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“Is this your first trip into the mountains?” Valdir asked.

“No, but the first time I had crossed the plains.” Barron caught himself. What was the matter with him? That gadget and its weird noises seemed to have unsettled his brain. “Yes, I’ve never been outside the Terran Zone before this.”

“Of course you haven’t seen any real mountains yet,” Lerrys said. “These are just foothills, really,

compared to the Hellers or the Hyades or the Lorillard Ranges.”

“There’s quite enough mountain for me,” Barron said. “If these are foothills, I’m not in any hurry to see

anything higher.”

As if to refute what he had said, a picture sprang to swift life in his brain:
 
I had expected Armida to belike this, a great gray peaked castle lying beneath the chasmed tooth of the mountain, beneath thesnow-laden crag with its high plume of snow
 
.

Barron let his breath out as the picture faded, but before he could think of anything to say, the dooropened and Gwynn, now wearing what looked like a green and black uniform, came in, accompanied bytwo men carrying between them Barron’s crate of lens materials and grinding tools. They set it down,under his instructions, and removed the heavy straps, buckles and padding which had protected it on thetrip. Valdir thanked the men in an unfamiliar dialect, Gwynn lingered to ask a couple of routine questions,and when the men went away, Barron was once more composed and in possession of himself.
 
Okay,maybe I’ve had something like a nervous breakdown in the Terran Zone, and it’s still showing inintermittent brainstorms. It doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going insane, and it certainly needn’tinhibit the work I’m going to be doing
 
. He was glad to have the chance to collect himself by talkingabout familiar things.

He had to admit that for men without a standard scientific education, Valdir and Lerrys showed a gooddeal of comprehension and asked intelligent questions about what he had told them. He gave them a verybrief history of lenses—from microscope to telescope to refracting lens for myopia, to binocular lens.

“You realize this is all very elementary,” he added apologetically. “We’ve had simple lenses from our prehistory; it’s a pre-atomic development on most planets. Now we have the various forms of radar, coherent light devices, and the like. But when men on Terra first started experimenting with light, the lens was our first step in that direction.”

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“Oh, it’s quite understandable,” said Valdir, “you needn’t apologize. On a planet like Terra, where the random incidence of clairvoyance is so low, it’s perfectly natural that men would turn to such experiments.” Barron stared; he hadn’t been apologizing.

Lerrys caught his eye and gave Barron a brief, humorous wink, then frowned slightly at his guardian, and Valdir caught himself and continued. “And of course, it’s our good fortune that you have developed thistechnique. You see, Mr. Barron, here on Darkover, throughout
 
our
pre-history, we were a world wherethe so-called ESP powers were used, in place of gadgets and machinery, to augment and supplementman’s five senses. But so many of these old powers have been lost, or forgotten, during what we call the Years of Chaos, just before the Compact, that now we are forced to supplement our unaided senseswith various devices. It’s necessary, of course, to be very careful which devices we allow into oursociety; as the history of all too many planets will show, technology is a two-edged weapon, which canbe abused more often than it is used. But we have studied the probable impact on our society quitecarefully, and decided that with elementary caution the introduction of lenses will do no palpable harm inthe foreseeable future.”

“That’s good of you,” said Barron ironically. If Valdir was conscious of the sarcasm he let it pass without comment. He said, “Larry, of course, has a fairly good technical education, and can make things clear to me if I can’t understand. Now, about power sources for your machinery and equipment, Mr. Barron. I trust you were warned that very little electricity is available, and only in the lowest of voltages?”

“That’s all right. I have mostly hand equipment, and a small generator which can be adapted to work by

wind power.”

“Wind is something we have plenty of back here in the mountains,” said Lerrys with a friendly grin. “I

was the one who suggested wind power instead of storage batteries.”

Barron began putting the various bits of equipment back into their case. Valdir rose and went to thewindow, pausing beside the carved ornament which hid the strange electronic gadget. He asked abruptly, “Mr. Barron, where did you learn to speak Darkovan?”

Barron shrugged. “I’ve always been fairly quick at languages.” Then he frowned; he had a good workingknowledge of the language spoken in the city near the Trade Zone, but he had given what amounted to along and fairly technical lecture, without once hesitating, or calling on the young man—Larry or Lerrys orwhatever Valdir called him—to interpret. He felt strangely confused and troubled.
 
Had
 
he been speaking Darkovan all that time? He hadn’t stopped to think what language he was speaking.
 
Damn it, what iswrong with me
 
?

“Nothing is wrong,” said Lerrys quickly. “I told you, Valdir. No, I don’t understand, either. But—I gave

him my knife.”

“It was yours to give, fosterling, but I don’t disapprove.”

“Look out,” Lerrys said quickly, “he can hear us.”

Valdir’s sharp eyes swept in the direction of Barron, who suddenly realized that the two Darkovans hadbeen speaking in yet another language. Barron’s confusion made him angry. He said, with dry asperity, “Idon’t know Darkovan courtesy, but among my people it is considered fairly rude to talk over someone’shead,
 
about
 
them.”

“I’m sorry,” Lerrys said. “I had no idea you could hear us, Dan.”

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“My foster son, of all people, should know about latent telepaths,” Valdir said. “I am sorry, Mr. Barron; we intended no rudeness. Telepaths, among you Terrans, are not common, though they are not unknown, either.”

“You mean I’m reading your minds?”

“In a sense. It’s far too complex a subject to explain in a few minutes. For the moment I suggest you think of it as a very good sort of talent to have for the work you’re going to be doing, since it will make it easy for you to talk to people, when you know only a little of their language.”

Barron started to say,
 
But I’m no telepath, I’ve never shown any talent for that sort of thing, andwhen the Rhines gave me the standard psi test for the Space Service, I tested out damn near flatnegative
 
. Then he withheld it. He had been learning a lot about himself lately, and it was certain that hewasn’t the same man he had been before. If he developed a few talents to go with his hallucinations, thatwas perhaps the law of compensation in action. It had certainly made it easier to talk to Valdir, so whycomplain?

He finished carefully putting the equipment in the crate, and listened to Valdir’s assurances that it wouldbe securely wrapped and crated for the trip up to the mountain station where he would be working.

But when, a few minutes later, he took his leave and went down the hall, he was shocked and yetunsurprised to realize that Valdir’s voices and Lerry’s continued, like distant whispers inside his head.

“Do you suppose the Terrans chose a telepath purposely?”

“I don’t think so, Foster Father; I don’t believe they knew enough about choosing or training them. And he seems too surprised by the whole thing. I told you that from somewhere he had picked up an image of Sharra.”

“
 
Sharra, of all conceivable
!”—Valdir’s mental voice blurted out in astonishment and what seemed like dismay. “
 
So you gave him your knife, Larry! Well, you know what that will mean. I’ll release you from your pledge, if you like; tell him who you are when it seems necessary
.”

“
 
It’s not because he’s a Terran. But if he’s going to be running around Darkover in that state, someone’s got to do something about it
—
 
and I can probably understand him better than most people. It isn’t all that easy, to change worlds
.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions, Larry. You don’t know that he’s changing worlds.”

Larry’s tone in answer sounded positive, and yet somehow sad. “
 
Oh, yes, he will. Where would he goamong the Terrans, after this
?”

VI

«^»

MELITTA crept down the long, tunneled stairway, groping through the darkness. After the faint lightfrom the cracks behind her had died, she was in total darkness and had to feel each step with her feetbefore setting her weight on it. She wished she had thought to bring a light. But on the other hand, she

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would need both hands to find her way and to brace herself. She went carefully, never putting her full weight on a step without testing it. She had never been down here before, but her childhood had been soaked in stories of her Storn forefathers and the builders of the castle before them, and she knew that secret exits and tunnels could be honeycombed with nasty surprises for people who blundered through them without appropriate precautions.

Her care was not superfluous. Before she had gone more than a few thousand feet down into thedarkness, the wall at her left hand fell away and left her feeling a breath of dank air which seemed to riseout of an immense depth. The air was moving, and she had no fear of suffocation, but the echoes stirredat such distance that she quailed at the thought of that drop to her left; and when she dislodged a smallpebble with her foot and it slipped over the edge it seemed to fall forever before landing at last, a distantwhisper, far below.

Abruptly her hands struck cold stone and she found that she had run into a blank wall. Taken aback fora moment, she began to feel about and discovered that she was inching, foot by foot, along a narrowshelf at the foot of the stairs. She felt her hands strike and break thick webs, and cringed at the thought ofthe unseen creatures in the darkness that had spun them; she had no fear of ordinary spiders, but whocould tell what horrors might spawn here, out of sunlight since the beginning of the world, and what theywould crawl over in the darkness and what ghastly things they would find to eat. She braced herself,setting her small chin, thinking,
 
They won’t get to eat me, anyhow
 
. She gripped the hilt of her knife andheld it before her.

To her left, a small chink of pale greenish light wavered. Could she have come to the end of the tunnelalready? It was no normal daylight or moonlight. Wherever the light came from, it was not outside. Theledge suddenly widened and she could step back and walk at ease instead of inching along.

The greenish light grew slowly, and now she saw that it came through an arched doorway at the end ofthe stone passageway along which she walked. Melitta was far from timid, but there was somethingabout that green light which she disliked before she saw more than a glimmer of it, something whichseemed to go beneath the roots of consciousness and stir old half-memories which lay at the very depthsof her being. Darkover was an old world and the mountains were the most ancient bones of the world,and no man knew what might have crawled beneath the mountains when the sun first began to cool, agesago, there to lie and grow in unseen horror.

She had been walking silently in her fur-lined boots; now she ghosted along hardly disturbing the air shewalked through, holding her breath for fear it would disturb some hidden
something
 
. The green lightgrew stronger, and, although it was still no brighter than moonlight, somehow it hurt her eyes so that sheslitted them to narrowness against it and tried not to let it inside her eyelids. There was something veryawful down here.

Well
, she thought,
 
even if it’s a dragon, it can’t be much worse than Brynat’s men. At worst adragon would only want to eat me. Anyhow, there haven’t been any dragons on Darkover for athousand years. They were all killed off before the Ages of Chaos
 
.

The doorway from which the green light emanated was very near. She felt the poisonous brightness as apositive assault on her eyes. She stepped to the doorway and peered through, holding her breath againstscreaming at the ghastly glare which lay ahead.