Foster looked at me as if I wasn't there. "I remember Vallon," he said. He put a hand to his head. "But I remember too a barbaric world, brutal and primitive. You were there. We travelled in a crude rail-car, and then in a barge that wallowed in the sea. There were narrow, ugly rooms, evil odors, harsh noises ... and The Hunters! We fled from them, Legion, you and I. And I remember a landing-ring...." He paused. "Strange, it had lost its cap-stones and fallen into ruin." "Us natives call it Stonehenge." "The Hunters burst out of the earth. We fought them. But why should the Hunters seek me?" "I was hoping you'd tell me," I said. "Do you know where this ship came from? And why?" "This is a ship of the Two Worlds," he replied. "But I know nothing of how it came to be here." "How about all that stuff in the journal? Maybe now you--" "The journal!" Foster broke in. "Where is it!" "In your coat pocket, I guess." Foster felt through his jacket awkwardly, brought out the journal. He opened it and looked at the part written in the curious alien characters that nobody had been able to decipher. But he was reading it. * * * * * For hours I had waited while Foster read. At last he leaned back in his chair and sighed. "My name," he said, "was Qulqlan. And this," he laid his hand upon the book, "is my story. This is one part of the past I was seeking. And I remember none of it...." "Tell me what the journal says." Foster picked it up. "It seems that I awoke once before, in a small room aboard this vessel. I was lying on a memo-couch, by which circumstance I knew that I had suffered a Change--" "You mean you'd lost your memory?" "And regained it--on the couch. My memory-trace had been re-impressed on my mind. I awoke knowing my identity, but not how I came to be aboard this vessel. The journal says that my last memory was of a building beside the Shallow Sea." "Where's that?" "On a far world--called Vallon." "Yeah? And what next?" "I looked around me and saw four men lying on the floor, slashed and bloody. One was alive. I gave him what emergency treatment I could, then searched the ship. I found three more men, dead; none living. Then the Hunters attacked, swarming to me. They would have sucked the life from me--and I had no shield of light. I fled to the lifeboat, carrying the wounded man. I descended to the planet below: your Earth. The man died there. He had been my friend, a man named Ammaerln. I buried him in a shallow depression in the earth and marked the place with a stone." "The Ancient Sinner," I said. "Yes ... I suppose it was his bones the lay brother found." "And we found out last night that the depression was the result of dirt sifting down into the ventilator shaft. But I guess you didn't know anything about the underground installation, way back then. Doesn't the journal say anything...?" "No, there is no mention made of it here." "How about the Hunters? How did they get to Earth?"