weird donovans scampering happily.

They came climbing up his arms and across his shoulders and milled
about on the ground beside him, waiting for the others.

And finally the Cytha, not skinned down to the bare bones of its
Thanksgiving-turkey-size, but far smaller than it had been, climbed
awkwardly up the rifle and the sling to safety.

Duncan hauled the rifle up and twisted himself into a sitting
position.

The Cytha, he saw, was reassembling.

He watched in fascination as the restless miniatures of the planet's
life swarmed and seethed like a hive of bees, each one clicking into
place to form the entire beast.

And now the Cytha was complete. Yet small--still small--no more than
lion-size.

"But it is such a little one," Zikkara had argued with him that
morning at the farm. "It is such a young one."

Just a young brood, no more than suckling infants--if suckling was the
word, or even some kind of wild approximation. And through the months
and years, the Cytha would grow, with the growing of its diverse
children, until it became a monstrous thing.

It stood there looking at Duncan and the tree.

"Now," said Duncan, "if you'll push on the tree, I think that between
the two of us--"

"It is too bad," the Cytha said, and wheeled itself about.

He watched it go loping off.

"Hey!" he yelled.

But it didn't stop.

He grabbed up the rifle and had it halfway to his shoulder before he
remembered how absolutely futile it was to shoot at the Cytha.

He let the rifle down.

"The dirty, ungrateful, double-crossing--"

He stopped himself. There was no profit in rage. When you were in a
jam, you did the best you could. You figured out the problem and you
picked the course that seemed best and you didn't panic at the odds.

He laid the rifle in his lap and started to hook up the sling and it
was not till then that he saw the barrel was packed with sand and
dirt.

He sat numbly for a moment, thinking back to how close he had been to
firing at the Cytha, and if that barrel was packed hard enough or deep
enough, he might have had an exploding weapon in his hands.

He had used the rifle as a crowbar, which was no way to use a gun.
That was one way, he told himself, that was guaranteed to ruin it.

* * * * *

Duncan hunted around and found a twig and dug at the clogged muzzle,
but the dirt was jammed too firmly in it and he made little progress.

He dropped the twig and w