Key Out of Time

Key Out of Time, by Andre Alice
Norton

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Title: Key Out of Time
Author: Andre Alice Norton
Release Date: October 28, 2006 [EBook #19651]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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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.
Those tapes returned to Terra after their chance discovery, were studied,
probed, deciphered by the best brains of his time, shared out by lot
between already suspicious Terran powers, bringing into the
exploration of space bitter rivalries and old hatreds.
Such a tape had landed their ship on Hawaika, a world of shallow seas
and archipelagoes instead of true continents. The settlement team had
had all the knowledge contained on that tape crowded into them, only
to discover that much they had learned from it was false!
Of course, none of them had expected to discover here still the cities,
the civilization the tape had projected as existing in that long-ago
period. But no present island string they had visited approximated those
on the maps they had seen, and so far they had not found any trace that
any intelligent beings had walked, built, lived, on these beautiful,
slumberous atolls. So, what had happened to the Hawaika of the tape?
Ross's right hand rubbed across the ridged scars which disfigured his
left one, to be carried for the rest of his life as a mark of his meeting

with the star voyagers in the past of his own world. He had deliberately
seared his own flesh to break the mental control they had asserted.
Then the battle had gone to him. But from it he