In my eagerness I was careless. The invader mind, recovering, struck back. Too late I felt it slip into my awareness, flick over the stored information. I leaped to protect one fact ... and lost my gains. With only a single tenuous line of rapport with the alien mind still open, I clung, shaken--but hugging precious patterns of stolen data. My raid had been no more than an irritation to the other mind ... but I had fetched away a mass of information. I interpreted it, integrated it, matched it to known patterns. A complex structure of relationships evolved, growing into a new awareness. Upon the mind-picture of Foster's face was now super-imposed another: that of Qulqlan, Rthr of all Vallon, ruler of the Two Worlds! And other pictures, snatched from the intruder mind, were present now in the earth-consciousness of me, Legion. The Vaults, deep in the rock under the fabled city of Okk-Hamiloth, where the mind-trace of every citizen was stored, sealed by the Rthr and keyed to his mind alone. Ammaerln, urging the king to embark on a Far-Voyage, stressing the burden of government, tempting him to bring with him the royal mind-trace; Qulqlan's acquiescence and Ammaerln's secret joy at the advancement of his scheme; the coming of the Change for the Rthr, aboard ship, far out in space--and the vizier's bold stroke; and then the fools who found him at the lifeboat ... and the loss of all, all.... There my own memories took up the tale: the awakening of Foster, unsuspecting, and his recording of the mind of the dying Ammaerlin; the flight from the Hunters; the memory-trace of the king that lay for three millenia among neolithic bones until I, a primitive, plucked it from its place; and the pocket of a coarse fibre garment where the cylinder lay now--on the hip of the body I inhabited but as inaccessible to me as if it had been a million miles away. But there was a second memory-trace--Ammaerln's. I had crossed a galaxy to come to Foster, and with me, locked in an unmarked pewter cylinder, I had brought Foster's ancient nemesis. I had given it life, and a body. Foster, once Rthr, had survived against all logic and had come back, back from the dead: the last hope of a golden age.... To meet his fate at my hands. * * * * * "Three thousand years," I heard my voice saying. "Three thousand years have the men of Vallon lived mindless, with the glory that was Vallon locked away in a vault without a key." "I, alone," said Ommodurad, "have borne the curse of knowledge. Long ago, in the days of the Rthr, I took my mind-trace from the vaults in anticipation of the day of days when he should fall. Little joy has it brought me." "And now," my voice said, "you think to force this mind--that is no mind--to unseal the vault?"