controlled in
considerable degree and mutation might even be a matter of deliberate
choice rather than random happenstance.

And it would make for a potential planetary unity such as no other
world had ever known. Everything here was kin to everything else. Here
was a planet where Man, or any other alien, must learn to tread most
softly. For it was not inconceivable that, in a crisis or a clash of
interests, one might find himself faced suddenly with a unified and
cooperating planet, with every form of life making common cause
against the interloper.

The little scurrying things had given up; they'd gone back to their
places, clustered around the pulsing violet of the Thanksgiving
skeleton, each one fitting into place until the Cytha had taken shape
again. As if, Duncan told himself, blood and nerve and muscle had come
back from a brief vacation to form the beast anew.

"Mister," asked the Cytha, "what do we do now?"

"You should know," Duncan told it. "You were the one who dug the pit."

"I split myself," the Cytha said. "A part of me dug the pit and the
other part that stayed on the surface got me out when the job was
done."

"Convenient," grunted Duncan.

And it _was_ convenient. That was what had happened to the Cytha when
he had shot at it--it had split into all its component parts and had
got away. And that night beside the waterhole, it had spied on him,
again in the form of all its separate parts, from the safety of the
thicket.

"You are caught and so am I," the Cytha said. "Both of us will die
here. It seems a fitting end to our association. Do you not agree with
me?"

"I'll get you out," said Duncan wearily. "I have no quarrel with
children."

* * * * *

He dragged the rifle toward him and unhooked the sling from the stock.
Carefully he lowered the gun by the sling, still attached to the
barrel, down into the pit.

The Cytha reared up and grasped it with its forepaws.

"Easy now," Duncan cautioned. "You're heavy. I don't know if I can
hold you."

But he needn't have worried. The little ones were detaching themselves
and scrambling up the rifle and the sling. They reached his extended
arms and ran up them with scrabbling claws. Little sneering screamers
and the comic stilt-birds and the mouse-size kill-devils that snarled
at him as they climbed. And the little grinning natives--not babies,
scarcely children, but small editions of full-grown humanoids. And the