The Warlock of Sharrador By GARDNER F. FOX _For unremembered eons the Thing had slept. For a million years it had quested through the star worlds of its dreams, until it lived only as a faint legend in the race memories of mankind. But now the time had come for man to recall its name, and to worship it once again. Noorlythin arose and went out into the world of men and robots._ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories March 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] The McCanahan came awake in the pearl mists of a Senn dawn, staring upward into the round blue muzzle of a Thorn blaster. The handgun hung in the air without visible support, its trigger moving slowly back. In an instant, it would lash out at him with a thousand tares of destruction. He whipped the bedclothes into a geyser of silk and moonylon, and dove naked over the edge of the bed to roll on the floor and turn over and over. He brought up against the chair where his uniform belt hung, and fumbled blindly for his service holster. The blaster spoke in a soft whooosh of yellow flame, and the bedclothes puffed once, billowing into a thick, reddish smoke. _That would have been me, instead of the blankets, if the Little People had not come in my dreams to whisper in my ears of Flaith's loveliness_, the McCanahan thought, and tore loose his addy-gun. His wrist steadied, and he touched the stud. The blaster, hung on a tensor beam, went red, then white, and began to melt in droplets all over the thick Morrvan carpet of his officer's quarters. The tensor beam, held by a minute mechanism inbuilt within the handgun's butt, let loose, and the blistered, melting thing thudded to the floor. "It was a close thing," Kael McCanahan told himself, sitting there naked on the floor. It had been the sfarri who had sent the gun. The sfarri, who hated the men of Terra with a hate like a fierce, blazing flame, who would not scruple at assassination to gain their aims. They were a cold, efficient breed of men, these sfarri. The farflung Galactic fleet ships of Mother Terra, stretched in a thin line between the stars, had crossed addy beams and searirays with their slim vessels a thousand times. Almost always, Terra lost her ships. Almost always, those far-ranging sfarran ships smashed the eagle-blazoned Terran cruisers, and fled like laughing ghosts into the black infinity of space. No Terran ship had ever captured a living sfarran. Somehow, with the barbaric philosophy of hara-kari, they committed suicide. It never failed.