ee months before the next colonists were due, a new animal was
detected. Food was missing from the fields. It was not another tiger:
they were carnivorous. Nor rats, for vines were stripped in a manner
that no rodent could manage.

The food was not important. The colony had enough in storage. But if
the new animal signaled another plague, it was necessary to know how
to meet it. The sooner they knew what the animal was, the better
defense they could set up against it.

Dogs were useless. The animal roamed the field they were loose in, and
they did not attack nor even seem to know it was there.

The colonists were called upon for guard duty again, but it evaded
them. They patrolled for a week and they still did not catch sight of
it.

Hafner called them in and rigged up an alarm system in the field most
frequented by the animal. It detected that, too, and moved its sphere
of operations to a field in which the alarm system had not been
installed.

Hafner conferred with the engineer, who devised an alarm that would
react to body radiation. It was buried in the original field and the
old alarm was moved to another.

Two nights later, just before dawn, the alarm rang.

Marin met Hafner at the edge of the settlement. Both carried rifles.
They walked; the noise of any vehicle was likely to frighten the
animal. They circled around and approached the field from the rear.
The men in the camp had been alerted. If they needed help, it was
ready.

They crept silently through the underbrush. It was feeding in the
field, not noisily, yet they could hear it. The dogs hadn't barked.

They inched nearer. The blue sun of Glade came up and shone full on
their quarry. The gun dropped in Hafner's hand. He clenched his teeth
and raised it again.

Marin put out a restraining arm. "Don't shoot," he whispered.

"I'm the exec here. I say it's dangerous."

"Dangerous," agreed Marin, still in a whisper. "That's why you can't
shoot. It's more dangerous than you know."

Hafner hesitated and Marin went on. "The omnimal couldn't compete in
the changed environment and so it evolved mice. We stopped the mice
and it countered with rats. We turned back the rat and it provided the
tiger.

"The tiger was easiest of all for us and so it was apparently stopped
for a while. But it didn't really stop. Another animal was being
formed, the one you see there. It took the omnimal two years to create
it--how, I don't know. A million years were requ