thinks he has his specimen. He went out at dawn this
morning and came in before breakfast. He's quit drinking but he hasn't
slept in three days now and looks like hell. I thought he was getting
his fancy imagination out of the bottle, but the soberer he got the more
worried he looked over this "invasion" idea of his.

Now he claims that his catch is definitely a sample of something new
under our particular sun. He hustled it under a glass and started
classifying it. It filled the bill for the arthropods, class Insecta. It
looked to me, in fact, just like a small, ordinary blowfly, except that
it has green wings. And I mean _green_, not just a little iridescent
color.

Cleve very gently pulled one wing off and we looked at it under low
power. There is more similarity to a leaf than to a wing. In the bug's
back is a tiny pocket, a sort of reservoir of the green stuff, and
Cleve's dissection shows tiny veins running up into the wings. It seems
to be a closed system with no connection with the rest of the body
except the restraining membrane.

Cleveland now rests his extraterrestrial origin theory on an idea that
the green stuff is chlorophyll. If it is chlorophyll, either Cleve is
right or else he's discovered a new class of arthropods. In other
respects the critter is an ordinary biting and sucking bug with the
potentials of about a deerfly for making life miserable. The high-power
lens showed no sign of unusual or malignant microscopic life inside or
out of the thing. Cleve can't say how bad a bite would be, because he
doesn't have his entomologist kit with him, and he can't analyze the
secretion from the poison gland.

The commander has let him radio for a botanist and some micro-analysis
equipment.

Everyone was so pitched up that Cleve's findings have been rather
anti-climactic. I guess we were giving more credence to the
space-invader theory than we thought. But even if Cleve has proved it,
this fly doesn't look like much to be frightened over. The reporters are
clamoring to be let loose, but the quarantine still holds.

* * * * *

June 1--By the time the plane with the botanist arrived we were able to
gather all the specimens of _Tabanidae viridis_ (Cleveland's
designation) that he wanted. Seems like every tenth flying creature you
meet is a green "Tabby" now.

The botanist helped Cleve and me set up the bio kit, and he confirmed
Cleve's guess. The green stuff is chlorophyll