t to monstrosities!" He produced an uncertain smile, glancing from
one to the other of his interrogators. The smile promptly faded out
again.

"You've no idea at all then about the place they came from?" Cooms
asked expressionlessly.

"Oh, yes," Kinmarten said hastily. "Eltak talked a great deal about
the Hlats, and actually--except for its location--gave me a fairly
good picture of what the planet must be like. For one thing, it's an
uncolonized world, of course. It must be terratype or very nearly so,
because Eltak lived there for fifteen years with apparently only a
minimum of equipment. The Hlats are confined to a single large
island. He discovered them by accident and--"

"What was he doing there?"

"Well, sir, he came from Hyles-Frisian. He was a crim ... he'd been
engaged in some form of piracy, and when the authorities began looking
for him, he decided it would be best to get clean out of the Hub. He
cracked up his ship on this world and couldn't leave again. When he
discovered the Hlats and realized their peculiar ability, he kept out
of their way and observed them. He found out they had a means of
communicating with each other, and that he could duplicate it. That
stopped them from harming him, and eventually, he said, he was using
them like hunting dogs. They were accustomed to co-operating with one
another, because when there was some animal around that was too large
for one of them to handle, they would attack, it in a group...."

He went on for another minute or two on the subject. The Hlats--the
word meant "rock lion" in one of the Hyles-Frisian dialects,
describing a carnivorous animal which had some superficial resemblance
to the creatures Eltak had happened on--frequented the seacoast and
submerged themselves in sand, rocks and debris, whipping up out of it
to seize some food animal, and taking it down with them again to
devour it at leisure.

Quillan interrupted, "You heard what happened to the man it attacked
on the fifth level?"

"Yes, sir."

"Why would the thing have left him half outside the wall as it did?"

Kinmarten said that it must simply have been moving too fast. It could
slip into and out of solid substances without a pause itself, but it
needed a little time to restructure an object it was carrying in the same
manner. No more time, however, than two or three seconds--depending more
on the nature of the object than on its size, according to Eltak.

"It can restructure _anythin