KEY OUT OF TIME ***
Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
_Key Out of Time_
ANDRE NORTON
Published by The World Publishing Company 2231 West 110th Street, Cleveland 2, Ohio
Published simultaneously in Canada by Nelson, Foster & Scott Ltd.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-10861 SECOND PRINTING 2WP164
Copyright © 1963 by Andre Norton
[Transcribers note: This is a Rule 6 Clearance. A copyright renewal has not been found.]
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher, except for brief passages included in a review appearing in a newspaper or magazine. Printed in the United States of America.
_Contents_
1. Lotus World
2. Lair of Mano-Nui
3. The Ancient Mariners
4. Storm Menace
5. Time Wrecked
6. Loketh the Useless
7. Witches' Meat
8. The Free Rovers
9. Battle Test
10. Death at Kyn Add
11. Weapon from the Depths
12. Baldies
13. The Sea Gate of the Foanna
14. The Foanna
15. Return to the Battle
16. The Opening of the Great Door
17. Shades Against Shadow
18. World in Doubt
KEY OUT OF TIME
1
Lotus World
There was a shading of rose in the pearl arch of sky, deepening at the horizon meeting of sea and air in a rainbow tint of cloud. The lazy swells of the ocean held the same soft color, darkened with crimson veins where spirals of weed drifted. A rose world bathed in soft sunlight, knowing only gentle winds, peace, and--sloth.
Ross Murdock leaned forward over the edge of the rock ledge to peer down at a beach of fine sand, pale pink sand with here and there a glitter of a crystalline "shell"--or were those delicate, fluted ovals shells? Even the waves came in languidly. And the breeze which ruffled his hair, smoothed about his sun-browned, half-bare body, caressed it, did not buffet on its way inland to stir the growths which the Terran settlers called "trees" but which possessed long lacy fronds instead of true branches.
Hawaika--named for the old Polynesian paradise--a world seemingly without flaw except the subtle one of being too perfect, too welcoming, too wooing. Its long, uneventful, unchanging days enticed forgetfulness, offered a life without effort. Except for the mystery....
Because this world was not the one pictured on the tape which had brought the Terran settlement team here. A map, a directing guide, a description all in one, that was the ancient voyage tape. Ross himself had helped to loot a storehouse on an unknown planet for a cargo of such tapes. Once they had been the space-navigation guides for a race or races who had ruled the star lanes ten thousand years in his own world's past, a civilization which had long since sunk again into the dust of its beginning.
