The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

embarrassed by his own solemnity, Dalgard ended with a most prosaic inquiry: “Would you like shellfish for eating?”
    Moments later, wading out into the water-swirled sand, his boots kicked off, his toes feeling for the elusive shelled creatures no one could see, Raf felt happier, freer than he could ever remember having been before. It was going to be all right. He could see ! He would find the ship! He laughed aloud at nothing and heard an answering chuckle and then a whoop of triumph from the scout stooping to claw one of their prey out of hiding.
    It was after they had eaten that Dalgard asked another question, one which did not seem important to Raf. “You have a close friend among the crew of your ship?”
    Raf hesitated. Now that he was obliged to consider the point, did he have any friends—let alone a close one—among the crew of the RS 10 ? Certainly he did not claim Wonstead who had shared his quarters—he honestly did not care if he never saw him again. The officers, the experts such as Lablet—quickly face and character of each swept through his mind and was as swiftly discarded. There was Soriki—He could not claim the com-tech as any special friend, but at least during their period together among the aliens he had come to know him better.
    Now, as if Dalgard had read his mind—and he probably had, thought Raf with a flash of the old resentment—he had another question.
    “And what was he—is he like?”
    Though the pilot could see little reason for this he answered as best he could, trying to build first a physical picture of the com-tech and then doing a little guessing as to what lay under the other’s space-burned skin.
    Dalgard lay on his back, gazing up into the blue-green sky. Yet Raf knew that he was intent on every word. A merman padded up, settled down cross-legged beside the scout, as if he too were enthralled by the pilot’s halting description of a man he might never see again. Then a second of the sea people came and a third, until Raf felt that some sort of a noiseless council was in progress. His words trailed away, and then Dalgard offered an explanation.
    “It will take us many, many days to reach the place where your ship is. And before we are able to complete that journey your friends may be gone. So we shall try something else—with your aid.”
    Raf fingered the little bundle of his possessions. Even his helmet with its com phone was missing.
    “No,” again Dalgard read his mind. “Your machines are of no use to you now. We shall try our way.”
    “How?” Wild thoughts of a big signal fire—But how could that be sighted across a mountain range. Of some sort of an improvised com unit—
    “I said our way.” There was a smile on Dalgard’s face, visible to Raf’s slowly clearing vision. “We shall provide another kind of machine, and these”—he waved at the mermen—“will give us the power, or so we hope. Lie here,” he gestured to the sand beside him, “and think only of your friend in the ship, in his natural surroundings. Try to hold that picture constant in your mind, letting no other thought trouble it.”
    “Do you mean—send a message to him mentally!” Raf’s reply was half protest.
    “Did I not so reach you when we were in the city—even before I knew of you as an individual?” the scout reminded him. “And such messages are doubly possible when they are sent from friend to friend.”
    “But we were close then.”
    “That is why—” again Dalgard indicated the mermen. “For them this is the natural means of communication. They will pick up your reaching thought, amplify it with their power, beam it north. Since your friend deals with matters of communication, let us hope that he will be sensitive to this method.”
    Raf was only half convinced that it might work But he remembered how Dalgard had established contact with him, before, as the scout had pointed out, they had met. It was that voiceless cry for aid which had pulled him into this adventure in the first place. It was only fitting that something of the same process give him help in return.
    Obediently he stretched out on the sand and closed his dim eyes, trying to picture Soriki in the small cabin which held the com, slouched in his bucket seat, his deceptive posture that of a lax idler, as he had seen him so many times. Soriki—his broad face with its flat cheekbones, its wide cheerful mouth, its heavy-lidded eyes. And having fixed Soriki’s face, he tried to believe