iosis is. Together each one is better off than either one would be
alone. We all of us live in symbiosis with the bacteria in our digestive
tracts, don't we? We provide them with a place to live and grow, and
they help us digest our food. It's a kind of a partnership--and Fuzzy
and I are partners in the same sort of way."

Jack had argued, and then lost his temper, and finally grudgingly agreed
that he supposed he would have to tolerate it even if it didn't make
sense to him.

But the creatures on 31 Brucker VII were "odd" far beyond the reasonable
limits of oddness--so far beyond it that the doctors could not believe
the things that their eyes and their instruments were telling them.

When Tiger and Jack came back to the _Lancet_ after their first trip to
the planet's surface, they were visibly shaken. Geographically, they had
found it just as it had been described in the exploratory reports--a
barren, desert land with only a few large islands of vegetation in the
equatorial regions.

"But the people!" Jack said. "They don't fit into _any_ kind of pattern.
They've got houses--at least I guess you'd call them houses--but every
one of them is like every other one, and they're all crammed together in
tight little bunches, with nothing for miles in between. They've got an
advanced technology, a good communications system, manufacturing
techniques and everything, but they just don't use them."

"It's more than that," Tiger said. "They don't seem to _want_ to use
them."

"Well, it doesn't add up, to me," Jack said. "There are thousands of
towns and cities down there, all of them miles apart, and yet they had
to go dig an old rusty jet scooter out of storage and get the motor
rebuilt just specially to take us from one place to another. I know
things can get disorganized with a plague in the land, but this plague
just hasn't been going on that long."

"What about the sickness?" Dal asked. "Is it as bad as it sounded?"

"Worse, if anything," Tiger said gloomily. "They're dying by the
thousands, and I hope we got those suits of ours decontaminated, because
I don't want any part of this disease."

Graphically, he described the conditions they had found among the
stricken people. There was no question that a plague was stalking the
land. In the rutted mud roads of the villages and towns the dead were
piled in gutters, and in all of the cities a deathly stillness hung over
the streets. Those who had not yet succumbed to t