“That’s right, Brekke,” someone cried. “That may work. Slow and steady! Breathe for yourself or you’ll pass out.”

Someone grabbed her painfully around the waist. She clung to F’nor’s limp body until she realized that they were both being lifted from the dragon’s neck.

She heard someone talking urgently, encouragingly to Canth.

“Canth! Stay!”

The dragon’s pain was like a cruel knot in Brekke’s skull. She breathed in and out. Out and in. For F’nor, for herself, for Canth. She was conscious as never before of the simple mechanics of breathing; conscious of the muscles of her abdomen expanding and contracting around a column of air which she forced up and out, in and out.

“Brekke! Brekke!”

Hard hands pulled at her. She clutched the wherhide tunic beneath her.

“Brekke! He’s breathing for himself now. Brekke!”

They forced her away from him. She tried to resist but everything was a bloody blur. She staggered, her hand touching dragon hide.

Brekke. The pain-soaked tone was faint, as if from an incalculable distance, but it was Canth. Brekke?

“I am not alone!” And Brekke fainted, mind and body overtaxed by an effort which had saved two lives.

—

Spun out by ceaseless violence, the spores fell from the turbulent raw atmosphere of the thawing planet toward Pern, pushed and pulled by the gravitic forces of a triple conjunction of the system’s other planets.

The spores dropped through the atmospheric envelope of Pern. Attenuated by the friction of entry, they fell in a rain of hot filaments on the surface of the planet.

Dragons rose, destroying them with flaming breath. What Thread eluded the airborne beasts was efficiently seared into harmless motes by ground crews, or burrowed after by sandworm and fire-lizard.

Except on the eastern slope of a northern mountain plantation of hardwood trees. There men had carefully drawn back from the leading Edge of the Fall. They watched, one with intent horror, as the silver rain scorched leaf and fell hissing into the soil. When the leading Edge had passed over the crest of the mountain, the men approached the points of impact cautiously, the nozzles of the flame throwers they carried a half-turn away from spouting flame.

The still smoking hole of the nearest Thread entry was prodded with a metal rod. A brown fire-lizard darted from the shoulder of one man and, chirping to himself, waddled over to the hole. He poked an inquisitive half-inch of nose into the ground. Then he rose in a dizzying movement and resumed his perch on the specially padded shoulder of his handler and began to preen himself fastidiously.

His master grinned at the other men.

“No Thread, F’lar. No Thread, Corman!”

The Benden Weyrleader returned Asgenar’s smile, hooking his thumbs in his broad riding belt.

“And this is the fourth Fall with no burrows and no protection, Lord Asgenar?”