Chapter I
ALIEN DREAM
It seemed to Eric Nelson that a strange voice spoke in his mind as he lay in drink-drugged sleep, here in the squalid inn of a Chinese frontier village.
"Shall I kill, little sister?"
The voice was mental, not physical. His brain recorded it, not through his ears but directly.
And it was not human. There was an alien quality in its vibration that set even his dreaming mind bristling.
"No, Turk! You were to watch, not to kill! Not — yet!"
To Nelson the answering mental voice seemed human enough. But though it lacked the uncannily alien quality of the first, it was chill, silvery, merciless.
He knew that he was dreaming. He knew that he lay here in the battle-wrecked frontier village of Yen Shi, that he had drunk too much to forget the doom that stared him and his companions in the face, that fatigue and too much liquor were doing this to him.
Yet it was creepily real, this swift, urgent dialogue of voices that only his mind could hear. And again his nerves crawled at the non-human strangeness of the first voice.