themselves. Yes, they dream of holding all once more. But"--Sssuri's
yellow eyes took on some of the fire which had shone in those of the
snake-devil during its last seconds of life--"that must not be so!"

"If they take the land, you have the sea," Dalgard pointed out. The
mermen had a means of escape. But what of his own clansmen? Large
families were unknown among the Terran colonists. In the little more
than a century they had been on this planet their numbers, from the
forty-five survivors of the voyage, had grown to only some two hundred
and fifty, of which only a hundred and twenty were old enough or young
enough to fight. And for them there was no retreat or hiding place.

"We do not go bask to the depths!" There was stern determination in
that declaration from Sssuri. His tribe had been long hunted, and it
wasn't until they had made a loose alliance with the Terran colonists
that they had dared to leave the dangerous ocean depths, where they
were the prey of monsters more ferocious and cunning than any
snake-devil, to house their families in the coast caves and on the
small islands off-shore, to increase in numbers and develop new skills
of civilization. No, knowing the stubbornness which was bred into
their small, furry bodies, Dalgard did not believe that many of the
sea people would willingly go back into the sunless depths. They would
not surrender tamely to the rulership of the loathed race.

"I don't see," Dalgard spoke aloud, half to himself, as he studied the
tables closely packed, the machines standing on bases about the walls,
the wealth of alien technology, "what we can do to stop them."

The restriction drilled into him from early childhood, that the
knowledge of Those Others was not for his race and in some way