Clawly quit his nervous prowling and perched on Oktav's desk. His satanic face was set in tight, thwarted lines. Except for his rummaging everything in the room was just as it had been when he had stolen out early this morning. The outer door aslit, Oktav's black cloak thrown over the back of his chair, the door to the empty inner chamber open. As if the seer had been called away on some brief, minor errand. Clawly was irked at the impulse which had drawn him back to this place. True, his rummaging had uncovered some suggestive and disquieting things--in particular, an assortment of small objects and implements that seemed to extend back without a break to the Late Middle Dawn Civilization, including a maddeningly random collection of notes that began in faded stain on sheets of bleached and compressed vegetable fiber, shifted to typed characters on similar sheets, kept on through engraving stylus and plastic film to memoranda ribbon and recording wire, and finally ended in multilevel writing tape. But what Clawly wanted was something that would enable him to get a hook into the problem that hung before him like a vast, slippery, ungraspable sphere. He still had, strong as ever, the conviction that this room was the center of a web, the key to the whole thing--but it was a key he did not know how to use. His heels beat a muffled tattoo against the desk as he searched his mind for possible alternate avenues of attack. Thorn? That was a whole problem in itself, only a few hours old, but full of the most nerve-racking possibilities. He took from his pouch and nervously fingered the fragment of tape with its scrawlingly recorded message which he had found earlier today on Thorn's desk at their office--that message which no one had seen Thorn leave. A matter of the greatest importance has arisen. I must handle it alone. Will be back in a few days. Cancel or postpone all activities until my return. Thorn. Although the general style of recording was characteristically Thorn's, it had a subtly different swing to it, an alien undercurrent, as if some other mind were using Thorn's habitual patterns of muscular action. And the message itself, which might refer to anything, was alarmingly suggestive of a cryptic amnesiac's play for time. On the other hand, it would be just like Thorn to play the lone wolf if he saw fit. If he followed his simplest impulses, Clawly would resume the search for Thorn he had begun on finding the message. But he had already put that search into the hands of agencies more competent than any single individual could possibly be. They would find Thorn if anyone could, and for him to try to help them would merely be a concession to his anxiety. His heels beat a sharper tattoo.