ded. "Only twenty-five years since this planet was discovered, and
we have slums already. I was over there most of the afternoon, with a pair
of city police." She didn't seem to want to talk about it. "What were you
doing today?"

"Ruth, you ought to ask Doc Mallin to drop in on Leonard Kellogg sometime,
and give him an unobstusive going over."

"You haven't been having trouble with him again?" she asked anxiously.

He made a face, and then tasted his drink. "It's trouble just being around
that character. Ruth, to use one of those expressions your profession
deplores, Len Kellogg is just plain nuts!" He drank some more of his
cocktail and helped himself to one of her cigarettes. "Here," he
continued, after lighting it. "A couple of days ago, he told me he'd been
getting inquiries about this plague of land-prawns they're having over on
Beta. He wanted me to set up a research project to find out why and what
to do about it."

"Well?"

"I did. I made two screen calls, and then I wrote a report and sent it up
to him. That was where I jerked my trigger; I ought to have taken a couple
of weeks and made a real production out of it."

"What did you tell him?"

"The facts. The limiting factor on land-prawn increase is the weather. The
eggs hatch underground and the immature prawns dig their way out in the
spring. If there's been a lot of rain, most of them drown in their holes
or as soon as they emerge. According to growth rings on trees, last spring
was the driest in the Beta Piedmont in centuries, so most of them
survived, and as they're parthenogenetic females, they all laid eggs. This
spring, it was even drier, so now they have land prawns all over central
Beta. And I don't know that anything can be done about them."

"Well, did he think you were just guessing?"

He shook his head in exasperation. "I don't know what he thinks. You're
the psychologist, you try to figure it. I sent him that report yesterday
morning. He seemed quite satisfied with it at the time. Today, just after
noon, he sent for me and told me it wouldn't do at all. Tried to insist
that the rainfall on Beta had been normal. That was silly; I referred him
to his meteorologists and climatologists, where I'd gotten my information.
He complained that the news services were after him for an explanation. I
told him I'd given him the only explanation there was. He said he simply
couldn't use it. There had to be some other explanation."

"If you don't lik