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Title: Fog of the Forgotten
Author: Basil Wells
Illustrator: Alexander Leydenfrost
Release date: November 20, 2020 [eBook #63817]
Most recently updated: December 5, 2020
Language: English
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOG OF THE
FORGOTTEN ***
FOG OF THE FORGOTTEN
By BASIL WELLS

The fog of their world matched the fog in

their minds. Rebelling against science, they
smashed it, dragged their people down into
the ancient mists. But Ho Dyak wanted light.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Planet Stories Winter 1946.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
The fog sea thinned before Ho Dyak, and he could see the dank rocks of the
cliffs he scaled a scant twenty feet beneath his feet. The network of blue-
veined pale vines that he climbed thinned even as the air itself thinned. Far
below him in the lowlands the mat of agan vines was three hundred feet in
depth in many places.
Higher and higher climbed Ho Dyak, his long pale face, with its full red lips
and great thick-lidded purple eyes, drawn with pain. For the air of the
uplands was chill. As the fog thinned, so too dropped the temperature.
Ho Dyak gripped tighter the pouch of flayed drogskin, in which five of the
forbidden foot-long cylinders of metal skins nestled, as he paused for a
moment to rest. It was because of them, the forbidden scrolls stored in a
musty forgotten chamber of the Upper Shrine of Lalal, the One God of Arba,
that Ho Dyak was now climbing into the frigid death of the cloudless
uplands.
The ivory-skinned body of the man was swathed in layer upon layer of
quilted and padded garments of leather and fabric. His two feet, with their
webbed outstretched toes, and his short stubby middle limbs, strong-fingered
webbed hands at their ends, were encased in sturdy mitten-like moccasins.
Only his long upper hands were encased in stout leather gloves with four
divisions—one for the thumb and the other three for his four-jointed fingers.
Over his grotesquely swollen bulk, for which his myriad garments were
responsible, Ho Dyak's sword belt and the filled sheath of javelin-like darts
were belted. To his crossed belts also were attached his broad-bladed
machete-like knife and the throwing stick for his dwarfish spears.
No longer did he fear pursuit. The fighting priests, the dark-robed orsts of
Lalal, had brought with them none of the warm garments Ho Dyak wore.
Their shouts and sacred battle cries had died away on the slopes a mile or
more beneath where he now perched. For the moment he was safe from their
vengeance.
"I will see what lies above the fog sea," said Ho Dyak to the unresponsive
ladder-like network of agan he climbed. "Perhaps I can, for a few short
hours, see the vast plateaus that once my people ruled."
The agan made no answer, as Ho Dyak had expected it would not, but he
bent his gaze more closely upon its smooth stems. A greenish tinge lay upon
them, a tinge that in the lowlands only the rocks or tarnished metals bore.
The man's heart beat faster despite the chilling cold. He was approaching an
unknown zone of life!
The fog sea split apart abruptly. His broad shoulders and then his thickly
padded middle came above the last remnants of the mist. And he sensed a
warmth that came from above—not a pleasant warmth, but a strangely
stinging heat. He turned his hooded eyes skyward and pain filled his brain at
the glaring redness of the lights that blazed there. Three suns, one huge
primary and its offspring, that hung in the cloud-banked blue heavens
overhead.

Darkness dwindled into grayness and he could see. He was looking out
across a level rolling expanse of fleecy nothingness. A soft sea of foggy
mystery from which vagrant hills of vapor drifted upward lightly and settled
back again. Down beneath that impenetrable damp blanket, he knew, lay the
pleasant stone buildings and palaces of his people, and further away out
there rolled the gloomy steaming sea of Thol where men fished and hunted
for the mighty aquatic monsters of the deeps.
It was as though his homeland had never been, and he was a castaway here
on this sun-drenched vine-covered slope with the blood chilling in his
muscular squat body. He shivered.
He looked upward and his heart hammered new warmth into his muscles as
he saw that the rim of the mighty wall he ascended was but a score of feet
above. He swung himself upward swiftly.
Then he was standing upon a level expanse of grassy land beside a slow-
flowing brook. The stream was clogged with aquatic lush vegetation, and
further up along it he saw moving shapes, lizard-like creatures and four-
legged graceful animals that were covered with a dusty golden fur. Beyond
was a jungle of vine-linked growth, and far beyond that a vast escarpment
climbed, step upon step, upward to the white-helmeted peaks of a mountain
range.
It was at this moment that Ho Dyak became aware of the ragged roaring
sound from overhead. He squinted his eyes and was careful not to look into
the terrible flare of light that was the suns. The sound increased. After a
moment he saw a dark speck low down to the western horizon, a speck that
grew into a long stub-winged shape with vapor flaring like smoke from its
rear.
At first Ho Dyak thought that some living monstrous thing was diving upon
him, and then he saw the fixed rigidity of the boatlike elongated craft. This
was a man-made thing, a ship that rode noisily through the air even as the
great canoes of the fisherfolk sailed upon the hot waves of mighty Thol.
It was thus that the ancestors of his race had ridden in the long-dead ages
before the fog seas shrank downward from the mountains and plateaus. This
was one of the machines that his embittered race had destroyed after
cataclysmic disaster swept their world. He had thought that only in these
precious stolen scrolls was there any record of that mighty civilization; yet
here before his eyes a mighty thing of metal dropped swiftly.
Then the winged thing seemed to explode and crumple as it nosed into the
green expanse of tangled grasses near him. Flames licked out from the rear
of the craft!

Three days had passed there upon the plateau shelf above the fog sea. And
Ho Dyak had not returned to the welcome warmth of the lowlands of Arba.
Instead, he had found a great spring of boiling water in the rocky valley not
far from the crashed ship of the sky, and about this he had built a sturdy
dome of clay-plastered stones. Within this comfortably damp and well-
heated den Ho Dyak sprawled and talked through the slitted doorway that
was closed with triple hides of giant upland lizards.
"I do not understand," said the lanky sandy-haired man who sat, sweating,
outside the steaming mud-daubed mound, "why your people, with their
marvelous control of telepathy and their one-time control over all this world,
are content to live in savagery along the narrow strip of beach they now
possess."
Ho Dyak did not move his lips as he answered. Unlike the Earthman from
the Lo, he did not need to speak aloud to transmit his thoughts. His hasty
schooling of the two men and the girl he had rescued from the battered Lo
had been designed to afford immediate communication. Later he would
impress upon their brains the process of speechless transmission.
"Inventions, mechanical knowledge, brought about the downfall of Arba,
Glade Nelson. Lest any further destructive device do away with our last zone
of liveable atmosphere all mechanical knowledge and experimentation is
forbidden."
The Earthman snorted. "I know that, Hodiak," he said, using his own word
for the squat ivory-skinned man, "but with pressure cities, transparent domes
you know, and heated suits like the space suit we gave you, there's no reason
why your ancient lands should remain abandoned."
"I agree with you, Earthman. Some of the wisest men of Arba have felt the
same. But the priests of Lalal have branded them, branded them with
blindness, and driven them out into the agan jungles. They are content with
the barbaric simplicity of the lowlands."
"Perhaps," said Glade Nelson, "now that you have escaped with your life and
your vision you can help your people in spite of themselves."
Ho Dyak shook his big square head. The broad curly tendrils that sprouted
yellowly from his skull half-covered the delicate sharp tips of his upthrust
thin ears.
"The power of Lalal over the common people is no light thing."
The thoughts of the Earthman were confused for a moment and then Ho
Dyak heard, through the ears of Nelson, the frantic screams of the
Earthwoman, the dark-haired sister of Nelson's employer, hairy, stocky
Albert Gosden.
Nelson snatched his high-powered rifle and raced away toward the sound.
Ho Dyak sprang to his feet as well and slipped swiftly into the space suit that
Nelson had provided him. He set the heat controls for a comfortable 200
degrees and pushed aside the hide curtains.
He went racing after the Earthman. Although unhampered by the
cumbersome space suit Ho Dyak wore and fleet of foot, Nelson saw the
ivory man go racing by him and he marveled at the strength and vitality of
the squat Arban. Then they were at the stream, beside a swampy lake, dotted
here and there with tree islets and banks of reeds, searching for the girl.
They saw her flailing away at a swarm of scaly black lizard things, young
seven and eight foot-long drogs, with a leafy branch. She was safe enough
from them as she sat in the crotch of a moss-hung jungle giant at the lake's
green-scummed rim. But Ho Dyak saw the ripples that were converging on
the girl from other portions of the pool, and he reached down to the weapons
belted now about his dull-sheened space suit.
"Albert's dead!" Marta Gosden sobbed, thwacking away. There was a bloody
broken thing, or rather, things, that some of the young drogs quarreled over
in the thick muddy shallows.
Ho Dyak was busy now with his copper-tipped javelins. He was killing as
swiftly as his throwing stick could contact the sturdy butts of the javelins.
"Kill them," he flashed at Nelson, "for the grown monsters come."
But the lanky man with only two arms did not heed his order. In the
excitement of the moment Nelson had reverted to the use of his ears—his
mental receptive powers were as yet too untrained. Ho Dyak fought alone
while Glade Nelson shouted to the girl to climb down a drooping limb
toward him.
Ho Dyak drove the crawling lizard-beasts back until he stood beneath the
tree. He held up his two upper arms, and the girl dropped her leafy useless
club before she slid down the loose rough bark of the trunk. Then Ho Dyak
turned and raced with her in his arms away from the lake.
Nelson roared with sudden fear. Almost upon Ho Dyak's heels a huge mouth
gaped suddenly from the murky water and then a scaly six-legged monster
came charging up over the low marshy bank. Behind the first drog came
another, and then another. All of them were over twenty feet in length and
their pace was not slow. They were overhauling the burdened ivory man.

Ho Dyak put her down and turned to face the drog.

Ho Dyak put the girl down. He gave her a push in the direction of the
wrecked ship and with the same motion turned to face the drog's gaping
maw. His stout double-edged sword was in his hand. He could feel its
welcome pressure through the insulated layers of siladur that sealed out the
chill air of the plateau.
His sword flicked up toward the eye of the huge dragon. He pressed the
button that released the needle-like extension from the weapon's tip, and his
prolonged weapon ripped through the huge reddish eyeball. The monster
roared with rage, and whistling with its blasting breath, swung its head.
Again the sword flashed and the blinded monster dashed itself against a huge
smooth-boled tree. Its legs crumpled for a moment and then it was up
ripping ferociously with great nails and rending jaws at the unresisting
wood.
By now Nelson had taken a hand. His rocket projectiles were shattering the
armor-plated drogs. They were down upon the swampy turf, their mighty
bulks crimsoned and torn, and yet they hissed and growled while their dead
limbs shredded the dank black muck.
The Earthman turned his weapon upon the unseeing lizard thing and blew its
head from its ugly scaly neck. Even then the legs continued to strip bark
from the great tree, nor did the great body collapse for several long minutes.
Ho Dyak cleaned his sword-tip and pressed it back upon the spring at its
base. Then he went to Nelson and the girl. She had come back when she saw
the drogs were down. Nelson was holding the girl in his arms, talking softly
to her. He could see in their unguarded minds that they loved one another.
So it was that he turned abruptly away and went back to his comfortable
steam-heated igloo of stones. Memories of Mian Ith, she of the rioting
pinkish-brown tendrils and the full-breasted slim young body, came to him.
Memory of the Earthman's words came to him and his full lips smiled. Yes,
he could rebel and lead others.
"Tomorrow," he told himself, "I will go again to the Place of Lalal. There I
will find others of the precious scrolls of the ancients. And when I return I
will bring with me Mian Ith."
With the knowledge of the Earthman coupled with his own he might indeed
restore to his people the empire they had lost when the fog seas shrank
away....
Glade Nelson, the Earthman, walked as far as the rim of the lower plateau
with Ho Dyak. And, before he swung down into the foggy lake that hid the
lowlands and the sea of Thol, he told the Earthman that he might not return.
"If I do not come back," he said, "there is a possibility that you can return to
Earth."
Nelson laughed half-heartedly. "Not in the Lo," he said.
"Naturally," Ho Dyak flashed back, "but your helicopter, that you planned to
use for exploration on that other planet—"
"Mars," supplied Nelson. "Gosden financed the trip and purchased the ship
for me. I'd had experience with submarines and aircraft during the Second
War, and Gosden knew me then. His sister stowed away aboard. We were
several thousand miles out into space when we discovered her. We turned
back to Earth then; our supplies were insufficient."
Ho Dyak smiled. "When was it," he wanted to know, "that you realized
something was so terribly wrong—that this was not your home planet?"
"Almost as soon as we had sighted your world of Thrane," said Nelson.
"Then we saw the three suns and the two extra planets of your system." He
lighted one of his last cigarettes. "Just how did we get here?"
"Probably hit a space-time-material eddy. Our scientists created an artificial
eddy, a sort of gateway you might say, between parallel worlds. That's how
we lost our dense protective atmospheric envelope. The vibrational
gateways, in the course of many years' usage, became permanent. Our
ancestors no longer could seal them shut by cutting off the power.
"And so our precious atmosphere drained off into a dozen parallel
dimensional worlds. Fortunately the gateways were on the upper plateaus
and so a thin envelope of denser air remains. But one of those doors leads
through to Earth! Maybe several of them."
Nelson gripped Ho Dyak's bulky shoulder.
"You mean," he gasped, "this is really Earth? Only changed?"
Ho Dyak agreed. "Something like water and sand," he explained, "when
they're mixed together. They're distinct but occupy the same space." He
turned toward the sea of fog and stepped down into it.
He slipped through the sheltering upper layer of agan vines, their huge disc-
shaped leaves of blue-veined yellow as a protective screen about him. Here,
three hundred feet above the mucky soil, the thick rubbery coils were not
matted together into a solid wall as they were much lower.
He was soon approaching the seacoast city of Gorda, capital and chief city of
the priest-ruled nation of Arba. He saw where the floor of writhing pale
vegetable stems dropped away abruptly to the mile-wide clearing that the
heavy blades of convicted criminals kept cleared away. The shouts of the
men, as they hung back on their ropes and hewed at the thick fleshy wall of
growth, came faintly to his ears from the fog-shroud off to his left.
The sound of the booming surf came now from the right. He could not see
further away than fifteen feet, although his heavy-lidded purple eyes were
sharper than the majority of his people, but by the muffled sounds of the city
below and the steady throb of the surf's drumbeat, he knew that he was
nearing the forgotten twin spikes of a ruined tower. Directly opposite this
tower the Place of Lalal heaped its thirty levels, terrace upon terrace, into the
eternal thick mistiness of the fog sea.
Then he saw the tips of the tower, two man-made juts of metal ten feet apart
and covered with great orange and golden knobs of wrinkled warty fungi.
The round holes of sliran tunnels gaped beside the vine-buried dome of the
ruined tower—the many-legged blue-scaled snaky lengths of those hideous
monsters had kept open a rounded tube something over three feet in
diameter.
Ho Dyak had been here before. He drew his sword and lowered himself into
the steep slanting hole. As he descended he heard from above the
increasingly louder voices of men—some of the workers and their guards
were passing. He had entered the sliran burrow none too soon. And now, if
he did not encounter a sliran in the vine-walled tube, he would shortly be
inside the helmet dome of one-time silvery metal that capped the deserted
tower.
A moment later he stepped from the tunnel into the moist thick heat of the
broken dome. The broad phosphorescent band of light that was built into the
walls of all Arban architecture, waist-high, was dimmed by the slime of
ages. But he could see. The dome's interior was not occupied by any of the
huge stubby-legged snakes. The slirans spent most of their lives in the
muddy pools and root caverns at ground level.
He turned down the ramp that wound into the depths. A forgotten stone-
walled passage led under the city walls into the heart of the massive stone
pile that was the Place of Lalal. And there, in the pleasant upper-level
quarters of the One Orst, the high priest of Lalal, lived the daughter of the
One Orst, Mian Ith!

From his leather jerkin and his weapons, some time later, Ho Dyak wiped
the slime and encrusted mud. He was hidden in a deserted apartment upon
the fourteenth level, the same level that housed the children and mates of the
One Orst. Thus far had his dark robe, the garment of a fighting priest who
now lay trussed-up with his own harness on the second level, brought him.
Suddenly he crouched behind a massive chest of hammered silver. The
apartment's oval stone door-slab was swinging inward! Ho Dyak's sword
cleared the leather of his sheath silently. He recognized the voice of the
woman who entered the room—Mian Ith! And behind her came a man, a
blue-robed priest, one of the seekers after wisdom pledged to the celibate life
of a thinker. He wondered why the woman he adored came stealthily to this
musty, empty place with this dreamy-eyed seer of the mysteries of Lalal.
"My darling!" cried Mian Ith, her arms going about the slight body of the
thinker. "It is so long since we were together!"
"I feared," answered the seeker, his soft high-pitched voice more feminine
than Mian Ith's, "that Ho Dyak would persuade your father that you should
be his mate. He, like you, wore the red robes of the priestly rulers."
Mian Ith laughed. "The great muscled fool," she sneered. "He thought that I
loved him. He told me of his studies in the forbidden books of the Ancients.
Iiiy! but did he reveal his twisted unbelieving soul to me! It was a little
matter to lay a trap for him—to rid myself of him forever."
Ho Dyak felt his lips curl back from his teeth with scorn and hatred. This,
this—woman! Say, rather, this female sliran. She had betrayed him to the
priests of Lalal that she might be free to continue her forbidden trysts with
this puny seeker! It was true. He could read the woman's unshielded mind
now. He had never attempted to do so heretofore.
Two slashes of his keen-edged bronze sword and he would be avenged. And
yet Ho Dyak shook his head even as the thought came to him. He was well
rid of the false-tongued Mian Ith and the dreamy-eyed seeker he despised.
Better had Mian Ith chosen a stalwart black-robed warrior or yellow-robed
toiler for her lover.
The man and the woman moved into the other room, their four arms
interlocked and their soft head tendrils mingled in that half-embrace. And Ho
Dyak slipped from the outer door into the corridor beyond. A half-ruined
ramp within the walls, a ramp sealed off ages past and revealed to the boy,
Ho Dyak, by a dislodged block of masonry, opened off the ramp a level
above. In this way had Ho Dyak climbed in the bygone years to the Upper
Shrine of Lalal and taken from the thousands of inscribed metal scrolls those
he wished to study.
He would go to the Upper Shrine, fill his pouch with other slim metal skin
records of the past, and take as well certain small mysterious objects sealed
in crystalline spheres. The Earthman might know their purpose.
And so Ho Dyak ascended the ramp and squeezed through the shadowed
opening so familiar to him.
Later, Ho Dyak turned for a last look about the Upper Shrine. He saw
crystal-walled cases and unrusting metal devices of the Ancients. Here was
static knowledge and machinery that might make Arba the mightiest nation
upon the shores of the Sea of Thol. He touched lightly the pouch where nine
more of the precious metal scrolls nested. Perhaps after all these centuries
the wisdom of the forgotten ages would come to life beneath his four hands'
clumsy touch.
It was then that the javelins came from the grayness of the Shrine's further
corners.
The One Orst had laid a trap here for Ho Dyak, that profaner of the sacred
place, should he ever return!
One javelin pierced his side and another passed completely through the
upper muscles of his left middle arm. A third keen-tipped miniature spear
struck the handle of his sword and its copper point blunted harmlessly.
From the gray twilight that was all the day men knew beneath the fog sea,
there poured a dozen black-robed fighting men. Swords they carried, some
of them two and three, and many of them bore the barbed nooses of woven
droghide with which they bound prisoners before they were driven, blinded,
from Gorda.
Ho Dyak rushed through the panel of stone into the ancient sealed rampway.
He paused long enough here to tear the javelin from his side, and was
relieved to find that it had ploughed shallowly across his ribs. Then he raced
down the dimly lighted narrow way.
This time he did not attempt to use the opening on the fifteenth level. The
corridors of the Place of Lalal would be swarming with black-robed warrior-
priests and poorly armed yellow-robed toilers. Instead he raced on down the
ramp into the dank stench of the lower levels. For the unused ramp led into
the same great underground storage cave that he had entered from the rocky
tunnel beneath the city walls.
Bricked-up and partially sealed was its end, and for this reason he had not
ascended that way. Signs of his passing must have shown in a litter of
chipped cement and displaced yellowish slime had he done so. But now he
could shove the wall outward and race toward freedom. What matter, now, if
they found a gaping hole in an apparently solid supporting pillar of
masonry?
He put his eye to the broken wall as he reached the great basement cave in
this part of the underground citadel beneath the Place. Apparently no guards
had been posted here as yet. He lunged against the wall and it clattered
down. Then he darted across the slippery muck and sprouting toadstool
growth to the hidden entrance to the tunnel leading outside.
Even then he heard the rasp of the scaly black plates of hunting drogs, the
domesticated long-limbed smaller lizards that the warriors of Arba use in
hunting upon the agan jungle's upper terrace for the bat-winged wild lizards
and white-fleshed, tender, legless serpents so prized on Arban tables. The
black-robed ones had turned their swift drogs upon his trail! His only safety
lay in flight.
Almost had he reached the abandoned tower when the hunting drogs were
upon him. Even as they reached his heels Ho Dyak cast a despairing glance
upward—and saw one of the ancient ventilating shafts that supplied air to
this buried way.
He sprang upward and his fingers closed upon a tough agan root. A moment
later all four of his hands were gripping other roots and he was climbing
carefully up through a rounded shaft.
Below him the hunting drogs leaped high into the air and fell back again,
whistling, growling and screaming in their saurian stupid way. Twenty feet
he had climbed before a solid mat of agan blocked further upward progress.
Ho Dyak clung to the huge hairy white roots and peered about him.
Meanwhile the Place's warriors came swiftly up with their six-limbed lizard
beasts. A cry of triumph came up to Ho Dyak.
"Come down, Ho Dyak!" one of them shouted, "and we will not permit the
drogs to destroy you."
Ho Dyak laughed shortly. "It is you who will destroy me," he said, "and not
the drogs. I prefer the drogs."
"Surrender, Ho Dyak," cried the man menacingly, "at once, and the One Orst
may but take from you your eyes. Delay, and his tame drogs will eat your
limbs, one by one, as you yet live."
"I prefer a javelin," mocked Ho Dyak. "The death is clean and merciful."
"Then take it!" shouted the man, drawing back his throwing stick.
But even as a hail of javelins hummed upward Ho Dyak was in motion. He
had swung on his shaggy ladder of roots into a ragged crevice in the side of
the shaft. And so the javelins buried themselves only in the rubbery coils of
agan. A howl of rage rolled up through the old ventilating shaft.
Ho Dyak crawled further into the narrow crevice. At every instant he
expected to find that the probing roots or stems of the fleshy agan had closed
this last hope of escape, but as time passed and the way widened he began to
hope. Other tunnels branched off from time to time and he crawled through
tepid pools of foul water in which he sensed the wriggling of hideous alien
things with scaly-finned limbs and tails. The blackness was total. He groped
onward.

And then he fell forward into a blackness that was not total and found
himself squatting in the shallow muck of a sullen underground river. Or
perhaps that lightless roof overhead was but the matted stems and roots of
the sunless vines of the fog seas. He saw a faint luminous glow that came
from the river. Thousands of tiny light-producing aquatic plant-animals
swarmed in the depths.
He saw a raft of tied buoyant agan stems, huge two-foot sections ten and
eleven feet long, and poling it along with a tough spear of hide-bound bone,
was a woman in a scant, ragged tunic. At the same instant she saw him.
"In Lalal's name," she demanded, "why do you sit in the water so? Are not
there few enough warriors in the two caves of the Outcasts without offering
yourself thus freely to the water slirans?"
 "In Lalal's name," she demanded, "why do you sit in the water so?"

Ho Dyak realized that this was one of the blinded Outcasts, turned out to die
in the jungles because they dared question the rule of the One Orst and his
priestly underlings.
"I am Ho Dyak," he said, "who is hunted by the black-robed ones, the orsts."
"We have heard of you, Ho Dyak," the blind girl said, "and we welcome you
to the poor sanctuary of our caves." She poled the raft nearer. "I am Sarn
Vod, daughter of Dra Vod."
"Dra Vod is your father!" cried Ho Dyak. "I have heard of him. He built a
machine powered by the sap of pressed agan for his boat!"
"Aye," agreed the girl, "and his reward was blindness. Of the three hundred
Outcasts in our rocky caves a hundred are sightless."
"You can see!" Ho Dyak burst out. He was looking into the beautiful slim
face of the girl. She was more beautiful than Mian Ith had ever been. From
that moment Ho Dyak forgot the faithless One Orst's daughter....
"Of course," agreed the girl, laughing. "I was born after my father was taken
into the hidden village of the Outcasts."
They sat close together, then, in the raft, and Ho Dyak opened his mind to
the mind of the girl. She in turn opened her mind to him. It was not long that
they sat thus but when Sarn Vod took up the pole of bone again they had
found that they loved one another.
Never before had Ho Dyak allowed another to probe into the remoter
recesses of his brain. But he knew that she could be trusted. Her childlike
acceptance of him even before he opened his thoughts to her convinced him
of that.
"I will go with you to the camp of the Earthman," she told Ho Dyak softly,
as they neared the upreared hillock of soft gray rock from which their two
cave homes had been laboriously scraped.
"It is good," agreed Ho Dyak, "and later, when we have found a secure
place, I will come back for your people. The Outcasts will be the first to
share with us the wisdom of the Ancients."
Sarn Vod flashed him a quick mental caress as the raft grounded in the
shelter of an overhanging ledge. He stepped to take her in his arms, and
halted as a giant of a man groped toward them. Where his eyes had been
there were now but empty sockets.
"My father," said the girl, "Dra Vod!"
"And my father as well," said Ho Dyak, leaping to the blind man's side, and
his two middle arms locked with the elbows of Dra Vod's short middle arms.
Dra Vod's own powerful webbed fingers gripped Ho Dyak's elbows in return
as their minds interlocked in greeting for a brief moment.
So it was that two days later Ho Dyak and his mate, Sarn, climbed the chill
slopes above the lowlands and came to the highlands. With them came two
of the Outcasts, young hunters who wished to see the world above the fog
sea.
Ho Dyak wore the space suit that he had cached far below in a rocky cliff's
creviced wall, and Sarn and the two Outcasts wore as many and more
garments than Ho Dyak had worn long days before.
As they came through the last shreds of the watery vapor that flooded the
bowl of the Sea of Thol, one of the young Outcast warriors was in the lead.
Suddenly he uttered a short, choked cry and fell, toppling back into the mist.
And the rocks around them rattled with copper-tipped javelins.
"Quick!" shouted Ho Dyak. "It is the black-robed ones, the priests! They
have been lying in wait for us!"

Back into the welcome protection of the fog sea the Outcasts plunged, but
now there were only three of them. For one thing was Ho Dyak grateful: the
thinning network of agan afforded no safe footing for the hunting drogs.
"We die?" questioned Sarn quietly, and Ho Dyak laughed back at her. They
were resting for a moment, listening.
"Not so long as my sword arms last," he said, "and of arms I have four."
"But they will follow us along the rim," objected Sarn. "When we climb
upward again they will see us."
"They are cold and hungry," Ho Dyak told her, "and there are none too many
of them. If we can reach the plateau safely we can fight them off, until we
reach the rocket ship of the Earthman."
"We will be safe with the rocket rifle of Nelson to protect us," agreed Sarn.
Ho Dyak started along the thick stalks of agan again, his arms gripping the
interlacing of rubbery greenish stems on his right. And behind him came
Sarn and the young Outcast.
By nightfall they had moved a matter of two miles further along the left wall
of the barrier cliffs. The lone moon of Thrane had not as yet lifted above the
horizon and so they climbed silently upward into an almost complete
darkness. Out of the fog sea they made their way, and safely into the dense
jungle growth spreading at this point.
Sarn was chilled to the bone, and the young warrior's thick lips were blue
with cold. The temperature of the lower plateau had dropped to almost a
hundred degrees with the coming of dusk, ninety degrees below that of the
lowlands. And so Ho Dyak followed a small stream, warmer than the usual
upland streams, up to a rocky bluff where steaming water rolled white vapor
into the growing moonlight of the jungle clearing. By some good fortune the
hot spring gushed up in the heart of a small cavern and the two Outcasts
were not forced to lie in the almost-boiling water.
With morning they marched eastward to the jungle meadow where the
spaceship's shattered bulk lay. The spaceship was empty. Ho Dyak saw that
the helicopter was gone from the cargo hold, and with it many supplies.
Nelson and the girl had thought he was not returning and gone in search of
the ancient gateway that might pierce through to Earth!
Ho Dyak turned his eyes toward the mud-daubed hut of stones he had
abandoned. His eyes widened at the sight of steam rising from its dome.
Could they be—? No, it was impossible. Shattered though it was, the
spaceship afforded better protection for Nelson and Marta than the igloo.
Then who—?
Immediately, Ho Dyak knew the answer. The black-robed orsts had taken
over the igloo! And they were not yet aware of the presence of the Outcasts.
He returned to the hidden Outcasts, his mate and the young warrior, but with
him he carried a rocket rifle that Nelson had thoughtfully left behind.
"Come," he told the warrior, "we will drive the black-robed ones from our
hut. With the Earthman's gun they will be helpless before us."
They marched side by side, two warriors from the fog sea, toward the rocky
dome from which the plumes of white steam jetted. At last the priests saw
them and came pouring from their warm shelter.
"Go back to the Place of Lalal," ordered Ho Dyak.
The black-robed, thick-padded bodies of the seven priestly fighting men
shook with laughter. These two outcasts ordered them to retreat! They
plunged ahead.
The rocket gun whirred and an explosion ripped two of the priest-warriors
into tatters. Ho Dyak reloaded and fired, and a third warrior dropped. And
then the tiny battery that fired the rocket shell went dead! The third rocket
shell did not blast into the attacking men.
Ho Dyak flung down the useless weapon and drew his sword. Javelins could
not pierce his space suit, only a sword could crush through to his body. His
other hand was busy with his throwing stick and javelins, and he cursed the
two limbs of the Earthmen that prevented his middle pair of arms from being
used.
Four of the enemy faced the two of them at the last, and their weapons
clashed together. Ho Dyak fought with the strength of despair, and downed
one of the black-robed ones, but then he was battling three swordsmen. The
young Outcast had fallen.
Suddenly a shadow fell upon the fighting men from above. An explosion
sounded and a priestly warrior fell, and then another. The sole survivor raced
madly away toward the fog sea's welcome shelter and Ho Dyak was glad to
let him escape. He would carry the word of the terrible weapons of Earth to
the watchers along the rim.
The spaceship's helicopter settled slowly to the ground. Ho Dyak hurried
toward the little ship's cabin and at the same time he saw Sarn come
stumbling from the jungle toward them.
"Nick of time," grinned Nelson, and behind him Ho Dyak could see Marta
Gosden's startled bloodless face.
"Right you are," Ho Dyak assured the Earthman. "And how did the search
for a gateway to Earth go?"
"We're not worrying about that for the present," said Nelson. "You need us,
Ho Dyak, and I think we need you too. We're staying here on Thrane for a
long time."
"I am glad," Ho Dyak flashed. "In centuries to come all Thrane will bless
you."
"That's so much jet dust," scoffed Nelson. "But we did find a canyon, several
miles deep, Ho Dyak, a sort of fog lake, where you may be able to live
normally, and above it, on the second plateau we found an ideal spot for our
own home."
He squeezed Marta's shoulder as she slipped past him. Then he was beside
her as she greeted Sarn. Ho Dyak smiled as he felt the friendly spirit that was
instantly kindled between these women of two strange races.
"She is lovely!" cried Marta to Ho Dyak and Nelson, "and so miserable. Run
to the ship, Glade, and bring another space suit."
Yes, thought Ho Dyak, with the knowledge of two races his ivory-skinned
race might once again spread up over the fertile chill plateaus of Thrane.
Already he loved the mighty vistas of clear air here above the fog sea. Never
again would he be satisfied with the circumscribed grayness of a fog-bound
world....
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