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Larry woke before dawn, his throat and lungs filled with smoke. He sat up. The roar of the fire soundedominous and harsh in his ears; men were still gathered at the center of the camp space. He recognized thetall form of Valdir Alton, heard the sound of excited voices. He wriggled out of his blanket and stoodupright, then was aware of Kennard, rising to his feet beside him. Against the dimness, Kennard was onlya blurred form. He said, “Something’s happening over there. Let’s go and see.”

The two boys picked their way carefully through the rows of sleeping men. As they came closer to thelighted fire, the firelight shone on a tall man in a somber gray cloak, dull-red hair splotched with white,and Larry recognized the stern, ascetic face of Lorill Hastur; close at his side, in a close-wrapped cape,shivering, was a slight and fragile woman with masses of burning, fire-red hair.

Kennard whistled softly. “A
 
leronis
 
, a sorceress—and the Hastur-Lord! The fire must be worse thanwe thought!” He tugged at Larry’s wrist. “Come on—this I want to hear!”

Quietly they crept to the outskirts of the little group. Valdir Alton had spread a blanket on the trampledgrass for the woman; she sat down, staring at the glow of the distant fire as if hypnotized.

“The fire’s leaped the lines on the North slope,” Valdir said. “They were too close to the flames, and had to leave the area. We brought up donkey-teams to plow lines and clear away faster, but there weren’t enough people working there. We had only one clairvoyant, and he couldn’t see too clearly where the fire was moving.”

Lorill Hastur said, in his deep voice, “We came as quickly as we could. But there’s not much we can dountil the sun rises.” He turned to the woman. “Where are the clouds, Janine?”

Still staring fixedly at the sky, the woman said, “Too far, really. And not enough. Seven
 
vars
 
distant.”

“We’ll have to try it, though,” Valdir said. “Otherwise it will cross the hill to the west, and burn down—Zandru’s hells, it could burn all the way to the river! We can’t afford to lose that much timberland.”

Larry heard the words with a strange little prickle of dread. He found himself thinking, painfully, of hisown world.

With tractors and earth-movers they could cut firelines twenty feet wide in a few hours! With chemicals,they could douse the fire from the air, and have it out within the hour! Here, they didn’t even havehelicopters or planes to see from the air which way the fire was moving!

Kennard looked at him a little wryly, and Larry again wondered if he had spoken aloud, but the Darkovan boy said nothing. The darkness was thinning, and through the thick sooty air the sky wasflushing purple with dawn.

“What are they going to do?” Larry asked.

Kennard did not answer.

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The woman motioned to Lorill Hastur; he lowered himself and sat, cross-legged, on the blanket beforeher. Valdir Alton stood behind them, his face wiped clean of expression, intent and calm.

The woman was holding something in her hand. It was a blue jewel, glimmering, pale in the purplishdawn, and Larry thought suddenly of the blue jewel Valdir had held in his hand when he probed the mindof the dying Ranger. A curious little prickle of apprehension ran down his spine, and he shivered in thechilly, soot-laden wind.

The three forms were motionless, tense and still as carven images. Kennard gripped at Larry’s arm and Larry felt the taut excitement in his friend; he wanted to ask a dozen questions, but the intentness of thethree redheaded forms held him speechless. He waited.

Minutes dragged by, slowly, and the blue jewel gleamed in the woman’s hand, and Larry could almostsee the tension radiating between the three of them. The pale dawn brightened, and far away at theeastern horizon a dimmer crimson glow lightened the lurid red of the faraway fire. The light strengthened,grew brighter in the pale clear sky.

Then the woman sighed softly, and Larry felt it as a palpable darkening and chill. Kennard gripped hisarm, pointed upward. Clouds were gathering—thickening, moving in the pale windless sky, centering,clustering from no-where. Thick, heavy, high-piled cumulus, thin wispy fast-moving cirrus, raced from thehorizon—from all the horizons! Not moving with normal wind, but coming, collecting from all corners ofthe compass, the clouds gathered and darkened, piling high and higher above them. The sun was blurredaway, the meadow gradually darkened and Larry shivered in the sudden chill—but not with cold. He letout his breath in a long sigh.

Kennard loosed his clenched fists. He was staring at the sky. “Clouds enough,” he muttered, “if onlythey would rain! But with no wind, if the clouds just
sit
 
there—”

Larry took the murmured words as license to break his silence. Questions tumbled one over another,condensed themselves to a blurted, “How did they do that?
Did
 
they bring those clouds?”

Kennard nodded, not taking it very seriously. “Of course. Nothing much to that—I can even do itmyself, a little. On a good day for it. And they’re Comyn—the most powerful psi powers on Darkover.”

Larry felt the chill run up and down his spine with cold feet. Telepathy—and now clouds moved by thepower of trained minds!

His Terran training said,
Impossible, superstitious rubbish! They observed which way the cloudswere moving and bolstered up their reputation by predicting that clouds would pile up for rain
 
. But even as he said it, he knew it was not true. He was not in the safe predictable world of Terranscience now, but in the cold and alien strangeness of a world where these powers were more commonthan a camera.

“What now?” he asked, and as if in answer, Valdir said from the center of the circle, “Now, we pray for

rain. Much good may it do us.”

Then, raising his head, he saw the boys, and beckoned to them.

“Have some breakfast,” he said. “As soon as it’s a little lighter they’ll send you out on the fire-lines

again. Unless it rains.”

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“Evanda grant it,” said the woman huskily.

Lorill Hastur raised his still face and gave Kennard a smile of greeting, which turned impassive as he saw Larry. Larry, under the man’s gaze, was suddenly aware of his soot-stained face, his raw and blisteredhands, the torn and sweaty state of his clothes. Then he realized that Valdir Alton was in little better state. He had vaguely noticed, yesterday, that the men on the fire-lines were of all sorts: some soft-handed, inthe rich clothing of aristocrats, some in the rags of the poorest. Evidently rank made no difference; richand poor alike worked against this common danger. Of all those in the field, only the two telepaths wereunstained by hard work.

Then he saw the gray look of fatigue in the eyes of the woman, the deep lines in the face of the Hastur.

Maybe their work has been the hardest of all—

Kennard nudged him, and he accepted, from one of the old men, a lump of bread and a battered cup ofa bitter-chocolaty drink. They found an unmuddied stretch of grass and sat to eat, their ears tuned to thedistant roaring of the fire.

Kennard said, grimly, “They can bring the clouds and pile them up, but they can’t make them rain.

Although sometimes just the sheer weight of the clouds will condense them into rain. Let’s hope.”

“If you had airplanes—” Larry said.

“What for?”

“On Terra, they can make rain,” Larry said slowly, thinking back to half-learned lessons of his schooldays. “They seed the clouds with some chemical—crystals—silver iodide,” he used the Terran word, not knowing the Darkovan one, “or even dry ice will do. I’m not sure how it works, but it condenses the clouds into rain—”

“How can ice be dry?” Kennard demanded, almost rudely. “It sounds like nonsense. Like saying dry

water or a live dead man.”

“It’s not real ice,” Larry corrected himself. “It’s a gas—a frozen gas, that is. It’s carbon dioxide—the gas you breathe out. It crystallizes into something like snow, only it’s much, much colder than ice or snow—and it burns if you touch it.”

“You’re not joking?”

“I hope not,” said Valdir abruptly from behind them. “Kennard, what was Larry saying to you just now?

I picked it up, but I can’t read him—”

With a curious prickly sensation again, Larry realized that Valdir had been well out of earshot. The Darkovan lord was looking down at him with an almost fierce intensity. He said, “Make rain? It sounds,then, as if the Terrans have a magic greater than ours. Tell me about this rain-making, Larry.”

Larry repeated what he had said to Kennard, and the older man stood scowling, deep in thought. Without a word, Lorill Hastur and the frail, flame-haired woman had approached them, and stoodlistening.

Lorill Hastur said, “What about it, Valdir? You know something of atomic structures. Is it practical atall?”

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The men who had slept in the meadow were collecting their tools now, forming in groups, getting theirorders for the day’s work. Larry looked at the forest edge. How green it looked. Yet above it rose theblanket of smoke and the omnipresent dull roar of the fire. Valdir turned, too, and looked at the cloudthat hung over the burning woods.

He said, “Fire throws off the same gas as breath. There must be an enormous quantity of carbon dioxidegoing off into the air.”

“We can move it into the cold of the outer sky,” Lorill Hastur said. “That’s easy enough. And from

there, if it falls on the clouds—”

“There’s no time to waste,” the woman said. Her eyes were closed, her voice remote, as she added, “A fire-storm has broken out on the far side of the forest, and the main blaze is racing toward the villages there. The fire-lines will never contain it. Rain is the only hope. There is enough moisture in those clouds to kill the fire—if we could only get it out of them.”

“We can try,” Valdir said. The three of them went into one of those intent silences again, the very air

between their still forms seeming to tremble with invisible force.

Larry looked at Kennard. “Do you know what they’re going to do? How can they—?”

“They can teleport the gas above the clouds,” Kennard said. “If the cold can freeze it—”

Larry was becoming a little hardened to these curious powers now. If telepathy was possible,teleportation was only a minor step—

“If they can teleport, why don’t they just teleport enough water from a river, or something, to put out the

fire?”

“Too much weight involved,” Kennard said gravely. “Even the clouds—they didn’t move the clouds themselves, just enough air to create a wind to move them here.” He fell silent, his eyes on his father, and when Larry started to speak, motioned him, impatiently, to silence.

The silence in the dawnlit meadow deepened; there was no sound at all, except for the distant, indistinctsound of the fire. The clouded sky seemed to darken, grow thick and dreary. Larry watched a group ofmen moving away toward the fire-lines; he and Kennard should have been with them. And they stoodhere, waiting, watching the three telepaths—

Abruptly there was a great WHOOSH from the distant fire; Larry, whirling round, saw a tremendousuprushing billow of smoke and flame, and seemed to feel, rather than hear, the wild roaring sound. Thensilence again, hushed, tense and deep.

Above his head the clouds moved, writhed, seeming to form and reform into tossing shapes and wormsof moisture; they curdled, coalesed, the sky darkened and darkened as the cloud-gray deepened.

Then the sky and cloud-layer suddenly
 
dissolved—
 
that was the only way Larry could describe it,afterward—and flowed into dark, thick lines of teeming, pouring rain. The burning forest sizzled, crackledin a sort of desperation. Great thick clouds of smoke and steam and soot billowed upward, and a rushingwind flung great sparks upward. Larry was soaked through in a moment, before the rain localized itself,pouring heavily down over the forest, but leaving the meadow untouched except by the brief spit of rain.

Page 47

The flames, visible over the treetops, sank and died beneath the upsurge of steam and smoke. The hissingsound grew louder, roared, then dimmed and was still.

The rain stopped.

Soaked, shivering, Larry stared in blank wonder at Valdir and the two gray-clad telepaths. They hadcornered the clouds; they had harnessed the very force of the rain to combat the fire!

Valdir beckoned to the boys. They walked across the damp grass, Larry still a little dazed. He hadboasted of Terran science; could it match
 
this
 
?

“That’s over with, at least,” Valdir said, in a tone of profound relief. “Larry, I wanted to thank you; without what you told us, none of us would have known how to do that. I hardly know how to thank you.”

It was more confusing than ever. These men had forces and powers undreamed of by science—and yetthey were ignorant of a simple notion like cloud-seeding! Because he could not have spoken withoutrevealing that mixture of awe, mingled with surprise at the incompleteness of the knowledge, Larry wassilent. Valdir turned to Lorill Hastur and said, “Now you can see my point, perhaps! Without theirknowledge—”