The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

while ago I got to thinking that I wasn’t here at all, that I might be dreaming it all. Then I met you.”
    Thorvald understood. “Yes, but this could be a dream meeting. How can we tell?” 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. But maybe we can really lick it now.”
    “How?”
    “Well, if these phantoms are born of our memories there are about only two or three we could see together—maybe a Throg on the rampage, or that hound we left back in the mountains. And if we do sight anything like that, we’ll know what it is. On the other hand, if we stick together and one of us sees something that the other can’t…well, that fact alone will explode the ghost.”
    There was sense in what he said. Shann aided the officer to his feet.
    “I must be a better subject for their experiments than you,” the older man remarked ruefully. “They took me over completely at the first.”
    “You were carrying that disk,” Shann pointed out. “Maybe that acted as a focusing lens for whatever power they use to make us play trained animals.”
    “Could be!” Thorvald brought out the cloth-wrapped bone coin. “I still have it.” But he made no move to pull off the bit of rag about it. “Now”—he gazed at the wall of green—“which way?”
    Shann shrugged. Long ago he had lost any idea of keeping a straight course through the murk. He might have turned around any number of times since he first walked blindly into this place. Then he pointed to the packet Thorvald held.
    “Why not flip that?” he asked. “Heads, we go that way—” he indicated the direction in which they were facing—“tails, we do a rightabout-face.”
    There was an answering grin on Thorvald’s lips. “As good a guide as any we’re likely to find here. We’ll do it.” He pulled away the twist of cloth and with a swift snap, reminiscent of that used by the Warlockian witch to empty the bowl of sticks, he tossed the disk into the air.
    It spun, whirled, but—to their open-jawed amazement—it did not fall to the sand. Instead it spun until it looked like a small globe instead of a disk. And it lost its dead white for a glow of green. When that glow became dazzling for Terran eyes the miniature sun swung out, not in orbit but in straight line of flight, heading to their right.
    With a muffled cry, Thorvald started in pursuit, Shann running beside him. They were in a tunnel of the fog now, and the pace set by the spinning coin was swift. The Terrans continued to follow it at the best pace they could summon, having no idea of where they were headed, but each with the hope that they finally did have a guide to lead them through this place of confusion and into a sane world where they could face on more equal terms those who had sent them there.
    CHAPTER 14
    Escape
    “Something ahead!” Thorvald did not slacken the pace set by the brilliant spot of green they trailed. Both of the Terrans feared to fall behind, to lose touch with that guide. Their belief that somehow the traveling disk would bring them to the end of the mist and its attendant illusions had grown firmer with every foot of ground they traversed.
    A dark, fixed point, now partly veiled by mist, lay beyond, and it was toward that looming half-shadow that the spinning disk hurtled. Now the mist curled away to display its bulk—larger, blacker and four or five times Thorvald’s height. Both men stopped short, for the disk no longer played pathfinder. It still whirled on its axis in the air, faster and faster, until it appeared to be throwing off sparks, but the sparks faded against a monolith of dark rock unlike the native stone they had seen elsewhere. For it was neither red nor warmly brown, but a dull, dead black. It could have been a huge stone slab, trimmed, smoothed, set up on end as a monument or marker, except that only infinite labor could have accomplished such a task, and there was no valid reason for such toil as far as the Terrans could perceive.
    “This is it.” Thorvald moved closer.
    By the disk’s action, they deduced that their guide had drawn them to this featureless black steel with the