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fast for comprehension. Believing Fitz's spur-of-the-moment fabrication that the coins had been the bequest of some deceased uncle, Gus Tolliver had

    taken advantage of his guild's far-flung network of contacts to begin to sell and mail-auction the exceedingly rare collector gold pieces all over the world, taking a fee of twenty percent of the profits and giving Fitz the remaining eighty.
    The very first thing that Fitz had done with his newcome wealth was to buy the rental house and land outright. Then he had hired a general contractor to convert the decaying edifice into a small luxury home with attached double garage to house the two new vehicles with which he had quickly replaced his clunker.
    Next he had paid off the balance of the credit-union loan, which meant that he then began to receive his full retirement pension from his former firm—not that he had any need of so trifling a sum anymore, with money pouring in from sales of the forty pounds or so of golden coins from the casket in the wrecked ship.
    In his by then copious spare time, he had spent many full days in what he had come to think of as the sand world, and further exploration of the old ship had disclosed another and much larger cabin behind the two smaller ones, extending completely across the beam of the wrecked vessel. With bits of furniture from the other two cabins and modern items laboriously brought down the narrow, ever-treacherous stone stairs Fitz had fashioned of the sterncabin a moderately comfortable pied-a-terre in this world of sea and sand, birds and sea creatures but with no recent trace of man.
    The dunes seemed to march on into infinity to the east, the west and the north, as far as he had walked.

    It had not been until he had thought to buy and wrestle down the stairs an off-road motorcycle that he had begun to learn more of the sand world, had seen the long, broad Pony Plain north of the dunes and glimpsed the succession of dark-green, forested hills rising on the other side.
    He had first brought firearms into the seemingly uninhabited sand world because no matter where he went or travelled within it, he experienced the unpleasant, uncanny feeling that he was being watched, being observed. Even within the locked, barred and shuttered sterncabin he often felt that he was not truly alone, that someone or some thing was invisibly with him.
    Trouble was brewing in the other, more mundane world, too, coming fast to a roiling boil for him and Gus Tolliver. First came a succession of break-ins at Fitz's house during various of his sojourns in the sand world; although little of any real value was ever taken—save the two artifacts, the knife and the copper cup which had been his first finds aboard the beached ship—he had liked so little the idea of strangers poking about his home that he had taken extreme and very expensive steps to harden up the place and its grounds—steel-sheathed solid doors, special windows and state-of-the-art locks, high cyclone fencing for the perimeter of the entire property topped with barbed wire, floodlights, trip-flares, banshee-loud alarms, the works, the best that money could buy.
    Gus Tolliver, too, had had at least one break-in at his shop. Although a good number of silver coins had lain exposed in glass cases and there had been some modern gold coins in the big, old-fashioned, deliber-

    ately visible safe that had been skillfully opened, then just as skillfully reclosed, none of this had been so much as touched. Despite intensive, destructive searchings, the location of his hidden safe had never been found. But what had upset the old soldier more than this had been when word had been privately passed to him that certain governmental agencies had been putting pressure on officials of his bank to disclose certain information of a private, financial nature.
    That had been when he first had confided in Fitz of his fierce distrust of certain bureaus of the government he had served so long and so