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detect every virus and bacterium and germ known to the twenty-first century, to define any type of
cancer, and to interpret symptoms.
It took fifteen minutes to run through the samples from Laminak, and the coded result on the tape
was: DISEASE UNKNOWN. POSSIBLE PSYCHOSOMATIC ORIGIN. Laminak's fever rose to
102-1°F. and stayed there until late that night. She would drink water but had no desire to eat. She
became delirious that evening, and she mumbled and groaned much.
Of the few words they could determine, Koorik was the most frequent.
'She's been pining away ever since Koorik left,' Amaga said. 'Then she brightened up when the time
came for him to return. But as the days passed and he did not come, she became sick. Last night, she
started to burn, and she will not stop now until she is dead, unless Koorik comes back. And there is not
much time for that.'
'I can't believe that she could get so sick just grieving for John,' Rachel said.
'But she can,' von Billmann said. 'The tribe has stories of men and women, and children, who have
made themselves sick, killed themselves, with grief at the loss or prolonged absence of a loved one. It's a
psychological mechanism, true, but it operates far too effectively.'
'We don't know that that is the cause of her sickness,' Rachel said.
'True. But until we have a better explanation, I'll accept grief.'
Rachel stayed with Laminak even after Glamug returned and began to make the camp hideous with
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his howlings, shrill chantings, rattlings, bull roarings, and sudden shrieks. She did all she could to help the
girl and at the same time stay out of Glamug's way. She also kept a close observation of the progress of
the illness for the expedition's records.
The morning of the third day, just as the sun came up, Laminak breathed her death rattle.
Glamug stopped his shuffling and chanting, got down on his knees, and marked her forehead and
breasts with red ocher.
Then he stood up, removed his mask, and looked at Rachel with tired eyes and drooping face.
'For a little while last night, I rested,' he said. 'And I had a vision. I saw Koorik running toward us
across a field with a high cliff ahead. And behind him bounded a lion. The lion was very close, and then
Koorik was running through the shallow stream at the base of the cliff. This slowed him down, and the
lion roared with triumph, and it seized Koorik. And then they were rolling in the water, and Koorik had
only his shining gray knife to defend himself against the great lion. His thunder stick was empty; it had lost
its death-dealing powers. And his spear was in the throat of a lioness, the mate of the lion that pursued
Koorik.'
Rachel understood that Glamug had fallen asleep for a few minutes, though she could have sworn that
his racket had gone on all night without a second's break. He had had a dream and, as was the custom,
he must tell the nearest person the dream as soon as possible.
'Did Koorik get away from the lion? Or was he... ?'
'Was he killed?' Glamug said. 'I do not know. The vision faded, and I was sitting outside the tent of
Laminak and shivering with the cold. Not with the cold of the night wind, because that was warm. With
the cold of the wind that blows death.'
Rachel told Drummond and Robert of Glamug's vision. Drummond scoffed at it, saying that it was a
wish on the part of the witch doctor, who must resent Gribardsun's takeover of his role as healer. That
was all there was to it. Von Billmann, who had experience with sanctuary people, was not so skeptical.
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'But if his dream was a form of telepathy, why didn't I see John instead of Glamug? I'm much closer
to John than that primitive quack!'
'He's no quack; he believes in what he does and practices to the best of his ability,' von Billmann
said. 'As for why he received the message - if there was a message - well, he is a receiver, and you are
not. He's tuned in, on the proper wavelength.'
Rachel sneered, but she was worried. She would have laughed about the vision in her own
environment, the towering many-leveled twenty-first-century megalopolis, but in this savage world it was
as easy to believe in ESP and ghosts as it was to believe in mammoths and cave lions. It was summer and
therefore hot. The huge deer flies and the smaller flies were numerous, and the tribe must not be kept too
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