owly, and one of the creatures was in the act of dumping
his rubbish below it. The wheel ground it with a crunch--sand, stones,
plants, all into powder that sifted away somewhere. While we watched,
others filed in, repeating the process, and that seemed to be all. No
rhyme nor reason to the whole thing--but that's characteristic of this
crazy planet. And there was another fact that's almost too bizarre to
believe.

"One of the creatures, having dumped his load, pushed his cart aside
with a crash and calmly shoved himself under the wheel! I watched him
being crushed, too stupefied to make a sound, and a moment later,
another followed him! They were perfectly methodical about it, too; one
of the cartless creatures took the abandoned pushcart.

"Tweel didn't seem surprised; I pointed out the next suicide to him, and
he just gave the most human-like shrug imaginable, as much as to say,
'What can I do about it?' He must have known more or less about these
creatures.

"Then I saw something else. There was something beyond the wheel,
something shining on a sort of low pedestal. I walked over; there was a
little crystal about the size of an egg, fluorescing to beat Tophet. The
light from it stung my hands and face, almost like a static discharge,
and then I noticed another funny thing. Remember that wart I had on my
left thumb? Look!" Jarvis extended his hand. "It dried up and fell
off--just like that! And my abused nose--say, the pain went out of it
like magic! The thing had the property of hard x-rays or gamma
radiations, only more so; it destroyed diseased tissue and left healthy
tissue unharmed!

"I was thinking what a present _that'd_ be to take back to Mother Earth
when a lot of racket interrupted. We dashed back to the other side of
the wheel in time to see one of the pushcarts ground up. Some suicide
had been careless, it seems.

"Then suddenly the creatures were booming and drumming all around us and
their noise was decidedly menacing. A crowd of them advanced toward us;
we backed out of what I thought was the passage we'd entered by, and
they came rumbling after us, some pushing carts and some not. Crazy
brutes! There was a whole chorus of 'We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!' I
didn't like the 'ouch'; it was rather suggestive.

"Tweel had his glass gun out and I dumped my water tank for greater
freedom and got mine. We backed up the corridor with the barrel-beasts
following--about twenty of them. Queer thing--the ones