FIRE, mankind's oldest ally, weapon, tool, leaped high before the naked stone of the mountain side.  Men sat cross-legged about it, fifteen of them.  And behind, guarded by the flames and that somber circle, were the women.  There was a uniformity in this gathering.  The members were plainly all of the same racial stock, of medium height, stocky yet fined down to the peak of stamina and endurance, their skin brown, their shoulder-length hair black.  And they were all young - none over thirty, some still in their late teens.  Alike, too, was a certain drawn look in their faces, a tenseness of the eyes and mouth as they listened to Travis.

"So we must be on Topaz.  Do any of you remember boarding the ship?"

"No.  Only that we awoke within it."  Across the fire one chin lifted; the eyes which caught Travis' held a deep, smoldering anger.  "This is more trickery of the Pinda-lick-o-yi, the White Eyes.  Between us there has never been fair dealing.  They have broken their promise as a man breaks a rotten stick, for their words are as rotten.  And it was you, Fox, who brought us to listen to them."

A stir about the circle, a murmur from the women.

"And do I not also sit here with you in this strange wilderness?" he countered.

"I do not understand," another of the men held out his hand, palm up, in a gesture of asking - "what has happened to us.  We were in the old Apache world... I, Jil-Lee, was riding with Cuchillo Negro as we went down to the taking of Ramos.  And then I was here, in a broken ship and beside me a dead man who was once my brother.  How did I come out of the past of our people into another world across the stars?"

"Pinda-lick-o-yi tricks!"  The first speaker spat into the fire.

"It was the Redax, I think," Travis replied.  "I heard Dr. Ashe discuss this.  A new machine which could make a man remember not his own past, but the past of his ancestors.  While we were on that ship we must have been under its influence, so we lived as our people lived a hundred years or more ago -"

"And the purpose of such a thing?" Jil-Lee asked.