"Very cute," he said at last, with a slight chuckle. "Now, what I want
to know is: is someone playing a joke on you, or are you playing a
joke on me?"

Dodeth's eyelids slid upwards in a fast blink of surprise. "What do
you mean?"

"Why, these bathygraphs." Yerdeth rapped the bathygraphs with a
wrinkled, horny hand. He was a good deal older than Dodeth, and his
voice had a tendency to rasp a little when the frequency went above
twenty thousand cycles. "They're very good, of course. _Very_ good.
The models have very fine detail to them. The eyes, especially are
good; they look as if they really _ought_ to be built that way." He
smiled and looked up at Dodeth.

Dodeth resisted an urge to ripple a stomp. "Well?" he said
impatiently.

"Well, they can't be real, you know," Yerdeth replied mildly.

"Why not?"

"Oh, come, now, Dodeth. What did it evolve from? An animal doesn't
just spring out of nowhere, you know."

"New species are discovered occasionally," Dodeth said. "And there are
plenty of mutants and just plain freaks."

"Certainly, certainly. But you don't hatch a snith out of a hurkle
egg. Where are your intermediate stages?"

"Is it possible that we might have missed the intermediate stage?"

"I said 'stages'. Plural. Pick any known animal--_any_ one--and tell
me how many genetic changes would have to take place before you'd come
up with an animal anything like this one." Again he tapped the
bathygraph. "Take that eye, for instance. The lid goes down instead of
up, but you notice that there's a smaller lid at the bottom that
_does_ go up, a little ways. The closest thing to an eye like that is
on the hugl, which has eyelids on top that lower a little. But the
hugl has eighteen segments; sixteen pairs of legs and two pairs of
feeding claws. Besides, it's only the size of your thumb-joint. What
kind of gene mutation would it take to change that into an animal like
the one in this picture?

"And look at the size of the thing. If it weren't in that awkward
vertical position, if it were stretched out on the ground, it'd be a
long as a human. Look at the size of those legs!

"Or, take another thing. In order to walk on those two legs, the
changes in skeletal and visceral structure would have to be
tremendous."

"Couldn't we have missed the intermediate stages, then?" Dodeth asked
stubbornly. "We've missed the intermediates before, I dare say."

"Perhaps we have," Yerdeth admitted, "but if you boys in the