placed Yaxa in a Northern hex. We can place anyone there now—with difficulty, but with complete certainty."
A thrill shot through him, but it was tempered by his engineer's mind. Like them, he'd worked on the problem for many years to no avail.
"How is it possible?" he asked.
"A Northern energy creature, the Yugash, grows crystalline creatures tailored to its needs and then operates them by entering the creatures' bodies and controlling them," Racer explained. "Finally a Yugash, who are high-tech, got together with us. They, like us, thought that the Well used mind-set rather than physical form to regulate transfer between Zone and hex gates. We allowed a Yugash called the Torshind to possess a Yaxa completely while the thought processes of the Yaxa were heavily sedated. The Yaxa body entered the Yaxa embassy Zone Gate—but walked out in Yugash!"
Yulin thought about it. "You mean these things can take over your body? And the Well switches them—and whatever body they're in—to Yugash?"
"It is so. A bit unnerving, but, thankfully, they cannot enter hexes in the South. The Well is called the Well of Souls for good reason—it recognizes you by your mind, not your form. We firmly believe that we can now move a party of our choosing to Yugash, only three hexes, straight line, from where you crashed in Uchjin."
The news was incredible. He could hardly believe it—there had to be a fly in the ointment somewhere, and he thought of one immediately.
"What's to prevent these creatures from not just letting us go once they take us over?" he asked cautiously. "I've seen enough Well World life to know that my own people's legends of centaurs and mermaids and ghosts were more than racial memory—some of those creatures must actually have gone to the home world of the humans in the early days. There are also legends of people being possessed by demons. I can't but wonder if the Yugash . . ." He left the uneasy thoughts incomplete, but the Yaxa got his point.
"We think you're probably right," Racer agreed. "Surveys of many Entries have indicated this possibility, and the stories are remarkably similar. It's entirely possible that Yugash roam in many areas of space, the descendants of those who occupied the bodies of prototype colonists leaving the Well eons ago. However, we have pretty well determined that, while a Yugash can control your body, it cannot read your mind. Thus, for lack of knowledge, it still could not fly the ship, nor could it gain the means of entering Obie."
Yulin nodded. That was a relief. But practical problems remained. "I'd still feel better if we could find some way to be in control of ourselves at the critical point, when we're inside Obie. The old legends mentioned ways of warding off evil spirits. If the legends of the spirits are based on fact, then the protective spells probably are, too."
"We are ahead of you," the Yaxa assured him. "We have compared the legends of many Entry races for common factors, and, more important, we wanted to know why none of the six hexes surrounding Yugash were open to their takeover. We think we have found it—a common factor. First, protective amulets of some sort were always worn—though a few were vegetable matter, the ones that were not were frequently made of copper or a copper alloy. We checked into this, and, indeed, in all the hexes surrounding Yugash we found enormous quantities of copper, copper oxide, or copper sulfide, either in the physical composition of the creatures or in the atmosphere itself. And there is no copper at all in Yugash!"
Ben Yulin's bovine face could not smile, but satisfaction was evident there, and relief.
"But there's still the political problems," he pointed out. "The Uchjin will block any attempt to move the ship, and, besides, we don't have the means of doing so."
"We're working on that," the Yaxa assured him. "I doubt if we can ever get to the Uchjin, but between the Yugash and a Uchjin neighbor, the Bozog, we may have the means to seize the ship by force. The Bozog have the methods to move it, and their high-tech hex could be the launch site. The price would be their inclusion in our little party, of course, and they are not a very trustworthy race. We recently learned they have also contacted Ortega and Trelig. They will work with the first group to reach the ship."
Ben Yulin exhaled slowly. "So it's to be a race, is