ealed happily, "that you didn't _quite_ get the nuances of
the language, did you, Harkaway? Because I gather now that the whole
difficulty was a semantic one. The Flimbotzik were explaining the
zoology of the native life-forms to you and you misunderstood it as
their theology."

"Looks it, doesn't it?" Harkaway repeated glumly. "It certainly looks
it."

"Cheer up," Iversen said, reaching over to slap the young man on the
back--a bit to his own amazement. "No real harm done. What if the
Flimbotzik are less primitive than you fancied? It makes our discovery
the more worthwhile, doesn't it?"

At this point, the radio operator almost sobbingly asked to be excused
from the table. Following his departure, there was a long silence. It
was hard, Iversen realized in a burst of uncharacteristic tolerance, to
have one's belief, even so newly born a credo, annihilated with such
suddenness.

"After all, you did run across the Flimbotzik first," he told Harkaway
as he spread gooseberry jam on a hard roll for the ravenous ex-zkoort
(now a chu-wugg, he had been told). "That's the main thing, and a
life-form that passes through two such striking metamorphoses is not
unfraught with interest. You shall receive full credit, my boy, and your
little mistake doesn't mean a thing except--"

"Doom," said Dr. Smullyan, sopping up the last of his gravy with a piece
of bread. "Doom, doom, doom." He stuffed the bread into his mouth.

"Look, Smullyan," Iversen told him jovially, "you better watch out. If
you keep talking that way, next voyage out we'll sign on a parrot
instead of a medical officer. Cheaper and just as efficient."

Only the chu-wugg joined in his laughter.

"Ever since I can remember," the first officer said, looking gloomily at
the doctor, "he's never been wrong. Maybe _he_ has powers beyond our
comprehension. Perhaps we sought at the end of the Galaxy what was in
our own back yard all the time."

"Who was seeking what?" Iversen asked as all the officers looked at
Smullyan with respectful awe. "I demand an answer!"

But the only one who spoke was the doctor. "Only Man is vile," he said,
as if to himself, and fell asleep with his head on the table.

"Make a cult out of Smullyan," Iversen warned the others, "and I'll
scuttle the ship!"

Later on, the first officer got the captain alone. "Look here, sir," he
began tensely, "have you read Harkaway's book about _mpoola_?"

"I read part of the first chapter," Iversen told