ing legs, the grasping talons crossed on the breast in an attitude
of prayer. The Zark wasn't certain what it could do, but perhaps it
could help.

Albert was mercifully unconscious as it bent over him to inspect his
prone body with a purple-lidded pineal eye that was blue with concern.
The Zark noted the bruise upon his forehead and marked his regular
breathing, and came to the correct conclusion that, whatever had
happened, the biped was relatively undamaged. But the Zark didn't go
away. It had never seen a human in its thousand-odd years of existence,
which was not surprising since Earthmen had been on Antar less than a
decade and Zarks seldom left the forest.

Albert began to stir before the Zark remembered its present condition.
Not being a carnivore, it saw nothing appetizing about Albert, but it
was energizing a Bandersnatch, and, like all Zarks, it was a purist. A
living Bandersnatch would undoubtedly drool happily at the sight of such
a tempting tidbit, so the Zark opened the three-foot jaws and drooled.

Albert chose this precise time to return to consciousness. He turned his
head groggily and looked up into a double row of saw-edged teeth
surmounted by a leering triangle of eyes. A drop of viscid drool
splattered moistly on his forehead, and as the awful face above him bent
closer to his own, he fainted.

The Zark snapped its jaws disapprovingly. This was not the proper
attitude to take in the presence of a ferocious monster. One simply
didn't go to sleep. One should attempt to run. The biped's act was
utterly illogical. It needed investigation.

* * * * *

Curiously, the Zark sent out a pseudopod of its substance through the
open mouth of its disguise. The faintly glittering thread oozed downward
and struck Albert's head beside his right eye. Without pausing, the
thread sank through skin and connective tissue, circled the eyeball and
located the optic nerve. It raced inward along the nerve trunk, split at
the optic chiasma, and entered the corpora quadrigemina where it
branched into innumerable microscopic filaments that followed the main
neural paths of the man's brain, probing the major areas of thought and
reflex.

The Zark quivered with pleasure. The creature was beautifully complex,
and, more important, untenanted. He would make an interesting host.

The Zark didn't hesitate. It needed a host; giving its present mass of
organic matter pseudo-life took too much ene