quickly!" she said, urgently tugging at him. If he didn't shake his treestump legs, she was going to leave him. Good Samaritans on Barevi had better not get caught by Catteni.

She pulled at his arm and he seemed to make a decision. He lurched forward, one great hand grasping her shoulder in an incredible viselike grip. They reached the river bank, still ahead of the searchers. But Chris groaned as she realized that the barely conscious man would never be able to navigate the steppingstones.

The shouts behind them indicated that the others were fanning out to search the rocks. Urgently she grabbed his hand, leading him to the base of the falls.

"If you don't float, it's just too damned bad," she said grimly, and taking a running start, she knocked him into the water.

She dove in, right beside him, and when he did indeed continue to sink, she grabbed and caught him by his thick hair. Fortunately the water made even a solid Catteni manageable. Exerting all her strength and skill as a swimmer, she got his head above water and held him up with a chin lock.

By sheer good luck, they came up in the space between the arc of the falls and the cliff, the curtain of water shielding them from view. As the Catteni began to struggle in her grasp, the five hunters leapt spectacularly into view in the clearing by the pool. Her "Mahomet" was instantly alert and, instead of struggling, began to tread water beside her.

The Catteni were arguing with each other, and each seemed to be issuing conflicting orders.

Mahomet released himself from her chinhold, his yellow eyes never leaving the party on the bank. They watched, keeping the swimming motions to a minimum, though the falls would hide any ripples.

One Catteni, after a heated argument, decided to cross the wide pool in a fantastic, to Chris, standing leap. He and another began to move downstream, carefully examining both banks and casually surmounting upended coffinsized boulders with no effort. The other three went charging back the way they had come, arguing violently.

After an endless interval, during which the icy water chilled Chris to the bone, the refugee finally touched her shoulder and nodded toward the shore. But when she realized that he was going to head back the way they had come, she shook her head emphatically, pointing to the other side.

"I've a flitter. Over there," she shouted at him over the noise of the falls. He frowned. "Safer. That way!" she insisted, jabbing a finger in the direction of her hidden vehicle. Stunned as she suddenly realized what she had done, she stared at him. "Oh, God!"

He raised an eyebrow in surprise, and she hoped for one long moment that he had not understood what she had said. But he had, and now his yellow eyes gleamed at her in the gloom with a different sort of interest.

He's like a great lion, Chris thought, and almost choked on fear.

"You have aided a Catteni," he said, rumbling in a deep voice. "You shall not suffer for that."

Chris wasn't so sure when she tried to climb out of the river and found herself numb with cold, and strengthless. He, on the other hand, strode easily out of the water. He looked down at her ineffectual struggles, frowning irritably. Then, with no apparent effort, he curled the long fingers of one hand around her upper arm and simply withdrew her from the water, supporting her until she got her balance.

Shivering, she looked up at him. God, he was big: the tallest Catteni she had ever seen. She had inherited the height of her Swedish father and stood five foot ten in her bare feet. She had topped most of the Catteni she had seen by several inches, but his eyes 161 were level with hers. And his shoulders were as broad as the scoop of a roadgrader.

"Where's the flitter?" he demanded curtly.

She pointed, furious that she obeyed him so instantly, and that she couldn't control the chattering of her teeth or the trembling of her body. He reached for her hand, relaxing his grip a little at her involuntary gasp of pain.

Replace "grubby paws" with "highgravity paws," she told herself in an effort to keep up her spirits as she stepped in front of him.

"I'll have to lead the way through the thorns," she said. "Or maybe thorns don't bother Catteni hides?" she added pertly.

To her surprise, he grinned at her.

"Catteni are always cautious."

As she turned, she realized that she had never seen a Catteni smile before. She noticed, too, that he was following carefully in her footsteps. It was good to know that he was no more anxious to disturb the thornbushes with their vicious little barbs than she was.

They were halfway to the hidden flitter when both heard, off to the right in the valley, the staccato volley of orders in loud Catteni voices.

Mahomet paused, dropping to a halfcrouch, instinctively angling his body so that he did not touch the closegrowing vegetation. He listened, and although the words were too distorted for Chris to catch, he evidently understood them. A humorless smile touched his lips and his eyes gleamed with a light that frightened Chris.

"They have seen movement here. Hurry!" he said in a low voice.

Chris broke into a jog trot; the twisting path made a faster pace unwise. When they broke into the dell just before the extensive thicket, she paused.

"Where? Are you lost?" he asked.

"Through those bushes. Watch. And when I say move, move!"

He frowned skeptically as she picked up a handful of small stones. With a practiced ease, she began casting at the thickets. Gauging carefully, she threw right and left, watching and counting the thorn sprays to be sure she had triggered every bush. To be on the safe side, she scooped up one more handful of pebbles and broadcast it. No further thorns showered.

"Move!" His reaction time was so much faster than hers that he was halfway across the clearing within seconds after the order escaped her lips. She rushed in front of him. "We have five minutes to cross before they rearm."

An expression that was almost respectful crossed his face. Impatiently, she tugged at him and then began to weave her way among the bushes, following no recognizable route. When she made the last turn and he saw the flitter, its nose cushioned in the heavy cluster of thomthicket limbs, he gave what Chris assumed was a Catteni chuckle.

She waved open the flitter door and bade him to enter with a regal gesture. He walked straight to the instrument panel, grunting as he activated the main switch.

"Half a tank of fuel," he muttered, and then checked the other dials. He seemed pleased as he nipped off the switch. He glanced up at the transparent top, camouflaged by the interwining leafy limbs, at the bed she had made herself on the deck, at the utensils she had fashioned from spare parts in the lockers.

"So it was you who stole the commander's personal car," he remarked, looking intently at her.

Chris jerked her chin up.

"At least I landed it in one piece," she replied.

At that he laughed outright, once.

"You're one of the new species?"

"I'm a Terran," she said with haughty pride, her stance marred by uncontrollable shivering.

"Thinskinned species," he remarked. He looked down at her heaving chest, and slowly started to stroke her shoulder with one finger. His touch was feathery—and more. "Soft to the touch," he said absently. "I haven't bothered to try a Terran yet..."

Before she could draw back, his left hand cupped her breast and the other grabbed her tunic at the back, ripping the garment from her in one sharp, powerful jerk. The fingers of his right hand pulled her inexorably toward him.

"I saved your life..." she said in protest, her heart beating in panic.

"And I intend to reward you suitably."

"Not that..."

"A Catteni's honor is involved," he said, both hands exerting such pressure on her body that his caresses were painful.

With no effort at all he picked her up and deposited her on the bed. When she tried to wiggle away, he laid a hand, like a ton of bricks, on her chest. With the other, he stripped off his tunic, exposing his immense chest, each welldefined muscle rippling sinuously under slightly olive skin. The rest of his clothing followed.

"Oh no!" Chris cried in desperation. "You're... I can't!"

He glanced down at her wide, curving hips, and shrugged.

"Catteni have been enjoying your race since you were discovered," he reassured her calmly.

"Yes, but have we enjoyed it?"

She made a frantic attempt to evade him as he leaned down. But there was no escape from that implacable male. She arched her back, only to realize that she had made it much easier for him. She continued to struggle out of pride.

"You enjoy pain?" he asked, a puzzled frown on his face. His fingers tightened just that much more so that she felt she'd been caught in a vise and, with a shuddering moan she relaxed, too exhausted to offer even token resistance. "Now we will both enjoy," he said, and proceeded to prove his point.

Just as she was certain she would be split apart, apprehension was replaced by a surging emotion far more powerful and overwhelming. Somewhere, in that flood of intense relief and unexpected ecstasy, she heard him exclaiming, too, in loud surprise.

A harsh curse broke the silence that had settled in the hidden flitter. The warm, strong body of the Catteni stiffened. ,Chris glanced up at him in alarm. He brushed his hand warningly across her lips, all his attention focused in the direction of that swearing. The flitter door was still open, and both Chris and Mahomet heard the vrrh, vrrh as the thornbushes released their darts. There were loud cries of pain and further curses. Chris saw the Catteni's eyes dance with malicious amusement.

An authoritative voice uttered a rough command, and even Chris understood the "Get the hell out of here, nothing can pass this way."

She and Mahomet lay still, almost breathless, although the flitter was buried a good hundred yards from the edge of the thickets and could not possibly be seen. They waited until they heard no sound except the brief sighing of the wind.

With a low laugh, the Catteni finally withdrew from Chris, stretching leisurely, his joints popping and cracking with startling loudness.

"I'd heard there was a run on Terran women, and now I can see why. They use their heads as well as their tails."

Chris slapped at his hand, feeling like a flea attacking a Great Dane, but determined to make a gesture. He began to stroke her body, gently exploring it rather than attempting to arouse passion. He was curious, like a small intrigued boy.

"Yes, I can see why," he repeated with a chuckle. He lay back, glancing about the flitter. "This car has been gone five months. Why have you stayed so long alone?" he asked. "Are there others of you here?" He propped himself up on one huge elbow, looking suspiciously out the windows.

"Just me."

He relaxed and smiled. Sensing his receptivity, she dared ask him why he had been chased by his own people.

"Oh," and he shrugged negligently, "a tactical error. I was forced to kill their patrol leader. He had insulted the accomplishments of my squadron. And, as I was without allies, I withdrew."

"He who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day?"

"The next day," he corrected her, absently. "The next day?"

"Certainly. It is against the Catteni Law to continue a quarrel past the same hour of the following day. I have only to lie hidden," and he grinned at her, "until tomorrow at sun zenith and then I can return."

"Won't they be waiting for you?"

He shook his head violently. "Against the Law. Otherwise, we Catteni would quickly exterminate each other."

"You honestly mean to say that, if they can't find you before noon tomorrow, they have to give up?"

He nodded.

"Would that Law apply to slaves, too?"

He looked at her intently. "It can. And I shall personally see that in your case it does. However, while we're waiting for tomorrow..." And he reached purposefully for her.

Batting at his possessive hands, she squirmed to free herself.

"What? Was I not tender enough with you?" he asked, concern flitting across his face. "We Catteni pride ourselves that we are gentle with our women."

Chris could think of a hundred argumentative replies to that statement, and yet had to admit that he had been considerate, gentle, and that even at the height of his passion, he had not forgotten to adjust his strength. His hands were caressing her now, softly, and despite herself, she was responding to him, wanting more of that strong gentleness.

"It's just... well... you've had quite a day," she temporized, aware that her body was already conforming itself to his even as she protested, "you've been in a crash, halffrozen in icy water and..."

"Like the thombushes of Barevi," he said, smiling, "it takes the Catteni little time to rearm."

Horse from a Different Sea

ARE WE BABES IN THE WOODS? OR I SHOULD say, babes in space. I don't mean beating the Russians to a manned moonbase or setting up a space hospital or making Mars adaptable to our survival there to ease the population explosion here. Our problem is more basic than that: can man survive as Homo sapiens or a reasonable facsimile thereof. In that department, are we wetting our spacesuits!

I know what I'm talking about. Only I can't talk. Not yet, since my evidence hasn't come to light, so to speak. It's due soon and, as an ambulance chaser from way back, I've got to be there. I'd rather know right off what the competition makes out as.

We—that is, mankind, Earthtype—are in for one helluva jolt and this is one therapeutic pill that has no sugar coating—unless it's an LSD cube. I'm not the only one in the medical fraternity to realize that there's something queer in the conversion chamber. Some of us tumbled to it six months ago. The research is not the stuff of which AMA citations are made, but it will be handy when Itoldyouso time comes.

For me it started when my perennial maternity case phoned up and asked for an appointment.

"Buzzyboy says I must be pregnant again," Liz Lattimore said with understandable grimness in her voice. She has six under six—well, one set of twins.

Buzz is a guy on a single track, business and monkey business. As a kind of moral justice, he has sympathetic reactions to each of Liz's pregnancies in the form of violent morning nausea. Oh yes, it hap '166 pens. Liz may develop varicose veins, hemorrhoids, boils, hot flashes, heartburn, and high blood pressure during her gestations. Buzz gets the morning sickness. "How long since you missed a period, Liz?" I asked her.

"That's just it, Ted. This time he must be sympathetic to someone else because I came regular as clockwork last week."

"On a possible sixth pregnancy, you'd better see me."

She did. She wasn't pregnant.

"We had a fight a while ago," she told me after she'd dressed. "Buzz flounced out of the house like an injured Cub Scout. When he came home, he wore that merchandisebetterthanthou expression. Sometimes, Ted, it's a pure relief to me when Buzz cats around so I don't whinge."

She paused, about to add something more but hesitated. Even if she had voiced her suspicion then, I doubt it would've made much difference.

"Anything I can do, Liz?"

"Outside of helping to suppress a paternity suit if the case arises, I don't think so. We made up our differences." She rolled her eyes with droll expressiveness.

"Seriously, Liz, I'm glad you're not freshening again. You're run ragged now. Send Buzz in for a checkup. He may need it."

Buzz came in the next day at noon, which proved that he was now worried about himself.

"How come you said Liz wasn't pregnant?"

"Because she isn't. Praise be!"

"Then how come I got this damned morning nausea? I only get it when she's got buns in the oven."

"Nausea is a symptom not necessarily exclusive to pregnancy. Especially in the male of the species."

As I mentioned, we're such babesinspace.

"Off the record, Buzz, could you be sympathetic to someone else?"

Buzz flushed.

"Ted, I'm nuts about Liz no matter what I do or say. I only go catting when we've had a fight or she's too pregnant to screw. Hell, Ted, if I didn't love her so much, d'you think I'd go home every night to a house full of squalling brats?"

"Well, that was quite an imagination you projected the other afternoon at Casey's."

"At Casey's?" Buzz swallowed. "I didn't know you were there."

"Buzz, your voice'd carry to your funeral. Was it the girl at Lady Linda's?"

A strange look crossed Buzz's face and I could see him about to evade the question with some Lattimorian verbal embroidery. "She was the damnedest woman I ever screwed, Ted. Once was, by God, enough. But that once..." Buzz whistled slowly, shaking his head.

Something in his attitude inhibited further questions, so I changed the subject by getting him to strip. After a thorough physical I found only a little hard lump near the large intestine, but not situated where it could cause pressure that might result in nausea. I sent him to the hospital for a gastrointestinal series but the results were inconclusive. I saw no cause for alarm, so I told him that the nausea was caused by overwork—with a wink—and to give up smoking.

In the next few weeks I examined four more seriously nauseated males with small intestinal lumps. I also heard of seventeen more around town. Then I had a visit from the leading local Boy Scout and our little unprepared Explorer gave me my first definite lead.

"Doc, can I see you for a minute? I mean, you're not too tired or anything?"

When six feet two inches and 185 pounds of Explorer Boy Scout Horace Baker comes sneaking around after my nurse has left, I'd better not be too tired to see him.

"Now, what's wrong with you, Hoke? You look mighty pale for Glen Cove's answer to a maiden's prayer?"

The boy literally cringed away from my buddytype arm.

"Hey, feller, did I strike too close to home?" I led him to the surgery table.

"Aw, Doc, I'm in awful trouble." He groaned and averted his head.

"You mean," and I put on my best Ben Gazzara pose, "you've got some girl in trouble?"

"Naw," and he was momentarily indignant, "I wear my pants too tight. No, Doc, it's me. Ever since I went... to... Mrs. Linda's..." His voice failed him.

A kaleidoscope of impressions overwhelmed me for a moment at this confession. Kids grow up so fast. A few flashes of the red squally baby I'd delivered from Mrs. Baker merged into Explorer Hoke complete with merit badge sash, approaching in best Indian fashion Lady Linda's modestly situated house of seven delights. I wasn't sure whether I was glad or sorry that Hoke had taken his lustiness to Linda's. I was relieved that his experiments hadn't taken root, as it were, in any of his peers. Hoke needn't worry about VD: Linda's girls were clean. I had no remedy for his conscience, however.

"Well, now, Hoke, I don't think you have anything more to worry about than overactive sex glands. Linda's girls are—"

"Oh, it's not that. Doc. It's just that I can't eat. Nothing stays down. It's worse in the mornings, and Mom notices that I don't pack it away—hey!"

Past the first sentence I had dropped the TV medic pose and stretched him out flat. My fingers dug into his big gut and, sure enough, the precocious Explorer had joined the Group.

I gave him some dramamine and told him it was indigestion caused by a guilty conscience and to eat spaghetti for breakfast. He fortunately didn't argue because I had no more quick answers. I hurried him out, locked up, and went on a professional call.

Linda herself opened the door.

"Dr. Martin! You're psychic," she said by way of greeting. "I hate to mix pleasure with business and I'll expect your bill..."

"You won't get one because I am here on business, Linda," I said, trying not to be too brusque. "I'd appreciate seeing you? new girl for a brief professional inquiry."

Linda looked stunned, an expression I never thought to see on her face.

"She's who I was calling you for." And Linda gestured me to follow her up the stairs. "She's been losing weight steadily. She's skin and bones and you know that doesn't bed easy."

"Nausea?"

"Doesn't mention it. Until three days ago she had the appetite of an elephant, but you'd never guess it to look at her." Linda was slightly jealous.

"How long's she been with you?"

"About five weeks. A friend sent her to me from Chicago. She's got a sister in the business there. She's good but funny, no one wants her steady. She's educated, too: speaks very good English."

"She's foreign?"

"Must be, but I can't place her accent and I never ask too many personal questions."

The room Linda gestured me to enter was dark and rank with a heavy, musty, unairedattic odor. A dim light shone on the gaunt face of the dying girl. She was dying. It's an indescribable but recognizable look which I've seen too often in my years of practice. The pulse in her spiderthin wrist was barely discernible; her heartbeat mumed and erratic. She opened her eyes at my touch, then smiled wanly at Linda standing behind me.

"Too much at once. Now too little, too late. But thanks, Linda. I won't be much trouble, I promise." She spoke in a raspy voice, but her phrases were oddly inflected. "You see, Doctor, I'm dying and there's no cure for my ailment."

"No, you just rest easy," I began, but her knowing eyes mocked me for the specious words. "A cigarette, please?"

I offered my case, tacitly admitting my helplessness. She was sinking so visibly that it would have been heartless to bother her. An autopsy would give me more specifics anyhow.

"Thanks. Now, would you please go? Both of you." This one was different all right. No lastminute confessions of inadequacy, no wailing for repentance and salvation, and no real bravura. She just wanted to be left alone. I guided Linda out.

"Hell, Doc. Someone should stay with the poor kid," Linda said.

"You see too much TV."

"So does she," Linda replied with an irritated snort. "She's never smoked before."

The hall was suddenly flooded with a very bright light and an acrid formic acid stench like burning ants. I threw the door open but it was too late. The bed was a blazing funeral pyre.

I know now why, but at the moment I was aghast with remorse at this mystifying incineration. I couldn't understand how a cigarette, no matter how carelessly held by a novice smoker, could have caused as violent a combustion as this. I didn't have much time to think about it because it was all we could do to keep the blaze from spreading until the fire department got there. Neither Linda nor I mentioned that we'd only been out of the room three seconds when the fire started. No one would have believed us.

So my primary clue went up spectacularly in smoke. A little judicious inquiry uncovered a veritable epidemic of smokinginbed fire deaths in fifteen cities. One incident got a lot of publicity because the victim was a call girl. She was to have appeared before a board of inquiry the next day so her death was considered a grisly form of suicide. Seventeen such incidents on the East Coast scared me sufficiently not to want to know the odds against us in the rest of the world.

Linda gave me the names of all the men who had patronized the girl. If the others of her ilk had got around as much as she had... wow! Five of the men were patients of mine. Buzz was the furthest along—as far as I could tell—but then, it had been his tale in Casey's that had prompted others to visit the girl. The chief of police shouldn't have accepted payola in trade but that's his lookout. I almost wish I could morally allow the old fool to carry to "term." Jerry Striker's a 'poor enough character, but it'd serve his wife right. Martin Tippers? I hadn't guessed 172 him for the type. Must have been drunk. And our precocious Explorer.

What a queer collection of males to be chosen to propagate an unknown race on a new world. That's what I mean about adapting to survive. Those gals, if females they were, used equipment to hand, not fancy lifesupport systems.

Now that I know the game, I can't just ingenuously suggest to any one of my equally puzzled colleagues that their patients got invited into a lady spider's nest. Or maybe they had a hurry call from a passing sea mare? The least bizarre examples of male incubation on this planet are spiders and sea horses, and those comparisons are quite enough to inhibit further speculation. Give the imagination full rein and there are endless possibilities. You pays your money and you takes your choice. Of course, if I let one of the men carry to term, I'd find out more. But, hell, neither my conscience nor my professional integrity will permit me.

The most I can do is spread out the curious unorthodox operations on my five pregnant males so that I'll have some interesting embryos for my babesinspace theory. Even then I might goof. I don't know how long gestation takes, what would serve as a birth canal or, if you know what spiders do... well, you can see my problem. What form will the progency ultimately assume? That of their hosts? The two foeti I've removed show different stages of freakout evolution. I'm letting Hoke Baker go longest because he's adjusted best to the changes in his physiology. But I've got to arrange for his abortion soon—before he becomes eligible for an Explorer's Maternity Badge.

The Great Canine Chorus

Pete Roberts of the Wilmington, Delaware, K9 Corps has as his partner a German shepherd named Wizard. One night, just after they took the beat, Wizard started acting itchy, nervous, whiny. He was snappish, not like himself at all. He kept trying to pull Pete toward Seventh Street.

That wasn't the beat, as Wiz well knew. But Pete decided there might be a good reason. Wizard was a canny dog; he could pick a culprit out of a crowd by the smell of fear the man exuded. And he'd saved Pete from two muggings already this year. So, protesting, Pete let Wizard lead him to a block of buildings being torn down as part of an urban renewal program.

Wizard became more and more impatient with Pete's apprehensive, measured pace, and tried to tug him into a jog. Pete began to feel worried, kind of sickly scared. Suddenly the dog mounted the worn stairs of one of the buildings about to be demolished. He pawed at the door, whining.

Who's that? a voice asked, high and quavering like an old lady's. Pa? It couldn't be too old a female, then.

Wizard barked sharply three times in the negative signal he'd been taught.

Hi, dog. Do you see my pa?

Wiz got down from the steps, looked up and down the street, then barked again three times.

Pa's so late, and I'm so hungry, the voice said.

Pete, who had eaten well an hour earlier, was suddenly overwhelmed with hunger—a sullen kind of stomach cramp that he'd experienced in Korea when his unit was cut off for four days. The kind of gripping pangs you get when you're hungry all the time.

"Lady, I'm going down to the deli on the corner. I'll be right back with something to tide you over till your pa gets back." Pete made the announcement before he realized it. He left Wizard to guard the door.

He ordered a sub with no onions (somehow he knew she wouldn't want them), two cokes and a banana.

I'm in the back room, said the voice when he and Wizard entered the hall.

Pete had had the distinct impression the voice had come from the front of the building. It was too thin to have carried far. The stench in the filthy hall sickened Pete. No matter how many years he might spend on the force, he'd never get used to the odor of poverty. Maybe it was the stink that brought a growl from Wizard.

Pete pushed open the back door and entered the pitifully furnished room. On an old armchair by the window was a wasted little figure, like a broken doll thrown down by a careless child, limbs askew. By now he expected a girl, a child, but this was such a little girl!

Wizard got down on his belly, licking his lips nervously. He crawled carefully across the dirty floor. He sniffed at the tiny hand on the shabby arm of the chair, whined softly. The little band did not move away, nor toward him, either.

What kind of a father, Pete fumed to himself, would leave a kid, a mere baby, alone in a place like this?

I'm no baby, mister. I'm nine years old, she informed him indignantly.

Pete apologized contritely, blaming his error on the glare from the single window. He wouldn't have thought her more than five, six at the outside. She was so pitifully underdeveloped. She was clean, as were her shred of a dress and the old blanket on which she lay, but the rest of the room was filthy. Her pinched face had a curious, calm beauty to it. When Pete knelt beside her, he saw her eyes were filmed and sightless. And when she spoke, her mouth did not move. He found himself breaking off small pieces of the sub and feeding them to her. She sipped the Coke through a straw and a look of intense pleasure crossed her face. / knew I remembered how wonderful it tasted, she said. But not with her lips.

The truth dawned on Pete; this child was a telepath. Impossible? He hadn't actually believed any of that crap. But there was no other explanation.

"You aren't talking," he said. "You don't make a sound." / am too talking, answered the child soundlessly.

And you're answering. Pete gulped, hastily trying to mend matters. "You just don't speak the usual way."

I do everything kind of different. At least my pa's always complaining I do. Her head turned slowly toward him. You don't suppose something's happened to Pa, do you? I can't hear very far away when I'm hungry.

Guiltily, Pete fed her another bite. "When did you eat last?"

Pa was home this morning. But all we had was bread.

Pete vowed passionately to himself that he was going to see Welfare immediately.

Oh, you mustn't! pleaded.the soundless voice. Wizard, ears flattened, growled menacingly at Pete. She was clearly frightened of Welfare. They'd take me away, like they took my sister, and put me in a barred place and I'd never hear any birds or see Pa. They might cut me up 'cause my body doesn't work right. She still spoke without sound.

"Aw, honey..."

My name's Maria, not honey.

"Maria, you got it all wrong. Wizard, you tell her.

Welfare helps people. You'd have a clean bed and birds right outside the window."

It'd be a hospital. My ma died in a hospital because no one cared. Pa said so. They just let her die.

Wizard whimpered. Pete felt frightened himself.

He soothed Maria as best he could with promises of no hospitals, no cutting, plenty of birds. What she didn't finish of the sandwich, he wrapped up and put beside her. He started to peel the banana for her but she refused it.

It's a treat for Wiz for bringing you here. She laughed. He listens to people. Pete grinned.

"How on earth did you know that fool dog loves bananas?"

Nothing could have been funnier to Maria, and her laughter was so contagious Pete grinned foolishly. Even Wizard laughed in his canine way, his tongue lolling out of one side of his mouth. Suddenly the atmosphere changed.

I hear Pa coming. You'd better leave. He wouldn't like having the fuzz in here. "Then why did you let me in?" Wizard. Dogs always know. I talk to dogs all the time. But I've never talked to one as smart as Wizard before. You get out now. Quick.

Pete felt a violent compulsion to take to his heels. Once they were around the corner the impulse vanished, so he waited a few moments and then peered out at the building. He saw a shambling figure go into the house where they had found Maria.

Pete was shaken by his encounter with the girl: shaken, confused, and frightened. She had taken him over, used him to suit her needs, and then cut him off in fear when all he wanted to do was help her. He worried about her all the way to the hospital: her pitiful life in those awful surroundings... and that strange talent.

He had a friend, a drinking buddy, who was interning at Delaware Hospital. Finding Joe Lavclle on duty in the emergency ward that night, Pete told him a little about the girl. "And what's going to become of her, living like that?"

"I'd say she was dead already and didn't know it," Joe snorted.

The thought of Maria dead choked Pete up. Her fragile laugh, her curious calm beauty gone? No!

"Hey, Pete!" The intern watched the cop's gut reaction with amazement. "I was only kidding. Why, I couldn't even guess what was wrong with her without an examination. She could have had polio, meningitis, m.s., any variety of paralysis. But I'd say she needed treatment, fast. And I'd certainly like to see this kid who can make a stalwart defender of this onehorse town quake in his boots like this."

Pete growled and Wizard seconded it.

Laughing, Joe warded off an imaginary attack with his arm, just as his phone rang. Pete resumed his patrol.

The next morning, resolved to help Maria in spite of herself, he bought a frilly dress, bundled it and food and Wizard into his car, and went back to the house. He "talked" to let her know he was coming.

There was no answer. The back room was deserted. Except for the destuffed armchair by the window and two Coke bottles on the floor under it, Pete could have sworn no one had been in the house for months.

"Find Maria, Wiz," Pete ordered.

Wizard sniffed around and, with a yelp, raced out the door. He sniffed around outside and seemed to find a trace. Pete followed him in the car. Wizard acted just as if he knew exactly where he was going. He got halfway down the next block, then stopped as if he had run into an invisible wall. He lay down on the sidewalk, put his head on his paws, and whined. Then he slunk back to Pete at the curb.

"Find her. Wizard!" The dog crouched down and laid his ears back. It was the first time he had ever disobeyed that tone of voice.

"Maria! We're your friends! We want to help!" Pete called, oblivious to the stares. He was sure she could hear him. He waited, apprehensive, unsure.

No/ came the one disembodied word, filling his skull till his head rang. There was no arguing with it. "At least tell Wiz if you're hungry, Maria. He can bring you food. I promise I won't follow."

Twice in the next three weeks, Wizard darted into a deli, whining pathetically. The first time, it took Pete a minute or so to grasp what the big dog wanted.

Then he'd get a sandwich and a Coke to go, put it in a bag, roll the top into a handle for Wizard to carry. Then he'd wait till the dog returned. He was determined to prove to Maria that he'd keep his promise. He didn't want to lose contact with her.

In the meantime, he did a little library research on telepathy, but the textbooks were too much for him. When he asked the librarian for something a guy could understand, he was shown the science fiction shelves.

Maria didn't act like fictional telepaths. According to the stories, she should be able to get food when she wanted it, commit robberies undetected, start fires, transport herself and anyone else anywhere, aid society, and perform minor miracles. Like heal herself, even. The prospects were magnificently endless. Yet she was stuck in some hideous, hot horrible back room, halfstarved and slowly dying of neglect.

The one thing Pete had to accept was the fact that Maria kept in touch with Wizard but excluded him. Since Pete considered Wizard every bit as smart as most men, he wasn't offended; but he felt powerless to help her as only another human could.

The next set of inexplicable incidents began about four weeks after Pete and Wizard first encountered Maria. They were pacing the beat on the hotel side of Rodney Square when the dog got restless. He strained against the leash until Pete let him go to see where he'd head. At a dead run, Wizard streaked down Eleventh Street, right over into Harry West's beat.

Harry walked with Pirate, the biggest dog on the force. Pete couldn't figure Harry in trouble. But he was wrong. He heard the sullen rumble of an angry crowd by the time he reached French Street. Wiz was already around that corner and in the middle of a fight. Pete whistled for squad cars as he broke into the edge of the crowd, swinging his nightstick. He could hear Wizard growling angrily. He heard a yelp and then the growling of a second dog. He stumbled over Harry, bleeding from a head wound. Pete got Harry clear of the stampede just as the squad cars arrived.

Both dogs were at work, snapping, snarling, darting around, and the crowd thinned rapidly. In a matter of minutes, all but the bitten, bruised, and brained had evaporated into the hot night.

"How'd you get here so fast?" Harry demanded as he came to. "I heard Wiz just as some kook pelted me with a bottle."

"Well, Wizard just took off," was Pete's unenlightened reply.

"Glad he did. We came down on a Code One, but when Pirate and I got to the edge of the mob to get them moving, they closed in like we was Christmas in July. Somebody got Pirate in the head and I couldn't turn anywhere without getting clobbered." Harry dabbed at the cuts on his hands. "I'd sure like to know what set them off."

Wizard and the bigger dog were wandering around the street, nervously sniffing. The paddy wagon arrived, and Wiz and Pirate assisted in rounding up the incidentals, just begging for one legal bite. Then they started whiffling around again.

"What's with the dogs?" Harry asked Pete as he helped him into a car. "Look at old Wiz pumping."

Wizard's tail was wagging like he was on his way to a steak fry.

"Maria!" Pete gasped and called Wizard to heel. The dog came bounding over, wriggling with delight. "Find Maria!" But Wizard barked three times, sneezed, and shook his head. Pirate came up, nuzzled Harry, sniffed Wizard, and then he barked three times.

"I got a girl that only talks to dogs yet," Pete said in bitter disgust.

Back on their own beat, Pete tried to figure out why Maria would have called Wizard. Harry and Pirate weren't in trouble at the time Wiz took off. Maria must have been worried... yeah, that was it! Worried about her old man! She'd called Wizard because her old man had been in that crowd.

And that explained why Wizard was so happyacting. He'd found Maria's father's trail leading away from the rumble. '

Pete left a note for Harry to keep an ear and an eye open for any crippled kids on his beat and to let him know if Pirate ever acted... strange. She might keep in touch with Pirate, too, since the big dog had been involved in getting her father out of a tough scrape.

Two of the men picked up that day were known numbers runners. They stuck to they story that the cop had come busting in where he wasn't wanted and his damn dog had spooked the crowd into the rumble. They just "happened" to be there.

For the next few weeks Pete got no signs from Wizard that Maria was in any distress. This bothered him almost as much as hearing from her when she was hungry. At headquarters they were hearing nasty rumors about a new numbers racket. Certain hoods were being seen in new cars, in new quarters, acting up. Two runners were picked up on suspicion, in the hope of cracking them. They had to be released twentyfour hours later, clean, but one of them had bragged a little. Pete heard one of the detective lieutenants complaining bitterly about it.

"Yeah, the punk says, 'You gotta have evidence, Lootenant, and this time there ain't any, Lootenant. Not unless ya can read minds.' That's what he says, s'belp me."

Mariaf Pete thought with a sense of shock.

What was it Maria had said? When she was hungry, she didn't have the strength to hear far away. If she were well fed, how far could she hear? All the way to Chicago? To grab the numbers?

The conclusion just couldn't be dodged. Maria and her pa were involved. But how would she know she was doing something wrong? Whoever had latched onto her would be jubilant over the fact they were able to put something over on the cops. To Maria, cops were just the fuzz. Cops spelt trouble for her father. Cops meant Welfare, and hospitals, and she didn't know which one scared her the most.

"At least," Pete said to Wizard, "she's not in that crummy room. She's cared for. That was all I wanted, wasn't it? And she is a minor, so even when the gangs gets pulled in, she wouldn't be booked. Why, those hoods might even get a doctor to try and fix her up." He groaned. "And I sure as hell can't go to the Chief and say, 'Look, there's a kid telepath running the numbers.' Not even if I knew where to find her." Wizard nuzzled his hand.

"Now what would Al Finch be wanting with a highpriced specialist from Minneapolis?" the desk sergeant asked Pete when he came on duty the next night. "He's got medics and nurses hopping in and out of his pad like he had the Asian crud."

"Better him than you," said Pete, automatically laughing. But he was thinking Maria!

Pete found out where Al Finch was living. Outside the building, Pete saw a truck from a pet shop deliver a triple cage of singing birds, and he knew his hunch was right. Finch was making book with Maria's mindreading ability.

"Maria," Pete called in his head, "Maria, answer me. I know you're there. What you're doing, reading numbers, is wrong. It's causing a lot of trouble. It'll get you in trouble, too."

Pete, came Maria's voice in his head, sweetly, happily, Pete, I'm not hungry anymore and I have so many pretty birds. And you should see how nice Pa looks now he's got a good job. I'm clean, and my •whole room is clean. I've got pretty dresses.

Her giggle was light and tinkling. Smelly men come and poke me around. They say they want to fix me. They can't, of course. Some of them say it out loud and some tell Al they can. Then they say inside they can't, that I'm a hopeless case. She giggled again, as if this were the funniest thing she'd ever said.

"Maria, I won't say Al isn't trying to help you and make you happy. But he gets more out of you than you get out of him. He's just using you. You miss getting the numbers through once and he'll hurt you."

Maria's laugh bubbled up. / don't let myself get hurt. And Al's all right. He thinks the damnedest things sometimes. She giggled naughtily. He says he's my sugar daddy.

"Maria, you shouldn't use such words."

Maria's incredible laugh chimed through his head.

Al says it's cute the way I talk. And he really does like me.

"I'll bet," Pete said in a harsh tone. "Look, Maria, you can have the birds, and the good food, and a good job for your father, but get them from the right sort of people. Al Finch is dangerous! He's got a record for assault, attempted homcide, you name it. I'm afraid he'll hurt you."

He wouldn't dare, Maria replied with complete selfassurance. I'm very important to him, and I know he means it. Do you know I have my own Coke machine?

"Maria, Maria," Pete said with a groan. Oh God, how do I explain? How, please, do I have the nerve to try? "Maria," he called as loud as he could in his mind, "Maria, promise me one thing. You get scared of Al, or worried, just call Wizard or Pirate. Any of the dogs. They'll protect you. Just call the dogs!"

Wizard barked twice, paused, barked twice again. So did three stray dogs across the street. And a cat walking on a nearby fence meowed in the same sequence.

Pete tried not to worry. But she was so frail; wellfed or not, she couldn't have great reserves of energy. Finch might kill her without meaning to. He'd have to find a way to stop Finch using her.

On his day off, following a strong hunch, Pete hung around the betting windows at the Brandywine Raceway. Sure enough, Maria's father shuffled up to the tendollar window, just before the second race. Pete sidled up to him.

"You tell Al to be careful with Maria," he said. "He can use her too much, you know. He could kill her. And the cops'll tumble to Finch soon enough. They got a lead."

"Who're you?" the little man asked nervously, his face twitching as his redrimmed eyes slid over Pete's face. "Fuzz?" He scurried away.

Pete had had a good look at his face, though, and was able to identify him in the rogue's gallery as Hector Barres. He had a record; vagrancy, drunk and disorderly, petty larceny.

No appeal based on Maria's frailty would reach 183 Barres. Right now he had all he wanted from life. Barres' thoughts were only for the money rolling in today. Tomorrow, and Maria's welfare, were far from his mind.

Now that he had Maria's last name, Pete checked hospital records and found her date of birth. Her mother had been picked up unconscious, already in active labor, and brought into the emergency ward. The intern who had delivered Maria had expressed doubts that the infant would survive, due to prenatal malnutrition.

Maria's mother had died in the same hospital two years later. The cause was neglect. Not on the part of the hospital. She had had tuberculosis, diabetes, and a coronary condition. She had been severely beaten about the abdomen and died of internal hemmorrhaging before they could operate.

Pete took to talking to Wizard on the beat at night, hoping that Maria would overhear him. He told Wizard all about Maria's mother, about her father's record, about how Maria could use her great gift to help people. He told her all he knew about paranormal powers, his feeling that she must conserve her energies; and he repeatedly cautioned her to call Wizard or Pirate if she felt endangered. Sometimes he had the feeling she listened to him. He knew she often talked to Wizard.

Then Al Finch stepped up his operations to include narcotics, apparently having approached and reached an agreement with the local drug pushers in an unprecedented crossover in vice. Pete and the police went quietly berserk. No known pushers were suddenly in evidence. There was no direct contact with or indirect approach to Finch. All known pushers were clean when they were picked up on routine searches. Not a sniff on them. But the stuff was circulating in greater quantities than had ever reached Wilmington before.

"Maria," Pete called resolutely to her from the corner opposite Al's apartment. "Do you know what drugs do to people?"

Sure. They have the coolest dreams to read.

"Do you take it?" He gasped, frightened. / don't need to, Maria laughed with a mirth that no longer chimed. Her voice—the essence of the voice she sent—was hard and brassy. I dig it from others. It's boss, man.

"Then dig what happens when they can't pay to get it, Maria. When they have withdrawal. Dig that and see how boss it is!"

But, Pete honey: you gave me the idea ysurself. It's much easier to grab the stuff from... well, never mind where. Her voice was sickeningly smug. Easier than reading numbers out of Chicago. You said I was to take care of myself. I am.

"I don't know why I bother with you. You know you're doing wrong, Maria. And when you get hurt, it'll be your own fault." Then...

He didn't know what hit him. When he came to, he was in the emergency ward with Joe bending over him anxiously.

"Brother, you've been out three hours and there isn't a mark on you."

Pete carefully touched his sore head with exploratory fingers. He hurt all over, every nerve felt twisted, his head half unscrewed.

"I got clobbered." The phrase had never seemed so apt.

"Yeah, I know," Joe replied drily. "But with what?"

"Would you believe a girl telepath?" Pete asked in a plaintive voice.

"Right now," Joe said wearily, "I'd believe an invasion of little green men."

Pete looked up at him, startled by the credulous bitterness in the young doctor's voice.

"What'd you mean, Joe?"

Annoyed with himself, Joe grimaced, then swore under his breath. He stepped to the door, looked up and down the hall. Closing the door tightly, with one final cautious look through the small glass insert, he asked, "Do you know where Al Finch is getting narcotics, Pete?"

The policeman groaned. "From the locked pharmacy cabinets of the hospitals."

Joe's eyes widened in stunned amazement. "How in hell did you know? Hahlgren didn't report it until noon and you've been in dreamland since then."

It was a relief to Pete to be able to tell someone his secret. When he finished, Joe shook his head slowly from side to side.

"Believe you, I must. The drug cupboard was bare at eight this morning. The question is, what do we do now?"

A few days later. Hector Barres was admitted to the hospital, stricken with a paralysis of the spine. Some of the drugs Maria had lifted from the hospital shelves were not pure opium. One was a thebaine compound which acted like strychnine and commonly caused spinal paralysis. Her father died of a heart attack shortly after his admission.

Suddenly all the dogs began to howl. Every dog in Wilmington added his note to the clamor. The dogs howled for a full earsplitting hour despite every attempt to silence them. The SPCA and the Humane Association, police and firemen were called in—unsuccessfully—to disband a huge pack of hysterical dogs, cats, and tree beasts congregated in Maria's neighborhood.

Only when Maria released them, did the animals disband, melting away in a matter of moments. Pete and Joe took up a position across from her windows.

"Maria," Pete said. "I brought Joe with me. He did everything he could to save your father. But you've been stealing the wrong kind of drugs. It was one of those that killed your father." / know, Maria said in a flat, hard tone. There was an odd blur to her projected voice that had always rung so clear and true in Pete's mind. I've been... experimenting a little.

There was a long pause. Pete suddenly experienced wild grief, a sense of terrified guilt which was quickly overlaid by a sullen resentment; and, finally, an irrational feeling of satisfaction.

He was a nasty old man. He was mean to me. He killed my mother. '186 Joe caught Pete's arm, his eyes wide with repugnance and dread.

You go away, Pete, Maria said. Or I'll set my friends on you.

"Maria, I don't care how much you threaten me," Pete said stolidly. "I have to tell you you're doing wrong."

Bug off, fuzz, Maria snapped. I'm having fun. I never had fun before in my life. I'm living it up good now. You go away.

"Pete," Joe cautioned urgently.

"Damn it, Maria..."

This time when Pete woke up in the emergency ward, Joe was in the next bed. They managed to talk the intern on duty into entering "heat prostration" on their charts as the cause of collapse. They promised faithfully to go to their respective homes and rest for the next twentyfour hours. Out on the hot street, Pete suggested that a couple of beers would start their unexpected holiday the right way, so they adjourned to the nearest airconditioned bar.

The dogs began to howl again as they crossed the street.

"If we'd told anyone why the dogs howled," Pete said, moodily doodling in the moisture on the beer glass, "they would send us to the funny farm."

"Would you believe a hopped up preadolescent telepath?" Joe asked wistfully, and raised his glass in a mock toast.

"I only told her the truth." !

"For truth she puts holes in our heads."

"All right, wise guy, what should I have done?"

"How do I know?" Joe asked with a helpless gesture of his hands. "My specialty's going to be internal medicine, not headshrinking or pediatrics. I'm as lousy at this sort of work as you are." He thought for a while, holding his head. "The trouble, Pete, lies in neither you nor me... nor Maria. The trouble is the situation and the circumstances. If she'd had the sense to get born a Dupont instead of a Barres..." And he made a slicing motion with one hand.

They got drunker and drunker, somehow agreeing on only one thing: they were both so sensitive in the head bone that they couldn't give a j.d. brat the spanking she so richly deserved. Or rescue her from hell.

Success on a small scene went to Al Finch's head. He decided that Wilmington offered too little scope for his operation's potential. Pete got the word from the desk sergeant that Finch had hired a private plane and a private ambulance.

Pete called Joe Lavelle, told him to meet him across from Maria's at once. Joe arrived in time to watch Maria being carried from the apartment on a stretcher.

"God Almighty, look," Pete cried. "Al Finch, framed by canaries."

Executing an intricate shuffle step, the gang leader was maneuvering the elaborate fivefoot cylindrical triple birdcage through the door, all the while bellowing conflicting orders at his subordinates. That kept them bobbing so solicitously between Al and Maria that they all got royally in each other's way.

Then the rear stretcherbearer tripped on the uneven sidewalk. He went down on one knee, losing his grip on the handles. Maria, her tiny body strapped to the stretcher, was jolted. The forward bearer, unaware for a moment of the accident, continued on and pulled the handles out of his companion's grip so that Maria, head downward, was dragged jouncingly along the sidewalk. With a yelp, Al leaped forward, unceremoniously depositing the canary cage on the lawn, where it rested at a dangerous tilt. He collided with one of his cohorts who had also jumped to the rescue. The two of them succeeded in startling the forward bearer and the front end of Maria's stretcher dropped with a second jarring jolt.

Like the incredible noise that issues from a cyphering organ played full through faulty stops, a chorus of strident howls arose. Starting with the piercing yelps of nearby dogs, it grew in intensity and volume as Maria, battered and painracked, summoned aid. It came bounding in answer to her call. With uncharacteristic ferocity, three poodles and a ,188 terrier launched themselves at the stretcher men. Before Finch could touch Maria, a collie and two boxers cut him off, snapping and snarling. The indignant doorman was tripped by a frantic cocker, who plunged at him from the lobby.

"Christ Almighty, she's called all the dogs," Joe cried.

A yelping, yapping, yipping vortex of sound with a rumbling, roaring groundbass enveloped the area. The street soon became a seething mass of dogs, from ragged Scotties to leaping Dalmatians. More kept arriving on the scene, many dragging snapped ropes and chains, towing stakes, one even hauling a doghouse.

"She's called too many! She'll get hurt," Pete groaned.

As one, Pete and Joe started across the street, stepping on and over dog bodies. Pete caught a glimpse of a protective ring forming around Maria's manabandoned stretcher.

"Maria! Maria!" he shouted over the tumult. "Call off the dogs. Call them off!"

The sheer press of numbers would overrun her. Kicking, flailing, Pete waded on. A cat, leaping from a stopped car roof, raked him with her claws. Joe reached the curb and fell, momentarily lost under the bounding bodies.

Suddenly, as if cut off by an invisible conductor, all sound ceased. The silence was as terrifying as the noise, but now the momentum of the charging animals faltered. Pete made it to the sidewalk in that hiatus. Neither Maria nor stretcher nor sidewalk was visible under the smooth and brindled, spotted, mottled, rough and smooth blanket of dogs and occasional cats.

Cursing wildly, Pete and Joe labored, throwing the stunned animals out of the way until a space was cleared around the overturned stretcher. The upset bird cage rolled down to the sidewalk, coming to rest with the bent door uppermost. A flurry of orange and yellow feathers, frightened canaries flew hysterically aloft, their frantic chirps ominous and shrill.

Unable to move, Pete watched as Joe carefully 189 r turned the stretcher over. The two men stood looking down at Maria's crushed and bloodied body, trampled by the zeal of her wouldbe protectors. Then, moved by some obscure impulse, Pete joined her hands.

At this point, the dogs, released from the weird control that had summoned and then immobilized them, remembered ancient enmities. The abortive rescue mission turned into a thousand private battles.

Out of the corner of his eyes, Pete saw Wizard coming hellforleather down the street. Finch staggered to his feet, clawing his way up, using the bird cage as a support. With a howl, Wizard knocked him down again. Pete grabbed the man and arrested him for disturbing the peace. Wizard stood guard, in much better shape than any of Maria's other protectors, thanks to his late arrival.

The news story never mentioned that a human had been killed in the great dog riot. But it was noted that the unearthly canine choruses that had been plaguing Wilmington ended with that unscheduled concert.

But sometimes now when Pete Roberts is walking the beat with his K9 partner. Wizard will suddenly start acting itchy and nervous. He whines and pulls, straining against the lead.

"Heel," Pete says stolidly, pretending nothing's happened.

One of these days I'll really put on the pressure.

"Finder's Keeper," "A Proper Santa Claus," and "Smallest Dragonboy" were written at Roger Elwood's behest. He wanted short stories by McCafFrey. My estimable agent, Virginia Kidd, said that it was best not to limit McCafFrey, so I had to. The original ending of "A Proper Santa Claus" did not suit its intended market. I have reinstated my downbeat ending because it is logical.

Finder's Keeper

PETER TURNED IN FOUR DOZEN GOLF BALLS including the monogrammed ones that Mr. Roche had been yelling about. The course manager was almost cheerful as he counted out Peter's finder's fee.

"You've got a positive genius for scrounging balls, Pete. Don't know how you do it."

"My mother says everyone's got something they're good at," Peter replied, and began to edge out the door of the stuffy office. Comments like that made him nervous: he halfexpected he'd given away his secret, and that he and his mother would be forced to run away again.

The manager only grunted and muttered about keeping the members happy. Peter ducked out, running home with his pocketful of dollars. Mother would be pleased, although she didn't like him using his trick of "finding" for "material gain," as she put it. But since she'd been too sick to work at the diner, they had precious little choice. Peter had wanted to get a fulltime job as a caddy but his mother had resisted.

"You can't be like me, Peter. You got to have education and training. Your father was a smart man, but he didn't have enough education." Dedication made her eyes bum in her thin face. "It's education that matters in this world, Peter. You got to go to school." She emphasized her last statement by stringing the words out and enunciating them clearly.

Peter adored his mother but he hated her attempts to imitate a "country club" accent: her habit of quoting country clich6s'only ruined the effect she wanted to produce.

Seven dollars he was bringing home today. Not bad, added to the twentytwo he'd made caddying over the weekend. This week's rent, food, and some of the medicine were now paid for. If he could just talk Mother into letting him take a week off school now that the rains had stopped and spring sun was drying the greens, he'd really make some money! Mr. Roche always tipped a fiver, especially when Peter kept track of those monogrammed balls of his that he always swatted into the rough.

"Son, if you could patent that ballhoming instinct of yours," Mr. Roche had said more often than Peter liked, "you'd be a millionaire!"

It had made Peter almost scared to continue caddying for Mr. Roche, but the money was too tempting.

He came around the comer of their house trailer and skidded to an abrupt stop in the mud. Ken Fargo's green Mustang was parked on the concrete apron. The only good thing about his mother being sick, in Peter's estimation, was that she didn't have to be pleasant to creeps like Ken Fargo.

"He's pleasant enough and all that," his mother had said and then shuddered, smiling quickly to reassure Peter. "There's just something... slippery about him." She sighed. "I suppose he can't help being sour and suspicious. People do and say the most awful things to collect insurance! And he's lonely."

His mother would understand being lonely. And she'd understand the awful things people do and say —particularly if you're different in any way. But the knowledge hadn't made her sour, just more lonely, and sad, and cautious. Why she called Peter's knack of finding things a "gift," he didn't know. He felt it was a curse. It had brought them more grief, kept them moving around in the period before he'd learned not to "find" everything lost...

And why did Ken Fargo have to get unlost? They had thought him well gone when the insurance company that used him as an investigator had called off the search for the hijacked furs. There had been a reward of $15,000 for the return of those coats. Try as he would, Peter hadn't been able to figure out a legitimate way to "find" those furs. He hadn't been with the searchers when they'd looked in the old lead mine, or he'd have "found" the furs under the concealing layer of rubble in the ore carts. He couldn't go there alone now. That old shaft was dangerous, the supports wormridden and damprotted. Every kid in town had been warned, on pain of a strapping, to stay away.

Peter paused at the front of the house. He didn't want to go in. He didn't like the way Ken Fargo looked at his mother, and there wasn't much a thirteenyearold boy could do to a sixfoot man who'd fought his way out of some nasty comers (Fargo's words), and looked it from the scars on his face and knuckles. Peter took a deep breath and stomped up the two boxes that made steps into the trailer.

Peter knew the moment he walked in that Fargo had been badgering his mother. She was flushed and wringing her hands.

"Peter!" She all but swooped down on him. "Did you have a good day?" She was terribly relieved to see him.

"Sure did, Mother." He held out the seven dollar bills. "Hello, Mr. Fargo." He had to acknowledge the man's presence or his mother would chew him out for bad manners no matter how much she disliked Fargo.

"Long time no see," the man replied, jerking his shoulders to settle a flashy gold sports jacket. He sauntered toward the back of the caravan. "Sorry your ma's been ill. Should've let me know." Peter blinked at him in surprise. "Seven dollars," his mother was saying, her voice more natural now. "Oh, Peter, that's wonderful. Were you caddying?"

"That's just for scrounging golf balls." Something happened in the room, some indefinable change in the an: that registered against Peter's senses. When he looked at Ken Fargo, the man was occupied in lighting a cigarette. Peter glanced at his mother but she was proudly smoothing out the bills and arranging them all face up before she put them in her handbag.

"Peter's such a help," she said to Fargo, an artificial heartiness in her soft voice. "We've been just fine. I'll be back at work this week, but it was very nice of you to drop by and see us." She took two steps toward Fargo, her hand extended.

Fargo ignored the hand and sat down as if he meant to make a long visit. The knock at the door was a welcome diversion and Peter nearly collided with his mother as they both answered the summons.

"Oh, Mrs. Kieman, have you seen my Victor?" It was Mrs. Anderson from two trailers down. Her threeyearold had such a perverse habit of straying that the distraught mother had taken to tying him to an old dog run. "I told Henry the rope was frayed. I was doing the wash and I just didn't notice. I suppose I should've checked when I didn't hear him fretting, but I wanted to finish... so I don't know how long he's been gone. Have you seen him? What with being home and all?"

Peter bristled at the implied insult, but his mother shot him a look, for she'd often let him "find" Victor. Mrs. Anderson was a nice woman, his mother had said, and had more than a wayward child to burden her.

"No, Mrs. Anderson, I haven't seen Victor this morning," his mother replied.

"Which way is he likely to go, Mrs. Anderson?" Ken Fargo asked.

"Oh, I just dunno. He could be halfway to town by now." The woman twisted back the lock of lank bleached hair that had escaped its pins. She swiveled her body slightly, looking pointedly at the green Mustang.

"Well, that's no problem. C'mon, Pete, you and me will take a little spin and see if we can locate the lady's wandering boy."

Peter gave his mother a swift look, and she gave him a barely perceptible nod.

"Shouldn't be no time at all before we have him safely back in your arms, Mrs. Anderson. Now don't worry. For one thing I'm an insurance investigator, and finding lost things is my business."

Again that electric feeling charged the air, but before Peter could appeal to his mother, Ken Fargo had hustled him out the door and into the car, all the time driveling reassurances to Mrs. Anderson.

"Roll down that window, Petey boy," the man said, and Peter set his teeth against the irritating familiarity.

"Keep a sharp eye out on your side. I'll take care of mine."

Fargo's tone, smugly confident, gave Peter fair warning. Somehow Fargo thought that Peter could "find" things. Somehow Peter had to discourage him.

"You just sing out when you see that brat, Pete. This car'll stop on a dime and hand you back six cents— inflation, you know, ha ha ha." Fargo deftly turned the Mustang into the road to town. Peter didn't protest although he knew that Victor Anderson was moving steadily in the opposite direction. "And I've got a bone to pick with you."

Startled, Peter looked around, but the man's frown was bogus.

"You should've let me know your mother was ill. She's a fine woman, your ma, and deserves the best. She could've had it if you'd let me know."

"We got along all right."

"Yeah, but she'd be much better now with the kind of food and care I could've provided. And I'd like to provide for her; you get what I mean?" An elbow prodded Peter in the ribs.

"We prefer to do for ourselves, thank you."

"You're a good kid, Peter, but there're things a man can do that a boy can't."

Peter wanted to wipe that look from Fargo's face.

"Hey, you keep your eyes peeled for that kid. Let's find him in a hurry and get back. I got something to ask your ma and you might as well hear it, too."

Peter obediently faced the window, but they reached the middle of the town without a sight of any child.

"How about that? We gotta search the whole town. I thought you said the kid went into town."

"No, sir. Mrs. Anderson said she thought he'd be halfway to town by now.

"Well, goddammit, where is he?"

Peter looked Ken Fargo straight in the eyes. "I don't know."

The man's face turned grim, then as suddenly assumed a forced good humor. "All right, kid. If he didn't go into town, maybe he went out of town?"

"Maybe someone's found him already. There's Officer Scordus."

The policeman was not the least bit pleased to hear that the Anderson kid was missing again, and his remarks confirmed Peter's private opinion that Mrs. Anderson was a prime nuisance in the tiny community of Jennings, Colorado. Fargo brandished his investigator's credentials, an additional irritant to Scortius, who'd been forced to muck around the countryside trying to find the lost shipment of furs "alleged" to have been stashed somewhere near Jennings.

"Well, I'll see who we can find to help track the brat."

"I'll do the main road out of town."

Officer Scortius grunted and waddled off.

As they drew alongside her trailer, Mrs. Anderson was hanging over the bottom half of her door, the picture of maternal anxiety. Clearly Victor had not been recovered, but Fargo assured her heartily that it was only a matter of moments, and gunned the Mustang countryward.

"Okay, Pete, let's find that kid and end this soap opera," Fargo said between his teeth. "How far up the road is he?"

"Gee, how would I know?"

"How would you know? Because you'd know!" The man's tone emphasized his certainty and Peter felt sick fear curl up from the pit of his belly. "I get around the country, Petey boy. And I hear things, interesting things." He paused and his voice took on a conciliatory tone. "Look, Petey boy, I like your mother. I want to take care of her the way a man can. She shouldn't have to work herself sick to give you a decent place to live and a good education. I know how set she is to see you educated. But you don't need much book learning to get ahead. Not you. You know, with your trick, we could be a team, you and me. In fact, we would be a topdrawer unbeatable team of private investigators."

That insistent, persuasive voice was bad enough; the arguments were worse. Fargo knew exactly how to get to Peter.

"Wouldn't that be great? Your ma not having to work anymore? And you, kid, you've been handicapped. You've made mistakes. It was foolish, you know, to find Lyie Grauber's missing stocks! To say nothing of that Cadillac in Colorado Springs!" Fargo's laugh was unpleasant and Peter cringed. That Cadillac business had meant they'd had to leave one of the nicest apartments they'd ever had. That was when they had decided that Peter better check with his mother before he "found" anything. There'd been a fortune in old fivedollar bills hidden in that Cadillac—and he couldn't tell the authorities how he'd known where it had been hidden.

"Yes," Fargo was saying in an ominously casual way, "the police are still looking for the kid who told them where to find that Caddy—and skipped. They want him bad."

The Mustang, like the Cadillac, had become a trap.

"You're mistaking me for someone else, Mr. Fargo," Peter managed to say in a steady, apologetic voice.

"Oh, no, I'm not. I'm a topflight investigator because I'm smart. I put isolated clues together and come up with openandshut convictions."

If you looked adults in the face, they tended to think you couldn't be lying; but it took every ounce of selfcontrol that Peter had learned in thirteen years to look Ken Fargo squarely in the eyes.

"You are wrong, Mr. Fargo. I've never been in Colorado Springs. And gee, if I could find things like you do and get reward money, I sure would have tried to for my mother's sake."

"How do you know about reward money, kid?"

"Mother told me that your company gives you ten percent of the value of anything you recover for them."

Fargo grunted at that, but just on the other side of the town limit sign, he braked, swearing with impatience.

"Where's that brat? C'mon, kid, where is he? You know!"

And Peter did. Victor was cutting across the Omers' meadow, out of sight of the road, and heading toward the old mines. Peter knew he'd better find the kid soon, but he'd have to get rid of Ken Fargo first and how was he going to manage to do that?

"No, Mr. Fargo, I don't know." Peter stared the man straight in the eyes; "I wish I did because Mrs. Ander198 son always tips fifty cents when someone brings Victor home."

"You made seven bucks today finding golf balls. What about that?"

Peter forced himself to grin. "All you have to do is watch where Mr. Roche slices his balls and then go bring 'em in when he isn't looking. Half the ones I brought in today were in the pond anyway."

Doubt flickered across Ken Fargo's face.

"Honest, Mr. Fargo, you're wrong about me."

A big Olds came piling down the road toward town. Cursing under his breath, Fargo pushed himself out of the Mustang and nagged the big car down.

"Yeah? What's the trouble, fella? No gas?" asked the driver, sticking his head out the window. Peter saw, with sinking heart, that it was Mr. Roche. He tried to squinch down in the seat. "Hi there, Peter. Find any more of my balls for me?" He flicked his cigarette to the roadside and gave Fargo his attention. "Kid's a genius finding m'balls in the grass. Like he could home in on them or something. Caddy for me, Saturday, Peter? Ten sharp?"

Limp with defeat, Peter nodded and sank down in the bucket seat, swallowing fiercely against the lump in his throat.

"Seen anything of a kid, too young to be off on his own?" Fargo asked.

"Kid? No. Nothing on the road from here to Hibernia."

Mr. Roche drove off in the Olds, leaving Peter at Fargo's mercy. " 'Kid homes in on them or something,' hutT? 'No, Mr. Fargo, you're wrong about me.'" Fargo's voice was savage as he slid into the driver's seat. "All right, Peter me lad. Now, unless you want some trouble, real trouble, with the cops in Colorado Springs, because they're looking for you, you'd better tell me where those furs are!"

"Furs?"

Fargo grabbed Peter by the wrist. He was as strong as he'd boasted, and the bones in Peter's arm rubbed together painfully in his grip. Blunt fingers gouged into the tendons until Peter had all he could do not to cry out.

"You know, don't you?"

The pain had caught Peter off guard and his face must have given away his secret knowledge, for Fargo swore.

"How long have you known?" Each word was punctuated by a flexing of those implacable fingers on his wrist. "D'you realize you done me out of fifteen thousand dollars?" Just as Peter was certain Fargo would break his arm, the man's attitude altered. "Okay, kid. I understand. You and your mother got scared after that Cadillac caper. Well, you don't have to be scared anymore. I said we'd be a team and we will. No one will think it funny if I find things. I'm a firstrate investigator to begin with. But with you... okay, where're the furs?"

"In the old lead mine." Peter pointed toward the hills. And Victor.

"We searched there already." Fargo's expression was suspicious and menacing. "You lead me on, kid..." and he raised his hand warningly.

"The furs are hidden under the rubble in the old ore carts."

"How do you know? You seen.em?"

"No, but that's where they are."

"You mean, we walked up and down past that loot?"

If they were mice, they would've bit you, Peter recited one of his mother's offquoted phrases to himself. Thinking of his mother gave him a second hold on his courage. Pargo knew, but if his knowledge went no further than an old mine shaft...

"The road to that mine's around here, isn't it?"

Peter told Fargo the way.

"Now you're using the old noggin, Petey boy." Cooperation made Fargo goodnatured. "Say, kid, how do you do it?"

"What?"

"No more of the innocent act." Fargo's voice took on its dangerous edge. "How do you find things you've never seen?"

"I can't always," Peter replied, trying to sound dubious. "It's just when things are on people's minds a lot, like that Cadillac or the furs, I sort of get a picture where they are. Sometimes the picture is clearer than other times, and I know the location."

"What's with the golf balls? You must've found hundreds of stupid golf balls these past coupla months. Pennyante stuff—when I think of the lists of lost, or strayed, items on the company's records... I can make a fortune!"

Peter swallowed. "I", not the more diplomatic "we." The Mustang swerved up the last bend to the mine. "It's getting dark, Mr. Fargo," Peter said. "We should get Victor. He's up there. We can come back tomorrow for the..."

"Forget that stupid brat! I want those furs... now!" Fargo pulled a huge handlight from under his seat and gestured with it for Peter to lead the way.

"The mine's dangerous, Mr. Fargo. And the ore carts are pretty far down..."

There was no reprieve in Fargo's eyes. Peter turned toward the shaft and started walking.

The walls were dripping with the recent spring thaws, and the tunnel had a clammy chill as they penetrated slowly down, turning the gentle bend that led into the bowels of the mine.

"That's a new fall," Peter said nervously as they scrambled over a soggy pile of mud.

Fargo shined the spotlight at the sagging supports. "Yeah, so let's get this business over with. Fifteen thousand will do a lot for us, Petey boy. For you, your mother, and me."

"Why don't you just take the furs and leave us alone, Mr. Fargo? It's not right for me to find things for money."

"Who says?" Fargo snorted at his altruism. "Like the old saying, Petey, 'Finders keepers, losers weepers.' And, Petey boy, I'm the finder's keeper from now on."

The smile on Fargo's face chilled Peter worse than the tunnel's cold. But the smile disappeared when they both heard the groaning of wood and the dribbling sound of dirt falling from a height.

"How much further?" Fargo asked. "This place isn't safe."

The ore carts were right up against the old fall which 201 had closed the mine. Fargo hoisted Peter into the first cart. The boy dug into the loose earth layering the cart, and Fargo swore as Peter unearthed the first of the plastic sacks. "They all that big? Christ, we can't pack those up that tunnel. Take all night." He heaved the plastic bags to the ground and the air puffed them up. He glanced up the tunnel, measuring its width. "I bet I can just get the Mustang down here." And he started off.

"Mr. Fargo, would you leave me the light?"

With the torch pointed forward, Fargo's smile was malevolent in the dim tunnel. "What? A big kid like you afraid of the dark? What could find you here?" He laughed. "Just think of all the things fifteen thousand will buy!"

Peter watched with a rapidly increasing anxiety as the gleam of the spot disappeared around the bend, leaving him in a total blackout.

"Afraid of the dark?" The taunt frightened him not half as much as the life looming with grim certainty before him. Not all the warmth of the pelts on which he crouched could have thawed the fear in Peter's heart.

An ominous creak, almost overhead, startled him further. "The finder's keeper," Fargo had said. There were darker death traps than an old mine shaft, and bleaker lightless vistas.

Nonetheless Peter cried aloud when he saw the return of light and heard the sound of the Mustang bumping along the cart tracks.

"Okay, move your butt and haul these furs into the car, Petey. On the double."

Another warning rumbled overhead and a gout of water spewed from the support directly above the ore carts. Peter grabbed the plastic bags, tripping over the trailing length of them.

"Keep 'em off the wet ground, you stupid jerk. They're worth a fortune."

Peter mumbled an apology as he crammed the bags into the car trunk. The plastic refused to give up its supply of air, and Fargo was cursing as he helped. Then he storme^ down the tunnel for more furs, dragging Peter with him. The light from the Mustang's headlights helped relieve the gloom, although its exhaust was a blue plume in the culdesac of the rockfall. Two loads and the trunk was full. Peter stood with an armful of plastic sacks wondering how they could possibly get them all in the sports car.

"Don't stand there, stupid. Dump 'em on the back seat."

That, too, was full shortly, so Peter heaved his next load onto the passenger seat, falling over it as he lost his balance. Accidentally he hit the wheel, and the horn. The noise startled Fargo into dropping his load, but his curses were covered by a long low rumble. Mud and ooze rained down.

Peter screamed, gesturing frantically to the bulging overhead beam. Then, suddenly he found himself stumbling over plastic bags, desperately pulling at Fargo's arm to get the man to move. Peter remembered scrambling and clawing through wet heavy mud. Then something struck him across the head.

His skull was on fire, his body rigid. Certain he was buried in the tunnel, he tried to move but his arms were held to his side. His fingers clawed but met fluffy soft warm blanketing. There was noise and confusion around him. He was aware of breathing fresh air, and yet... there was thudding and rumbling underneath him which echoed through his painfilled head.

The mine had collapsed! But he was wrapped in a blanket. He was safe.

"Yeah, you wouldn't believe how fast that Mustang went into reverse. The surprising thing is I made it out in one piece at all. 'Course the company will see to the body work. All in the line of duty, Scortius! And I got what I went after. I found the furs."

"I" found the furs? Peter cringed at Fargo's arrogance.

"Considering you were out looking for the Anderson kid, you got double luck," the officer was saying enviously.

Fargo chuckled. "Two finds in one day. Not bad, huh? Say, Doc, how long does it take that ambulance to get here? I want Petey boy given the best of care.

I'll foot the bill myself. And, of course, we should get the little feller back to Mrs. Anderson, too."

"The ambulance's coming," Dr. Wingard said, and there was something in his voice that made Peter think that the doctor didn't much like Ken Fargo. "I'm just as anxious as you are about Peter's condition. I want an x ray of that skull..."

"I thought you said he had just a flesh wound?"

"There's a possibility of concussion—"

"Concussion?" Fargo was startled.

"Yes, it was a wound caused by a falling object. Sufficient force to crack the skull. And I want to run an EKG on Peter. I don't like the sound of that heart..."

"Heart?"

A fierce pounding in Peter's chest echoed the panic in Fargo's voice.

"Yes. Molly Kieman's got enough on her mind, but I spotted an irregularity in Peter's heartbeat when I gave him a physical in school. Might be nothing at all. No mention of rheumatic fever on his school record."

"Rheumatic fever?"

"I'm the cautious type. I'd just like to check."

"Oh."

Peter was somewhat encouraged by the dubious sound of Fargo's rejoinder. Then he remembered Jorie Grant. She'd had a rheumatic heart and couldn't take gym; stayed out of school in hard weather, in general was a real twerp. Be like her? Peter groaned.

"Hey, he's coming to," Fargo cried.

The air about Peter seemed to press in on him and he had a sense of suffocation. A hand grabbed his chin and shook him.

"Hey, Petey. Speak to me!"

There was a scuffle and an exclamation of surprise from Fargo.

"H you don't mind, Mr. Fargo," Dr. Wingate said in a hard icy voice. "I'm the doctor here." A firm hand turned back the blanket and found Peter's wrist. "And for your information, you don't shake concussion cases." Boy, was Dr. Wingard angry! "Peter? Peter? Can you hear me?" His voice was gentle again. 204 "Concussion." That word again. It triggered a series of associations in Peter's mind and eventually made him think of TV shows he'd seen. Maybe... as his mother used to say, there were more ways to kill a cat than choking him with butter.

"Where am I?" He fluttered his eyelids like patients did on "Dr. Kildare." The act became real for the searchlights of the police cars were trained in his direction, bright enough to stun his eyes.

"Peter, it's Dr. Wingard. How're you feeling?"

"My head hurts."

"I know, boy. We'll soon fix that. Can you open your eyes again? And tell me how many fingers I'm holding up?"

Peter blinked. He could see that the doctor was holding up three fingers. He blinked again, made his eyes stay wide with fear.

"Who are you?" he asked, looking directly at the doctor as if he'd never seen him. Then he looked unseeingly at Fargo. "Where am I?"

"How many fingers, Peter?"

"Fingers? Fingers?" Peter couldn't think how many he ought to see if he didn't see the right number. But he could see the dawning of disappointed frustration and the fury of loss in Ken Fargo's face.

Losers weepers. Peter essayed a sob. After all, his head hurt—and he wasn't supposed to be as brave as Peter Kieman.

"Who are you? Where am I? My head hurts." But the first sob was abruptly followed by deep hurtful ones which Peter hadn't ordered.

"There, there, boy. Take it easy. You'll be all right," the doctor said. He stood up, pulling Fargo aside. Peter strained his ears. "That head injury seems to be causing a little amnesia."

"Amnesia?"

"Oh, I don't think it's anything to worry about. A few weeks' rest in the hospital, a careful regime for a few months, and he'll be right as rain."

"Amnesia? And a bum heart?" Fargo glanced sourly at Peter, who gave a weak groaning sob. "Look, Doc, I've got to report to my company about finding those furs. You just send the bills for the kid to Midwestern. Least we can do for him!"

"You'll be looking in on Peter?"

Peter kept his eyes tightly shut, but he was thinking with all his strength: Go away. Ken Fargo!

Fargo cleared his throat and began to move away.

"Well, now, I'll certainly try to. You let me know when he's completely recovered. If he gets his memory back. And check out that bad heart, too."

Well now, Peter thought, Petey boy just wouldn't ever recover from his amnesia. Not completely. And not that part of his mind that made him valuable to Fargo. Finder's keeper indeed!

Weariness settled in along with pain and Peter closed his eyes tightly. It was reassuring to hear little Victor Anderson blubbering somewhere. But what did he have to cry about? He was found, wasn't he?

Peter would have to stop "finding" anything for a while. Even Mr. Roche's golf balls. But he could blame that on the crack on the head, too. He could still caddy.

Then, when he grew up, and without Mr. Ken Fargo interfering with him and his mother, why he'd become the toppestfiight insurance investigator. And nobody would consider it odd that he could find anything he needed to.

As his mother often said, it was an ill wind that blew nobody any good.

A Proper Santa Claus

JEREMY WAS PAINTING. HE USED HIS FINGERS instead of the brush because he liked the feel of paint. Blue was soothing to the touch, red was silky, and orange had a gritty texture. Also he could tell when a color was "proper" if he mixed it with his fingers. He could hear his mother singing to herself, not quite on pitch, but it was a pleasant background noise. It went with the rhythm of his fingers stroking color onto the paper.

He shaped a cookie and put raisins on it, big, plump raisins. He attempted a sugar frosting but the white kind of disappeared into the orange of the cookie. So he globbed up chocolate brown and made an icing. Then he picked the cookie out of the paper and ate it. That left a hole in the center of the paper. It was an excellent cookie, though it made his throat very dry.

Critically he eyed the remaining unused space. Yes, there was room enough, so he painted a glass of Coke. He had trouble representing the bubbles that're supposed to bounce up from the bottom of the glass. That's why the Coke tasted flat when he drank it.

It was disappointing. He'd been able to make the cookie taste so good, why couldn't he succeed with the Coke? Maybe if he drew the bubbles in first... he was running out of paper.

"Momma, Momma?"

"What is it, honey?"

"Can I have more paper? Please?"

"Honest, Jeremy, you use up more paper... Still, it does keep you quiet and out of my hair... why, whatever have you done with your paper? What are those holes?"

Jeremy pointed to the round one. "That was a cookie with raisins and choc'late icing. And that was a Coke only I couldn't make the bubbles bounce."

His mother gave him "the look," so he subsided. "Jeremy North, you use more paper than—than a..."

"Newspaperman?" he suggested, grinning up at her. Momma liked happy faces best.

"Than a newspaperman."

"Can you paint on newspaper?"

His mother blinked. "I don't see why not. And there's pictures already. You can color them in." She obligingly rummaged in the trash and came up with several discarded papers. "There you are, love. Enough supplies to keep you in business a while. I hope."

Well, Jeremy hadn't planned on any business, and newsprint proved less than satisfactory. There wasn't enough white spaces to draw his paintings on, and the newspaper soaked up his paints when he tried to follow the alreadypictures. So he carefully put the paints away, washed his hands, and went outside to play.

For his sixth birthday Jeremy North got a real schooltype easel with a huge pad of paper that fastened onto it at the top and could be torn off, sheet by sheet. There was a rack of holes for his poster paint pots and a rack for his crayons and chalk and eraser. It was exactly what he wanted. He nearly cried for joy. He hugged his mother, and he climbed into his father's lap and kissed him despite his prickly beard.

"Okay, okay, da Vinci," his father laughed. "Go paint us a masterpiece."

Jeremy did. But he was so eager that he couldn't wait until the paint had completely dried. It smeared and blurred, brushing against his body as he hurried to find his dad. So the effect wasn't quite what Jeremy intended.

"Say, that's pretty good," said his father, casting a judicious eye on the profferred artwork. "What's it supposed to be?"

"Just what you wanted." Jeremy couldn't keep the disappointment out of his voice.

"I guess you're beyond me, young feller me lad. I can dig Andy Warhol when he paints tomato soup, but you're in Picasso's school." His father tousled his hair affectionately and even swung him up high so that, despite his disappointment, Jeremy was obliged to giggle and squeal in delight.

Then his father told him to take his painting back to his room.

"But it's your masterpiece, Daddy. I can fix it..."

"No, son. You painted it. You understand it." And his father went about some Sunday errand or other.

Jeremy did understand his painting. Even with the smears he could plainly see the car, just like the Admonsens', which Daddy had admired the previous week. It had been a proper car. If only Daddy had seen it...

His grandmother came, around lunchtime, and brought him a set of pastel crayons with special pastel paper and a simply superior picture book of North American animals and birds.

"Of course, he'll break every one of the pastels in the next hour," he heard his grandmother saying to his mother, "but you said he wants only drawing things."

"I like the book, too, Gramma," Jeremy said politely, but his fingers closed possessively around the pastels.

Gramma glanced at him and then went right on talking. "But I think it's about time he found out what animals really look like instead of those monstrosities he's forever drawing. His teacher's going to wonder about his home life when she sees those nightmares."

"Oh, c'mon, Mother. There's nothing abnormal about Jeremy. I'd far rather he daubed himself all over with paint than ran around like the Reckons' kids, slinging mud and sand everywhere."

"If you'd only make Jeremy..."

"Mother, you can't make Jeremy do anything. He slides away from you like... like a squeeze of paint."

Jeremy lost interest in the adults. As usual, they ignored his presence, despite the fact that he was the subject of their conversation. He began to leaf through the book of birds and animals. The pictures weren't proper. That brown wasn't a birdbrown. And the red of the robin had too much orange, not enough gray. He kept his criticism to himself, but by the time he'd catalogued the anatomical faults in the sketch of the mustang, he was thoroughly bored with the book. His animals might look like nightmares, but they were proper ones for all of that. They worked.

His mother and grandmother were engrossed in discussing the fixative that would have made the pictures "permanent." Gramma said she hadn't bought it because it would be dangerous for him to breathe the fumes. They continued to ignore him. Which was as well. He picked up the pastels and began to experiment. A green horse with pink mane and tail, however anatomically perfect, would arouse considerable controversy.

He didn't break a single one of the precious pastels. He even blew away the rainbow dust from the tray. But he didn't let the horse off the pad until after Gramma and his mother had wandered into the kitchen for lunch.

"I wish..."

The horse was lovely.

"I wish I had some..." Jeremy said.

The horse went cantering around the room, pink tail streaming out behind him and pink mane flying. "... Fixative, Green Horse!" But it didn't work. Jeremy knew it took more than just wishing to do it proper.

He watched regretfully as Green Horse pranced too close to a wall and brushed himself out of existence.

Miss Bradley, his firstgrade teacher, evidently didn't find anything untoward about his drawings, for she constantly displayed them on the bulletin boards. She had a habit of pouncing on him when he had just about finished a drawing so that after all his effort, he hadn't much chance to see if he'd done it "proper" after all. Once or twice he managed to reclaim one from the board and use it, but Miss Bradley created so much fuss about the missing artwork that he diplomatically ceased to repossess his efforts.

On the whole he liked Miss Bradley, but about the first week in October she developed the distressing habit of making him draw to order: "class assignments," she called it. Well, that was all right for the ones who never knew what to draw anyhow, but "assignments" just did not suit Jeremy. While part of him wanted to do hobgoblins, and witches, and pumpkin moons, the other part obstinately refused.

"I'd really looked forward to your interpretations of Hallowe'en, Jeremy," Miss Bradley said sadly when he proffered another pedantic landscape with nothing but tickytacky houses. "This is very beautiful, Jeremy, but it isn't the assigned project. Now, look at Cynthia's witch and Mark's hobgoblin. I'm certain you could do something just as original."

Jeremy dutifully regarded Cynthia's elongated witch on an outsized broomstick apparently made from 2 x 4s instead of broom reeds, and the hobgoblin Mark had created by splashing paint on the paper and folding, thus blotting the wet paint. Neither creation had any chance of working properly; surely Miss Bradley could see that. So he was obliged to tell her that his landscape was original, particularly if she would look at it properly.

"You're not getting the point, Jeremy," Miss Bradley said with unaccustomed sternness.

She wasn't either, but Jeremy thought he might better not say that. So he was the only student in the class who had no Hallowe'en picture for parents to admire on BacktoSchool Night.

His parents were a bit miffed since they'd heard that Jeremy's paintings were usually prominently displayed.

"The assignment was Hallowe'en and Jeremy simply refused to produce something acceptable," Miss Bradley said with a slightly forced smile.

"Perhaps that's just as well," his mother said, a trifle sourly. "He used to draw the most frightening nightmares and say he 'saw' them."

"He's got a definite talent. Are either of you or Mr. North artistically inclined?"

"Not like he is," Mr. North replied, thinking that if he himself were artistically inclined he would use 211 Miss Bradley as a model. "Probably he's used up all his Hallowe'en inspiration."

"Probably," Miss Bradley said with a laugh.

Actually Jeremy hadn't. Although he dutifully set out trickortreating, he came home early. His mother made him sort out his candy, apples, and money for UNICEF, and permitted him to stay up long past his regular bedtime to answer the door for other beggars. But, once safely in his room, he dove for his easel and drew frenetically, slathering black and blue poster paint across clean paper, dashing globs of luminescence for horrific accents. The proper ones took off or crawled obscenely around the room, squeaking and groaning until he released them into the night air for such gambols and aerial maneuvers as they were capable of. Jeremy was impressed. He hung over the windowsill, cheering them on by moonlight. (Around three o'clock there was a sudden shower. All the water solubles melted into the ground.) For a while after that, Jeremy was not tempted to approach the easel at all, either in school or at home. At first. Miss Bradley was sincerely concerned lest she had inhibited her budding artist by arbitrary assignments. But he was only busy with a chemical garden, lumps of coal and bluing and ammonia and all that. Then she got the class involved in making candles out of plastic milk cartons for Thanksgiving, and Jeremy entered into the project with such enthusiasm that she was reassured.

She ought not to have been.

Threedimensionality and a malleable substance fascinated Jeremy. He went in search of anything remotely pliable. He started with butter (his mother had a fit about a whole pound melted on his furry rug; he'd left the creature he'd created prancing around his room, but then the heat came up in the radiators.) Then he tried mud (which set his mother screaming at him). She surrendered to the inevitable by supplying Kirn with PlayDoh. However, now his creations thwarted him because as soon as the substance out of which the proper ones had been created hardened, they lost their mobility. He hadn't minded the ephemeral quality of his drawings, but he'd begun to count on the fact that sculpture lasted a while.

Miss Bradley introduced him to plasticine. And Christmas.

Success with threedimensional figures, the availability of plasticine, and the sudden influx of all sorts of Christmas mail order catalogues spurred Jeremy to unusual efforts. This time he did not resist the class assignment of a centerpiece to deck the Christmas festive tables. Actually, Jeremy scarcely heard what Miss Bradley was saying past her opening words.

"Here's a chance for you to create your very own Santa Claus and reindeer, or a sleigh full of presents..."

Dancer, Prancer, Donner, Blitzen, and Dasher and Comet and Rudolph of the red nose, took form under his flying fingers. Santa's sack was crammed with fullcolor advertisements clipped from mail order wishbooks. Indeed, the sleigh threatened to crumble on its runners from paper weight. He saved Santa Claus till the last. And once he had the fat and jolly gentleman seated in his sleigh, whip in hand, ready to urge his harnessed team, Jeremy was good and ready to make them proper.

Only they weren't; they remained obdurately immobile. Disconsolate, Jeremy moped for nearly a week, examining and reexamining his handiwork for the inhibiting flaw.

Miss Bradley had been enthusiastically complimentary and the other children sullenly envious of his success when the finished group was displayed on a special table, all red and white, with Ivory Snow snow and little evergreens in proportion to the size of the figures. There was even a convenient chimney for the good Santa to descend. Only Jeremy knew that that was not his Santa's goal.

In fact Jeremy quite lost interest in the whole Christmas routine. He refused to visit the Santa on tap at the big shopping center, although his mother suspected that his heart had been set on the Masterpiece Oil Painting Set with its enticing assortment of brushes and every known pigment in lifelonglasting color.

Miss Bradley, too, lost all patience with him and be came quite stem with his inattentiveness, to the delight of his classmates.

As so often happens when people concentrate too hard on a problem, Jeremy almost missed the solution, inadvertently provided by the pert Cynthia, now basking in Miss Bradley's favor.

"He's naked, that's what. He's naked and ugly. Everyone knows Santa is red and white. And reindeers aren't grayyecht. They're brown and soft and have fuzzy tails."

Jeremy had, of course, meticulously detailed the clothing on Santa and the harness on the animals, but they were still plasticine. It hadn't mattered with his other creations that they were the dull graybrown of plasticene because that's how he'd envisaged them, being products of his imagination. But Santa wasn't, or so he thought.

To conform to a necessary convention was obviously, to Jeremy, the requirement that had prevented his Santa from being a proper one. He fabricated harness of string for the reindeer. And a new sleigh of balsa wood with runners of laboriously straightened bobby pins took some time and looked real tough. A judicious coat of paint smartened both reindeer and sleigh. However, the design and manufacture of the red Santa suit proved far more difficult and occupied every spare moment of Jeremy's time. He had to do it in the privacy of his room at home because, when Cynthia saw him putting harness on the reindeer, she twitted him so unmercifully that he couldn't work in peace at school.

He had had little practice with needle and thread, so he actually had to perfect a new skill in order to complete his project. Christmas was only a few days away before he was satisfied with his Santa suit.

He raced to school so he could dress Santa and make him proper. He was just as startled as Miss Bradley when he slithered to a stop inside his classroom door, and found her tying small gifts to the branches of the class tree. They stared at each other for a long moment, and then Miss Bradley smiled. She'd been so hard on poor Jeremy lately.

"You're awfully early, Jeremy. Would you like to help me... Oh! How adorable!" She spotted the Santa suit which he hadn't had the presence of mind to hide from her. "And you did them yourself? Jeremy, you never cease to amaze me." She took the jacket and pants and little hat from his unresisting hand, and examined them carefully. "They are simply beautiful. Just beautiful. But honestly, Jeremy, your Santa is lovely just as he is. No need to gild the lily."

"He isn't a proper Santa without a proper Santa suit."

Miss Bradley looked at him gravely, and then put her hands on his shoulders, making him look up at her.

"A proper Santa Claus is the one we have in our own hearts at this time of year, Jeremy. Not the ones in the department stores or on the street corners or on TV. They're just his helpers." You never knew which of your firstgraders still did believe in Santa Claus in this cynical age. Miss Bradley thought. "A proper Santa Claus is the spirit of giving and sharing, of good fellowship. Don't let anyone tell you that there isn't a Santa Claus. The proper Santa Claus belongs to all of us."

Then, pleased with her eloquence and restraint, she handed him back the Santa suit and patted his shoulder encouragingly.

Jeremy was thunderstruck. His Santa Claus had only been made for Jeremy. But poor Miss Bradley's words rang in his ears. Miss Bradley couldn't know that she had improperly understood Jeremy's dilemma. Once again the blight of highminded interpretation and ladylike good intentions withered primitive magic.

The little reindeer in their shrinking coats of paint would have pulled the sleigh only to Jeremy's house so that Santa could descend only Jeremy's chimney with the little gifts all bearing Jeremy's name.

There was no one there to tell him that it's proper for little boys and girls of his age to be selfish and acquisitive, to regard Santa as an exclusive property.

Jeremy took the garments and let Miss Bradley push him gently toward the table on which his figures were displayed.

She'd put tinsel about the scene, and glitter, but they didn't shine or glisten in the dull gray light filtering 215 through the classroom windows. They weren't proper snow and icicles anyway.

Critically, he saw only string and the silver cake ornaments instead of harness and sleigh bells. He could see the ripples now in the unbent bobby pins which wouldn't ever draw the sleigh smoothly, even over Ivory Snow snow. Dully, he reached for the figure of his Santa Claus.

Getting on the clothes, he dented the plasticene a bit, but it scarcely mattered now. After he'd clasped Santa's malleable paw around the whip, the toothpick with a bright, thick, nylon thread attached to the top with glue, he stood back and stared.

A proper Santa Claus is the spirit of giving and sharing.

So overwhelming was Jeremy's sense of failure, so crushing his remorse for making a selfish Santa Claus instead of the one that belonged to everyone, that he couldn't imagine ever creating anything properly again.

The Smallest Dragonboy

ALTHOUGH KEEVAN LENGTHENED HIS WALK ing stride as far as his legs would stretch, he couldn't quite keep up with the other candidates. He knew he would be teased again.

Just as he knew many other things that his foster mother told him he ought not to know, Keevan knew that Beterii, the most senior of the boys, set that spanking pace just to embarrass him, the smallest dragonboy. Keevan would arrive, tail forkend of the group, breathless, chest heaving, and maybe get a stem look from the instructing wingsecond.

Dragonriders, even if they were still only hopeful candidates for the glowing eggs which were hardening on the hot sands of the Hatching Ground cavern, were expected to be punctual and prepared. Sloth was not tolerated by the Weyrleader of Benden Weyr. A good record was especially important now. It was very near hatching time, when the baby dragons would crack their mottled shells, and stagger forth to choose their lifetime companions. The very thought of that glorious moment made Keevan's breath catch in his throat. To be chosen—to be a dragonrider! To sit astride the neck of a winged beast with jeweled eyes: to be his friend, in telepathic communion with him for life; to be his companion in good times and fighting extremes; to fly effortlessly over the lands of Pem! Or, thrillingly, between to any point anywhere on the world! Flying between was done on dragonback or not at all, and it was dangerous.

Keevan glanced upward, past the black mouths of the weyr caves in which grown dragons and their chosen riders lived, toward the Star Stones that crowned the ridge of the old volcano that was Benden Weyr. On the height, the blue watch dragon, his rider mounted on his neck, stretched the great transparent pinions that carried him on the winds of Pern to fight the evil Thread that fell at certain times from the skies. The manyfaceted rainbow jewels of his eyes glistened fleetingly in the greeny sun. He folded his great wings to his back, and the watch pair resumed their statuelike pose of alertness.

Then the enticing view was obscured as Keevan passed into the Hatching Ground cavern. The sands underfoot were hot, even through heavy wherhide boots. How the bootmaker had protested having to sew so small! Keeven was forced to wonder why being small was reprehensible. People were always calling him "babe" and shooing him away as being "too small" or "too young" for this or that. Keevan was constantly working, twice as hard as any other boy his age, to prove himself capable. What if his muscles weren't as big as Beterli's? They were just as hard. And if he couldn't overpower anyone in a wrestling match, he could outdistance everyone in a footrace.

"Maybe if you run fast enough," Beterii had jeered on the occasion when Keevan had been goaded to boast of his swiftness, "you could catch a dragon. That's the only way you'll make a dragonrider!"

"You just wait and see, Beterii, you just wait," Keevan had replied. He would have liked to wipe the contemptuous smile from Beterli's face, but the guy didn't fight fair even when a wingsecond was watching. "No one knows what Impresses a dragon!"

"They've got to be able to find you first, babe!"

Yes, being the smallest candidate was not an enviable position. It was therefore imperative that Keevan Impress a dragon in his first hatching. That would wipe the smile off every face in the cavern, and accord him the respect due any dragonrider, even the smallest one.

Besides, no one knew exactly what Impressed the baby dragons as they struggled from their shells in search of their lifetime partners.

"I like to believe that dragons see into a man's heart," Keevan's foster mother, Mende, told him. "If they find goodness, honesty, a flexible mind, patience, courage—and you've got that in quantity, dear Keevan —that's what dragons look for. I've seen many a wellgrown lad left standing on the sands. Hatching Day, in favor of someone not so strong or tall or handsome. And if my memory serves me"—which it usually did: Mende knew every word of every Harper's tale worth telling, although Keevan did not interrupt her to say so—"I don't believe that F'lar, our Weyrleader, was all that tall when bronze Mnementh chose him. And Mnementh was the only bronze dragon of that hatching."

Dreams of Impressing a bronze were beyond Keevan's boldest reflections, although that goal dominated the thoughts of every other hopeful candidate. Green dragons were small and fast and more numerous. There was more prestige to Impressing a blue or brown than a green. Being practical, Keevan seldom dreamed as high as a big fighting brown, like Canth, F'nor's fine fellow, the biggest brown on all Pem. But to fly a bronze? Bronzes were almost as big as the queen, and only they took the air when a queen flew at mating time. A bronze rider could aspire to become Weyrleader! Well, Keevan would console himself, brown riders could aspire to become wingseconds, and that wasn't bad. He'd even settle for a green dragon: they were small, but so was he. No matter! He simply had to Impress a dragon his first time in the Hatching Ground. Then no one in the Weyr would taunt him anymore for being so small.

Shells, Keevan thought now, but the sands are hot!

"Impression time is imminent, candidates," the wingsecond was saying as everyone crowded respectfully close to him. "See the extent of the striations on this promising egg." The stretch marks were larger than yesterday.

Everyone leaned forward and nodded thoughtfully. That particular egg was the one Beterii had marked as his own, and no other candidate dared, on pain of being beaten by Beterii at his first opportunity, to approach it. The egg was marked by a large yellowish splotch in the shape of a dragon backwinging to land, talons outstretched to grasp rock. Everyone knew that bronze eggs bore distinctive markings. And naturally, Beterii, who'd been presented at eight Impressions already and was the biggest of the candidates, had chosen it.

"I'd say that the great opening day is almost upon us," the wingsecond went on, and then his face assumed a grave expression. "As we well know, there are only forty eggs and seventytwo candidates. Some of you may be disappointed on the great day. That doesn't necessarily mean you aren't dragonrider material, just that the dragon for you hasn't been shelled. You'll have other hatchings, and it's no disgrace to be left behind an Impression or two. Or more."

Keevan was positive that the wingsecond's eyes rested on Beterii, who'd been stood off at so many Impressions already. Keevan tried to squinch down so the wingsecond wouldn't notice him. Keevan had been reminded too often that he was eligible to be a candidate by one day only. He, of all the hopefuls, was most likely to be left standing on the great day. One more reason why he simply had to Impress at his first hatching.

"Now move about among the eggs," the wingsecond said. "Touch them. We don't know that it does any good, but it certainly doesn't do any harm."

Some of the boys laughed nervously, but everyone immediately began to circulate among the eggs. Beterii stepped up officiously to "his" egg, daring anyone to come near it. Keevan smiled, because he had already touched it—every inspection day, when the others were leaving the Hatching Ground and no one could see him crouch to stroke it.

Keevan had an egg he concentrated on, too, one drawn slightly to the far side of the others. The shell had a soft greenishblue tinge with a faint creamy swirl design. The consensus was that this egg contained a mere green, so Keevan was rarely bothered by rivals. He was somewhat perturbed then to see Beterii wandering over to him.

"I don't know why you're allowed in this Impression, Keevan. There are enough of us without a babe," Beterii said, shaking his head.

"I'm of age." Keevan kept his voice level, telling himself not to be bothered by mere words.

"Yah!" Beterii made a show of standing in his toetips. "You can't even see over an egg; Hatching Day, you better get in front or the dragons won't see you at all. 'Course, you could get run down that way in the mad scramble. Oh, I forget, you can run fast, can't you?"

"You'd better make sure a dragon sees you, this time, Beterii," Keevan replied. "You're almost overage, aren't you?"

Beterii flushed and took a step forward, hand halfraised. Keevan stood his ground, but if Beterii advanced one more step, he would call the wingsecond. No one fought on the Hatching Ground. Surely Beterii knew that much.

Fortunately, at that moment, the wingsecond called the boys together and led them from the Hatching Ground to start on evening chores. There were "glows" to be replenished in the main kitchen caverns and sleeping cubicles, the major hallways, and the queen's apartment. Firestone sacks had to be filled against Thread attack, and black rock brought to the kitchen hearths. The boys fell to their chores, tantalized by the odors of roasting meat. The population of the Weyr began to assemble for the evening meal, and the dragonriders came in from the Feeding Ground on their sweep checks.

It was the time of day Keevan liked best: once the chores were done but before dinner was served, a fellow could often get close enough to the dragonriders to hear their talk. Tonight, Keevan's father, K'last, was at the main dragonrider table. It puzzled Keevan how his father, a brown rider and a tall man, could be his father—because he, Keevan, was so small. It obviously puzzled K'last, too, when he deigned to notice his small son: "In a few more Turns, you'll be as tall as I am —or taller!"

K'last was pouring Benden wine all around the table. The dragonriders were relaxing. There'd be no Thread attack for three more days, and they'd be in the mood to tell tall tales, better than Harper yams, about impossible maneuvers they'd done adragonback. When Thread attack was closer, their talk would change to a discussion of tactics of evasion, of going between, how long to suspend there until the burning but fragile Thread would freeze and crack and fall harmlessly off dragon and man. They would dispute the exact moment to feed firestone to the dragon so he'd have the best flame ready to sear Thread midair and render it harmless to ground—and man—below. There was such a lot to know and understand about being a dragonrider that sometimes Keevan was overwhelmed. How would he ever be able to remember everything he ought to know at the right moment? He couldn't dare ask such a question; this would only have given additional weight to the notion that he was too young yet to be a dragonrider.

"Having older candidates makes good sense," L'vel was saying, as Keevan settled down near the table. "Why waste four to five years of a dragon's fighting prime until his rider grows up enough to stand the rigors?" L'vel had Impressed a blue of Ramoth's first clutch. Most of the candidates thought L'vel was marvelous because he spoke up in front of the older riders, who awed them. "That was well enough in the Interval when you didn't need to mount the full Weyr complement to fight Thread. But not now. Not with more eligible candidates than ever. Let the babes wait."

"Any boy who is over twelve Turns has the right to stand in the Hatching Ground," K'last replied, a slight smile on his face. He never argued or got angry. Keevan wished he were more like his father. And oh, how he wished he were a brown rider! "Only a dragon —each particular dragon—knows what he wants in a rider. We certainly can't tell. Time and again the theorists," K'last's smile deepened as his eyes swept those at the table, "are surprised by dragon choice. They never seem to make mistakes, however."

"Now, K'last, just look at the roster this Impression. Seventytwo boys and only forty eggs. Drop off the twelve youngest, and there's still a good field for the hatchlings to choose from. Shells! There are a couple of weyrlings unable to see over a wher egg much less a dragon! And years before they can ride Thread."

"True enough, but the Weyr is scarcely under fighting strength, and if the youngest Impress, they'll be old enough to fight when the oldest of our current dragons go between from senility."

"Half the Weyrbred lads have already been through several Impressions," one of the bronze riders said then. "I'd say drop some of them off this time. Give the untried a chance."

"There's nothing wrong in presenting a clutch with as wide a choice as possible," said the Weyrleader, who had joined the table with Lessa, the Weyrwoman.

"Has there ever been a case," she said, smiling in her odd way at the riders, "where a hatchling didn't choose?"

Her suggestion was almost heretical and drew astonished gasps from everyone, including the boys.

F'lar laughed. "You say the most outrageous things, Lessa."

"Well, has there ever been a case where a dragon didn't choose?"

"Can't say as I recall one," K'last replied.

"Then we continue in this tradition," Lessa said firmly, as if that ended the matter.

But it didn't. The argument ranged from one table to the other all through dinner, with some favoring a weeding out of the candidates to the most likely, lopping off those who were very young or who had had multiple opportunities to Impress. All the candidates were in a swivet, though such a departure from tradition would be to the advantage of many. As the evening progressed, more riders were favoring eliminating the youngest and those who'd passed four or more Impressions unchosen. Keevan felt he could bear such a dictum only if Beterii were also eliminated. But this seemed less likely than that Keevan would be turfed out, since the Weyr's need was for fighting dragons and riders.

By the time the evening meal was over, no decision had been reached, although the Weyrleader had promised to give the matter due consideration.

He might have slept on the problem, but few of the 223 candidates did. Tempers were uncertain in the sleeping caverns next morning as the boys were routed out of their beds to carry water and black rock and cover the "glows." Twice Mende had to call Keevan to order for clumsiness.

"Whatever is the matter with you, boy?" she demanded in exasperation when he tipped blackrock short of the bin and sooted up the hearth.

"They're going to keep me from this Impression."

"What?" Mende stared at him. "Who?"

"You heard them talking at dinner last night. They're going to turf the babes from the hatching."

Mende regarded him a moment longer before touching his arm gently. "There's lots of talk around a supper table, Keevan. And it cools as soon as the supper. I've heard the same nonsense before every hatching, but nothing is ever changed."

"There's always a first time," Keevan answered, copying one of her own phrases.

"That'll be enough of that, Keevan. Finish your job. If the clutch does hatch today, we'll need full rock bins for the feast, and you won't be around to do the filling. All my fosterlings make dragonriders."

"The first time?" Keevan was bold enough to ask as he scooted off with the rockbarrow.

Perhaps, Keevan thought later, if he hadn't been on that chore just when Beterii was also fetching black rock, things might have turned out differently. But he had dutifully trundled the barrow to the outdoor bunker for another load just as Beterii arrived on a similar errand.

"Heard the news, babe?" Beterii asked. He was grinning from ear to ear, and he put an unnecessary emphasis on the final insulting word.

"The eggs are cracking?" Keevan all but dropped the loaded shovel. Several anxieties flicked through his mind then: he was black with rock dust—would he have time to wash before donning the white tunic of candidacy? And if the eggs were hatching, why hadn't the candidates been recalled by the wingsecond?

"Naw! Guess again!" Beterii was much too pleased with himself.

With a sinking heart, Keevan knew what the news must be, and he could only stare with intense desolation at the older boy. "C'mon! Guess, babe!"

"I've no time for guessing games," Keevan managed to say with indifference. He began to shovel black rock into the barrow as fast as he could.

"I said, guess." Beterii grabbed the shovel. "And I said I have no time for guessing games." Beterii wrenched the shovel from Keevan's hands.

"Guess!"

"I'll have that shovel back, Beterii." Keevan straightened up, but he didn't come to Beterii's bulky shoulder. From somewhere, other boys appeared, some with barrows, some mysteriously alerted to the prospect of a confrontation among their numbers.

"Babes don't give orders to candidates around here, babe!"

Someone sniggered and Keevan, incredulous, knew that he must've been dropped from the candidacy.

He yanked the shovel from Beterii's loosened grasp. Snarling, the older boy tried to regain possession, but Keevan clung with all his strength to the handle, dragged back and forth as the stronger boy jerked the shovel about.

With a sudden, unexpected movement, Beterii rammed the handle into Keevan's chest, knocking him over the barrow handles. Keevan felt a sharp, painful jab behind his left ear, an unbearable pain in his left shin, and then a painless nothingness.

Mende's angry voice roused him, and startled, he tried to throw back the covers, thinking he'd overslept. But he couldn't move, so firmly was he tucked into his bed. And then the constriction of a bandage on his head and the dull sickishness in his leg brought back recent occurrences.

"Hatching?" he cried.

"No, lovey," Mende said in a kind voice. Her hand was cool and gentle on his forehead. "Though there's some as won't be at any hatching again." Her voice took on a stern edge.

Keevan looked beyond her to see the Weyr woman, who was frowning with irritation.

"Keevan, will you tell me what occurred at the blackrock bunker?" asked Lessa in an even voice.

He remembered BeterU now and the quarrel over the shovel and... what had Mende said about some not being at any hatching? Much as he hated BeterU, he couldn't bring himself to tattle on BeterU and force him out of candidacy.

"Come, lad," and a note of impatience crept into the Weyrwoman's voice. "I merely want to know what happened from you, too. Mende said she sent you for black rock. BeterU—and every WeyrUng in the cavern—seems to have been on the same errand. What happened?"

"BeterU took my shovel. I hadn't finished with it."

"There's more than one shovel. What did he say to you?"

"He'd heard the news."

"What news?" The Weyrwoman was suddenly amused.

"That... that... there'd been changes."

"Is that what he said?"

"Not exactly"

"What did he say? C'mon, lad, I've heard from everyone else, you know."

"He said for me to guess the news."

"And you fell for that old gag?" The Weyrwoman's irritation returned.

"Consider all the talk last night at supper, Lessa," Mende said. "Of course the boy would think he'd been eUminated."

"In effect, he is, with a broken skull and leg." Lessa touched his arm in a rare gesture of sympathy. "Be that as it may, Keevan, you'll have other Impressions. BeterU wiU not. There are certain rules that must be observed by all candidates, and his conduct proves him unacceptable to the Weyr."

She smiled at Mende and then left.

"I'm still a candidate?" Keevan asked urgently.

"Well, you are and you aren't, lovey," his foster mother said. "Is the numbweed working?" she asked, and when he nodded, she said, "You just rest. I'll bring you some nice broth."

At any other time in his Ufe, Keevan would have 226 relished such cosseting, but now he just lay there worrying. BeterU had been dismissed. Would the others think it was his fault? But everyone was there! BeterU provoked that fight. His worry increased, because although he heard excited comings and goings in the passageway, no one tweaked back the curtain across the sleeping alcove he shared with five other boys. Surely one of them would have to come in sometime. No, they were all avoiding him. And something else was wrong. Only he didn't know what.

Mende returned with broth and beachberry bread. "Why doesn't anyone come see me, Mende? I haven't done anything wrong, have I? I didn't ask to have BeterU turfed out."

Mende soothed him, saying everyone was busy with noontime chores and no one was angry with him. They were giving him a chance to rest in quiet. The numbweed made him drowsy, and her words were fair enough. He permitted his fears to dissipate. Until he heard a hum. Actually, he felt it first, in the broken shin bone and his sore head. The hum began to grow. Two things registered suddenly in Keevan's groggy mind: the only white candidate's robe still on the pegs in the chamber was his; and the dragons hummed when a clutch was being laid or being hatched. Impression! And he was flat abed.

Bitter, bitter disappointment turned the warm broth sour in his belly. Even the small voice telling him that he'd have other opportunities failed to alleviate his crushing depression. This was the Impression that mattered! This was his chance to show everyone, from Mende to K'last to L'vel and even the Weyrieader that he, Keevan, was worthy of being a dragonrider.

He twisted in bed, fighting against the tears that threatened to choke him. Dragonmen don't cry! Dragonmen learn to live with pain.

Pain? The leg didn't actually pain him as he rolled about on his bedding. His head felt sort of stiff from the tightness of the bandage. He sat up, an effort in itself since the numbweed made exertion difficult. He touched the splinted leg; the knee was unhampered. He had no feeling in his bone, really. He swung himself carefully to the side of his bed and stood slowly.

The room wanted to swim about him. He closed his eyes, which made the dizziness worse, and he had to clutch the wall.

Gingerly, he took a step. The broken leg dragged. It hurt in spite of the numbweed, but what was pain to a dragonman?

No one had said he couldn't go to the Impression. "You are and you aren't," were Mende's exact words.

Clinging to the wall, he jerked off his bedshirt. Stretching his arm to the utmost, he jerked his white candidate's tunic from the peg. Jamming first one arm and then the other into the holes, he pulled it over his head. Too bad about the belt. He couldn't wait. He hobbled to the door, hung on to the curtain to steady himself. The weight on his leg was unwieldy. He wouldn't get very far without something to lean on. Down by the bathing pool was one of the long crooknecked poles used to retrieve clothes from the hot washing troughs. But it was down there, and he was on the level above. And there was no one nearby to come to his aid: everyone would be in the Hatching Ground right now, eagerly waiting for the first egg to crack.

The humming increased in volume and tempo, an urgency to which Keevan responded, knowing that his time was all too limited if he was to join the ranks of the hopeful boys standing around the cracking eggs. But if he hurried down the ramp, he'd fall flat on his face.

He could, of course, go flat on his rear end, the way crawling children did. He sat down, sending a jarring stab of pain through his leg and up to the wound on the back of his head. Gritting his teeth and blinking away tears, Keevan scrabbled down the ramp. He had to wait a moment at the bottom to catch his breath. He got to one knee, the injured leg straight out in front of him. Somehow, he managed to push himself erect, though the room seemed about to tip over his ears. It wasn't far to the crooked stick, but it seemed an age before he had it in his hand. Then the humming stopped! Keevan cried out and began to hobble frantically across the cavern, out to the bowl of the Weyr. Never had the distance between living caverns and the Hatch228 ing Ground seemed so great. Never had the Weyr been so breathlessly silent. It was as if the multitude of people and dragons watching the hatching held every breath in suspense. Not even the wind muttered down the steep sides of the bowl. The only sounds to break the stillness were Keevan's ragged gasps and the thumpthud of his stick on the hardpacked ground. Sometimes he had to hop twice on his good leg to maintain his balance. Twice he fell into the sand and had to pull himself up on the stick, his white tunic no longer spotless. Once he jarred himself so badly he couldn't get up immediately.

Then he heard the first exhalation of the crowd, the oohs, the muted cheer, the susurrus of excited whispers. An egg had cracked, and the dragon had chosen his rider. Desperation increased Keevan's hobble. Would he never reach the arching mouth of the Hatching Ground?

Another cheer and an excited spate of applause spurred Keevan to greater effort. If he didn't get there in moments, there'd be no unpaired hatchling left. Then he was actually staggering into the Hatchling Ground, the sands hot on his bare feet.

No one noticed his entrance or his halting progress. And Keevan could see nothing but the backs of the whiterobed candidates, seventy of them ringing the area around the eggs. Then one side would surge forward or back and there'd be a cheer. Another dragon had been Impressed. Suddenly a large gap appeared in the white human wall, and Keevan had his first sight of the eggs. There didn't seem to be any left uncracked, and he could see the lucky boys standing beside wobblelegged dragons. He could hear the unmistakable plaintive crooning of hatchlings and their squawks of protest as they'd fall awkwardly in the sand.

Suddenly he wished that he hadn't left his bed, that he'd stayed away from the Hatching Ground. Now everyone would see his ignominious failure. So he scrambled as desperately to reach the shadowy walls of the Hatching Ground as he had struggled to cross the bowl. He mustn't be seen.

He didn't notice, therefore, that the shifting group of boys remaining had begun to drift in his direction. 229 The hard pace he had set himself and his cruel disappointment took their double toll of Keevan. He tripped and collapsed sobbing to the warm sands. He didn't see the consternation in the watching Weyrfolk above the Hatching Ground, nor did he hear the excited whispers of speculation. He didn't know that the Weyrleader and Weyrwoman had dropped to the arena and were making their way toward the knot of boys slowly moving in the direction of the entrance.

"Never seen anything like it," the Weyrleader was saying. "Only thirtynine riders chosen. And the bronze trying to leave the Hatching Ground without making Impression."

"A case in point of what I said last night," the Weyrwoman replied, "where a hatchling makes no choice because the right boy isn't there."

"There's only Beterii and K'last's young one missing. And there's a full wing of likely boys to choose from..."

"None acceptable, apparently. Where is the creature going? He's not heading for the entrance after all. Oh, what have we there, in the shadows?"

Keevan heard with dismay the sound of voices nearing him. He tried to burrow into the sand. The mere thought of how he would be teased and taunted now was unbearable.

Don't worry! Please don't worry! The thought was urgent, but not his own.

Someone kicked sand over Keevan and butted roughly against him.

"Go away. Leave me alone!" he cried.

Why? was the injuredsounding question inserted into his mind. There was no voice, no tone, but the question was there, perfectly clear, in his head.

Incredulous, Keevan lifted his head and stared into the glowing jeweled eyes of a small bronze dragon. His wings were wet, the tips drooping in the sand. And he sagged in the middle on his unsteady legs, although he was making a great effort to keep erect.

Keevan dragged himself to his knees, oblivious of the pain in his leg. He wasn't even aware that he was ringed by the boys passed over, while thirtyone pairs of resentful eyes watched him Impress the dragon.

The Weynnen looked on, amused, and surprised at the draconic choice, which could not be forced. Could not be questioned. Could not be changed.

Why? asked the dragon again. Don't you like me? His eyes whirled with anxiety, and his tone was so piteous that Keevan staggered forward and threw his arms around the dragon's neck, stroking his eye ridges, patting the damp, soft hide, opening the fragilelooking wings to dry them, and wordlessly assuring the hatchling over and over again that he was the most perfect, most beautiful, most beloved dragon in the Weyr, in all the Weyrs of Pem.

"What's his name, K'van?" asked Lessa, smiling warmly at the new dragonrider. K'van stared up at her for a long moment. Lessa would know as soon as he did. Lessa was the only person who could "receive" from all dragons, not only her own Ramoth. Then he gave her a radiant smile, recognizing the traditional shortening of his name that raised him forever to the rank of dragonrider.

My name is Heth, the dragon thought mildly, then hiccuped in sudden urgency. I'm hungry.

"Dragons are bom hungry," said Lessa, laughing. "F'lar, give the boy a hand. He can barely manage his own legs, much less a dragon's."

K'van remembered his stick and drew himself up. "We'll be Just fine, thank you."

"You may be the smallest dragonrider ever, young K'van," Flar said, "but you're one of the bravest!"

And Heth agreed! Pride and joy so leaped in both chests that K'van wondered if his heart would burst right out of his body. He looped an arm around Heth's neck and the pair, the smallest dragonboy and the hatchling who wouldn't choose anybody else, walked out of the Hatching Ground together forever.

Apple

The late Hans Stefan Santesson approached me at a party to see if I could contribute to his proposed Walker Anthology on crime prevention in the future. I had nothing completed but I'd just finished "A Womanly Talent," in which parapsychics got made respectable. I'd proposed that there'd be such talents as 'finders' employed by law enforcement officers to locate lost persons and objects. Happily, that background generated this story, almost in one sitting... rewarding me in many ways. Authors dream yearningly of stories that'll write themselves. It happens infrequently and is regarded, at least by me, as a minor miracle—the good apple in the barrel of imagination, Juicy, tart, memorable.

THE THEFT WAS THE LEAD MORNING 'CAST and ruined Daffyd op Owen's appetite. As he listened to the description of the priceless sable coat, the sapphire necklace, the couturemodel gown, and the jewelstrap slippers, he felt as if he were congealing in his chair as his breakfast cooled and hardened on the plate. He waited, numbed, for the commentator to make the obvious conclusion: a conclusion which would destroy all that the North American Parapsychic Center had achieved so slowly, so delicately. For the only way in which such valuable items could have been removed from a store dummy in a scanned, warded, very public display window in the fiveminute period between the fixed TV frames was by kinetic energy.

"The police have several leads and expect to have a solution by evening. Commissioner Frank Gillings is taking charge of the investigation. " 'I keep my contractual obligations to the City,' Gillings is reported to have told the press early this morning as he personally supervised the examination of the display window at Coles, Michaels' and Chamy Department Store. 'I have reduced street and consensual crimes and contained riot activity. Jerhattan is a safe place for the lawabiding. Unsafe for lawbreakers.' "

The backshot of Gillings' stem face was sufficient to break op Owen's stasis. He rose and strode toward the cornunit just as it beeped.

"Dafiyd, you heard that 'cast?" The long, unusually grim face of Lester Welch appeared on the screen. "Goddammit, they promised no premature announce ment. Mediamen!" His expression boded ill for the first unwary reporter to approach him. Over Les's shoulder, op Owen could see the equally savage face of Charlie Moorfield, duty officer of the control room of the Center.

"How long have you known about the theft?" Op Owen couldn't quite keep the reprimand from his voice. Les had a habit of trying to spare his superior, particularly these days when he knew op Owen had been spreading himself very thin in the intensive public educational campaign.

"Ted Lewis snuck in a cautious advice as soon as Headquarters scanned the disappearance. He also can't 'find' a thing. And, Dave, there wasn't a wrinkle or a peak between 7:03 and 7:08 on any graph that shouldn't be there, with every single Talent accounted for!"

"That's right, boss," Charlie added. "Not a single Incident to account for the kinetic 'lift' needed for the heist."

"Gillings is on his way here," said Les, screwing his face up with indignation.

"Why?" Daffyd op Owen exploded. "Didn't Ted clear us?"

"Christ, yes, but Gillings has been at Coles and his initial investigation proves conclusively to him that one of our people is a larcenist. One of our women, to be precise, with a secret yen for sable, silk, and sapphires."

Daffyd forced himself to nullify the boiling anger he felt. He could not afford to cloud reason with emotion. Not with so much at stake. Not with the Bill which would provide legal protection for Talents only two weeks away from passing.

"You'll never believe me, will you, Dave," Les said, "that the Talented will always be suspect?"

"Gillings has never caviled at the use of Talents, Lester."

"He'd be a goddamned fool if he did." Lester's eyes sparkled angrily. He jabbed at his chest. "We've kept street and consensual crime low. Talent did his job for him. And now he's out to nail us. With publicity like this, we'll never get that Bill through. Christ, what luck! Two bloody weeks away from protection."

"If there's no Incident on the graphs, Les, even Gillings must admit to our innocence."

Welch rolled his eyes heavenward. "How can you be so naive, Dave? No matter what our remotes prove, that heist was done by a Talent."

"Not one of ours." Daffyd op Owen could be dogmatic, too.