“Here is a rope,” he repeated, extending the coiled cord. “I will tie it about myself. See—like this. You take the other end. If you hold it tightly I can’t escape. It is long enough to enable me to go out and seek a cat litter, and to convince you that I can walk abroad.”

At first Lad-nar refused, eyeing the glistening, silvery cord with fear in his heavily lidded eyes. But Kettridge spoke on two levels, and soon the creature touched the cord.

It drew back its seven-taloned hand quickly. It tried again.

The third tune it grasped the cord.

You have just lost your religion, Kettridge thought.

Lad-nar had “smelled” with his mind. He had sensed a cat Utter fairly close to the cave. But he did not know where the living food supply had taken refuge.

Kettridge emerged from the dark mouth of the cave into the roaring maelstrom of a Blestonian electrical storm.

The sky was a tumult of heavy black clouds, steel and ebony and ripped duty cloth. The clouds revolved in dark masses and were split apart by the lightning. The very ah- was charged, and blast after blast sheared away the atmosphere in zigzagging streamers.

Kettridge stood there with the pelting rain washing over ward against the pull of the cord. He was forced to shade his eyes against the almost continuous glare of the lightning.

He was a small, thin man, and had it not been for the cord he might easily have been swept away by the winds and rain that sand-papered the rocky ledge.

Ketteridge stood there with the pelting rain washing over him, obscuring his vision through the hood, and leaving only the glare of the storm to guide him.

He took a short step forward.

A bolt slashed at him through a rift in the mountains and roared straight toward him. It materialized out of nowhere and everywhere—shattering a massive slab of granite almost at his feet Kettridge fell flat on his stomach, and the crack of thunder rolled on past him.