he
lowlands as though it was afraid of disturbing a single blade of grass
or a single drooping leaf. And then, at the crucial moment, it huffed
and puffed itself up into a little hurricane, charged down upon the
Galactic University buildings and whooshed through the Galactic
Historian's study like a band of interstellar dervishes.

Unfortunately, the Galactic Historian had begun to wipe his brows at the
very moment of the breeze's entry. While the act was not a complicated
one, it did consume time and monopolize attention. It is not surprising,
therefore, that he failed to witness the theft. Neither is it surprising
that he failed to notice afterwards that the page he had been checking
was gone.

He was, as previously stated, overworked, over-tired, and over-anxious
and, in such a state, even a Galactic Historian can skip a whole series
of words and dates and never know the difference. A hiatus of twenty
thousand years is hardly noticeable anyway. Galactically speaking,
twenty thousand years is a mere wink in time.

The breeze didn't carry the page very far. It simply whisked it through
a convenient window, deposited it beneath a xixxix tree and then
returned to the hills to rest. But the choice of a xixxix tree is highly
significant and substantiates the malicious nature of the breeze's act.
If it had chosen a muu or a buxx tree instead, the Galactic Historian
might have found the page in the morning when he took his constitutional
through the university grounds.

However, since a xixxix tree was selected, no doubt whatever can remain
as to the breeze's basic motivation. Articles of a valuable nature just
aren't left beneath xixxix trees. Everybody knows that squixes live in
xixxix trees and everybody knows that squixes are collectors. They
collect all sorts of things, buttons and pins and twigs and
pebbles--anything at all, in fact, that isn't too big for them to pick
up and carry into their xixxix tree houses.

They have been called less kind things than collectors. Thieves, for
example, and scavengers. But collectors are what they really are.
Collecting fulfills a basic need in their mammalian makeup; the
possession of articles gives them a feeling of security. They love to
surround their little furry bodies with all sorts of odds and ends, and
their little arboreal houses are stuffed with everything you can think
of.

And they simply adore paper. They adore it because it has a practical as
well as a cultura