now."

There was silence in the room until Powers broke it again.

"Would you have Sebelia, Sakh," he asked gently, "or Ruller I,
Bellevan's world, or Labath?" There was no answer to this and he knew
it. There was only one alternative to a dead, burned-out, empty planet.
Mureess was in the wrong stage of development, and it would have to be
brought in line. The Sirian Combine had to, and would remove any
intelligent unknown menace from a position from which it could threaten
its Master plan of integrated peace. As they left the chamber, Powers
said a silent prayer and touched the tiny Crescent and Star embroidered
on his shirt pocket. At least, he thought, the planted ultra-wave
communicators would be there when the Falsethsa needed them. He looked
out of a corridor port at the gray and rolling sea. The Great Mother,
he thought bitterly, benevolent and overflowing!

Traleres-124, female gardener, aged thirty-two cycles, hummed in a
minor key as she harvested weed of the solstice crop, twelve miles off
the northern islands. A rest period was due in the next cycle day, and
she and her mate were ahead of quota which should make the supervisor
give them a good holiday.

The tall weed swayed gently against her and several small fish darted
past in fright. As the first heavy beat of the water struck against her
slim body, she looked up. Frozen with horror, she released her
container, but in forty feet of water, the monster caught her before
she had moved a hundred yards.

As it fed, horribly, other grim shapes, attracted by the blood moved in
from the distant murk of deeper water.

Savathake-er rode his one-man torpedo alertly as he probed the southern
bay of Ramasarett. He was a scientist-12 and also a hereditary hunter.
If the giant fish, long since eliminated from the rest of the seas,
were breeding in some secret area of the far and desolate southern
rocks, it was his business to know it. No fish could catch his
high-powered torpedo, while his electric spears packed a lethal jolt.
Probably, he thought, a rumor of the poor fisher folk who worked the
southern fringe areas. What else could you expect from such types, who
had never even learned to read in a thousand cycles. Nevertheless, as
he patrolled the sunken rocks, he was alert, scanning the water on all
sides constantly for the great shape he sought, his skin alert for the
first strange vibration. By neglecting the broken bottom, brown with
laminaria and kel