dangerous, gave him an uneasy feeling of guilt just to be standing
there. Danger, danger which was far worse than physical, lurked
there. And he could bring it to life by merely putting out his hand
and picking up any one of those fascinating objects which lay only
inches away. For the pull of curiosity was warring inside him against
the stern warnings of his Elders.

Once when Dalgard had been very small he had raided his father's trip
bag after the next to the last exploring journey the elder Nordis had
made. And he had found a clear block of some kind of greenish crystal,
in the heart of which threadlike lines of color wove patterns which
were utterly strange. When he had turned the block in his hand, those
lines had whirled and changed to form new and intricate designs. And
when he had watched them intently it had seemed that something
happened inside his mind and he knew, here and there, a word, a
fragment of alien thought--just as he normally communicated with the
cub who was Sssuri or the hoppers of the field. And his surprise had
been so great that he had gone running to his father with the cube and
the story of what happened when one watched it.

But there had been no praise for his discovery. Instead he had been
hurried off to the chamber where an old, old man, the son of the Great
Man who had planned to bring them across space, lay in his bed. And
Forken Kordov himself had talked to Dalgard in his old voice, a voice
as withered and thin as the hands crossed helplessly on his shrunken
body, explaining in simple, kindly words that the knowledge which lay
in the cubes, in the oddly shaped books which the Terrans sometimes
came across in the ruins, was not for them. That his own
great-grandfather Dard Nordis, who had been one of the first of the
mutant line of sensitives, had discovered that. And Dalgard, impressed