Farree followed the Zacanthan to the larger table where there were even more piles of tapes balanced perilously. Zoror began to clear these away, piling them on the floor. Farree stooped quickly to help him, folding his wings tight again lest he cause some disaster.

"This is old, too, by the reckoning of most." The Hist-Technneer was fussing with a reader, making sure the machine was in proper position.

"Mingra?" That was a word Farree had never heard before.

"The darkened world—the world of the dead-alive—" Zoror was more intent on the disc he was fitting into the reader than he was to any question. "Now this"—he gave the roll a last turn, slipping it into place—"was the Shame of Mingra, the Shame of all who are space travelers—though perhaps it has so faded during the years that it is only alive as a poisonous whisper by now. Watch with care—for into it has gone the hate of one species for another and yet there is nothing to explain—"

His voice died away in a final hiss. Farree obediently looked at the small screen. Togger moved impatiently in his grasp until he placed the smux down carefully on the table before the screen. Togger drew himself into a ball and perhaps went to sleep. For Farree there was no sleep. He had seen plenty, since his arrival at Zoror's home which was also headquarters for a whole quadrant of researchers, of such records. Some had been so wildly fantastic that he had been sure they were indeed travelers' tall tales and not any true garnering of knowledge,

A picture formed on the screen. Farree jerked, half arose from his seat. For there was not only an ominous picture of a sphere, half lit at one edge by a red beam. But in his head—

He could not say it was a song, he could not even distinguish what must be wholly alien words. Yet deep into him had struck the thought-feeling that this held a truth which was evil and powerful. Gripping the edge of the table he made himself sit again but he did not loose his sustaining hold.

"Hurt—dark—hurt—" The smux had unrolled from his sleep ball and crouched before the screen, waving his great claws back and forth as if he were facing some dire danger.

That thread of sound swelled and, as if it called for sight, the red light on the screen blazed higher to display a barren stretch of riven rocks which were eroded, or perhaps storm-clawed, into ridges and plateaus. Shadows still clung to the feet of those outcrops and these dark wisps moved as if thrown by some source other than the rocks against which they sulked.

There was fear—a fear which arose and strengthened– which began to twist within Farree. A pile of reading rolls crashed to the floor as his wings answered to the unconscious stimulus.

With the speed of a laser shot a head flashed into the bloody light. It was the epitome of all evil Farree had ever known. It clashed broken-toothed jaws together, and eyes like pits with a fire deep held stared straight at him.

It knew, it hated, it was coming from him! And it was—

"Boogy—" The hissing of Zoror broke that fearful hold which the screened creature had half woven about Farree– either to draw him into its place or to burst forth from the screen—how could it? This was unlike any reading roll he had seen. From whose mind had this horror been shifted for future study—and where—when—?

"This was a collective nightmare," Zoror said. Farree heard him but more than half of his own attention was still centered on that thing. It had emerged from the shadow now. The mist lay shrunken behind as if its substance had been stolen to give the creeper more reality. Creep the creature did. Stunted limbs supported it—no, not limbs but rather thick tentacles; and Farree believed that he could actually hear the sound of suckers being pulled loose from the rock to be set again as it advanced.

Nightmare? This was more alive than any nightmare. Enough to bring death if it struck through sleep.

"Which it did," the Zacanthan said. "Look to the rocks at the right, my little friend."

Farree felt that if he withdrew his attention from the crawler he would leave an opening for attack, even if this was a read-roll. However, he gave a quick glance in the direction the Zacanthan suggested.

There was no shadow at the foot of this standing stone; rather it was crowned with such. The form was humanoid and—Farree sucked in a breath and swallowed a cry. For it was a winged one standing there, and he knew without being told that this one controlled the creeper, was sending it at some prey, not to slay—at least not at first—but to torment with fear. A winged one. He gave it full attention now. Its flesh, shown in limb and arm and face, was a dirty grey. The eyes, like those of the thing it commanded, were red and burning. About its body was tight clothing, also of a red to match the ever-lightening sky. Those wings which lazily fanned the air were not like Farree's, broad and colored, with one hue melting into another, so that full-spread the pinions were things of soft beauty. No, this leader of merciless shadows had wings which lacked the feathery down which covered Farree's. Instead they were the same foul greyish shade as the skin. Spread out they displayed perilous-appearing hooks at the top.

"Winged—" Farree half whispered. To the fear which still coiled within him was added now true horror. Was this what could claim him as kin—in spite of Zoror's talk about true tales and false? Somehow he knew that this was a true tale—

"Only to two." Zoror picked up his thought, and, for the first time since he had discovered his gift because he could communicate with smux, Farree resented that this was so.

"Two," Zoror leaned over and one of his well-smoothed finger claws touched a control which sent the screen dead again. Yet when Farree looked at it, he could still see that abomination winged and aloft on the rock waving forward the horror born of shadows.

"The two," the Zacanthan was proceeding, "being he who dreamed and he, or perhaps it, who sent such a dream! This was taken from the dream sleep of a small child, one of the many who were brought for treatment from Mingra to Yorum well over a hundred planet years ago. Five only of those little ones survived. The rest—nightmares such as you have just seen pursued them, until some died of fear alone and some then retreated so far from the outer world in their terror that none could reach within where they cowered. Thus they became the lost which we could not help."

"But you speak of shame—" countered Farree. He had seen what could be unending fear perhaps, but there was no shame that he could understand. Any child, yes, and fully grown adult, too, would have no shame for such fear.

"There was on Mingra a colony of dream-sleepers and they were learning how to control their dreams," Zoror explained. "When they were called upon to help, when children howled and screamed in their sleep—they fled and refused any aid. Those who dream-sleep hover always on the thin line of what most men call madness. They have been known to strike out in their sleep, even take up weapons in their hands, to the hurt of any who may be with them. Thus they are sent into wilderness until they learn to control their powers. If this dream recording you have seen worked upon you, think what it might have done to one who was drilled to be sensitive to such encounters? It was not only themselves that the dream-sleepers sought to protect. However, men and women who had seen their children rave in their sleep, a sleep from which there seemed to be no waking, no matter how the medical officers of that colony tried to rouse them—such are not always answerable for red terror which they wreak on their own. There was a wild descent upon the colony of the sleepers. They were taken and given to pain of many kinds when they said they could not awaken nor help the children. They died, not quickly or easily. It was a ship of the Patrol on a regular duty that landed on a planet where hands were bloody and more than one mind could no longer bear the burden of remembering what had happened. The children who had survived that long, and that were very few of those, were brought to Yorum and there healers of the mind wrought ceaselessly to banish the boogyman—"