The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

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 asked as if he were honestly interested.
    “Tyr.”
    “Caldon mines.” The Survey officer automatically matched planet to product. “How did you come into Survey?”
    Shann drew on his shirt. “Signed on as casual labor,” he returned with a spark of defiance. Thorvald had joined the Service the right way as a cadet, then a Team man, finally an officer, climbing that nice even ladder with every rung ready for him when he was prepared to mount it. What did his kind know about the labor Barracks where the dull-minded, the failures, the petty criminals on the run, lived hard under a secret social system of their own? It had taken every bit of physical endurance and energy, every fraction of stubborn will Shann could summon, for him to survive his first three months in those barracks—unbroken and still eager to be Survey. He could still wonder at the unbelievable chance which had rescued him from that merely because Training Center had needed another odd hand to clean cages and feed troughs for the experimental animals.
    And from the center he made a Team, because when working in a smaller group his push and attention to duty had been noticed and had paid off. Three years it had taken, but he had made Team stature. Not that that meant anything now. Shann pulled his boots on over the legs of rough dried coveralls and glanced up, to find Thorvald watching him with a new, questioning directness the younger man could not understand.
    Shann sealed his blouse and stood up, knowing the bite of hunger, dull but persistent. It was a feeling he had had so many times in the past that now he hardly gave it a second thought.
    “Supplies?” He brought the subject back to the present and the practical. What did it matter why or how one Shann Lantee had come to Warlock in the first place?
    “What we have left of the concentrates we had better keep for emergencies.” Thorvald made no move to open the very shrunken bag he had brought from the scoutship.
    He walked over to a rocky outcrop and tugged loose a yellowish tuft of plant, neither moss nor fungi but sharing attributes of both. Shann recognized it without enthusiasm as one of the varieties of native produce which could be safely digested by Terran stomachs. The stuff was almost tasteless and possessed a rather unpleasant odor. Consumed in bulk it would satisfy hunger for a time. Shann hoped that with the wolverines to aid they could go back to hunting soon.
    However, Thorvald showed no desire to head inland where they might expect to locate game. He disagreed with Shann’s suggestion for tracking Taggi and Togi when those two emerged from the underbrush obviously well fed and contented after their early morning activity.
    When Shann protested with some heat, the other countered: “Didn’t you ever hear of fish, Lantee? After a storm such as last night’s, we ought to discover good pickings along the shore.”
    But Shann was also sure that it was not only the thought of food which drew Thorvald back to the sea.
    They crawled back through the bolt hole. The beach of gravel-sand had vanished save for a narrow ribbon of land just at the foot of the cliffs, where the water curled in white lace about the barrier of boulders. There was no change in the dullness of the sky; no sun broke through the thick lid of clouds. And the green of the sea was ashened to gray which matched that overcast until one could strain one’s eyes trying to find the horizon, unable to mark the dividing line here between air and water.
    Utgard was a broken necklace, the outermost island-beads lost, the inner ones more isolated by the rise in water, more forbidding. Shann let out a startled hiss of breath.
    The top of a near-by rock detached itself, drew up into a hunched thing of armor-plated scales and heavy wide-jawed head. A tail cracked into the air; a double tail split into equal forks for half-way down its length. A leg lifted as a forefoot, webbed, clawed for a new hold. This sea beast was the most formidable native thing he had sighted on Warlock, approaching in its ugliness the hound of the Throgs.
    Breathing in labored gusts, the thing slapped