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I always knew you could if you'd work for it. A couple of black marks on your record, sure. But those can be rubbed out, boy, when you're willing to try. Thorvalds always have been Survey. Our father would have been proud." Thorvald's voice flattened, his smile faded, there was a growing spark of some emotion in those gray eyes.
Also that your soldier, Olaf, Thorvald's son, would have given his life rather than that you should have done so, not for the sake of any dream, but for your sake, Augusta, whom it is his business to protect." "Would, then, it were your business either to protect me a little more, or a little less!" she exclaimed bitterly.
Shann, watching to see if the reptile would surface again, sighted another object, a rounded shape floating on the sea, bobbing lightly as had their river raft. "Look!" Thorvald's gaze followed his pointing finger and then before Shann could protest, the officer leaped outward from their perch on the cliff to the broad rock where the scaled sea dweller had lain moments earlier.
But the quivering of the deck and the bulkheads about him told Shann that the ship was in flight. And there could be but two destinations, either the camp where the Throg force had taken over the Terran installations or the mother ship of the raiders. If Thorvald's earlier surmise was true and the aliens were hunting a Terran to talk in the transport, then they were heading for the camp.
Of the hundred and fifty men who had sailed in my father, Thorvald's, ships sixty were dead and many others wounded, some of them to death. Athalbrand's people had fared even worse, since those of Thorvald had slain their wounded, only one of his vessels having escaped back to Lesso, there to tell the people of that island and Iduna all that had happened.
And that, too, was odd; dream impressions usually faded with the passing of waking hours. "It has a protruding lower jaw and the waves wash that ... red-and-purple rock " "What?" He had Thorvald's complete attention now. "Where did you hear about it?" That demand followed quickly. "I didn't hear about it. I dreamed of it last night. I stood there right in front of it.
He did possess a different type of pride, born of his own stubborn achievement in winning out over a long roster of discouragements, failures, and adverse odds. "Why do we dream?" he repeated Thorvald's question. "No answer, sir." He gave the traditional reply of the Service recruit. And a little to his surprise Thorvald laughed with a tinge of real amusement. "Where do you come from, Lantee?"
He planted a knee on the small of Thorvald's back, digging the officer into the sand, pinning down his arms in spite of the other's struggles. Regaining his own breath in gulps, Shann tried to appeal to some spark of reason in the other. "Thorvald! This is Lantee Lantee " His name echoed in the mist-walled void like an unhuman wail. "Lantee ? No, Throg! Lantee Throg killed my brother!"
That note in the other's voice wiped away a measure of Shann's confidence, threatened something which had flowered in him since he had struck into the wilderness on his own. Three words had reduced him again to Lantee, unskilled laborer. "Lantee. I'm from the camp...." Thorvald's eagerness was plain in his next question: "How many of you got away? Where are the rest?"
He hesitated, almost diffidently, before he asked: "Have you met anyone else here?" "Yes." Shann had no desire to go into that. "People out of your past life?" "Yes." Again he did not elaborate. "So did I." Thorvald's expression was bleak; his encounters in the fog must have proved no more pleasant than Shann's. "That suggests that we do trigger the hallucinations ourselves.
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