's about
over. What happens to the bodies they're dumping down manholes? They
can't go down a sewer that way?"

"Oh, you didn't know? Food."

"Food? For what?"

"The Arpales and us, of course."

"What? You don't mean--you _can't_ mean that they--and by your thought,
you Arpalones, too--are cannibals!"

"Cannibals? Explain, please? Oh, eaters-of-our-own-species. Of
course--certainly. Why not?"

"Why, self-respect ... common decency ... respect for one's fellow-man
... family ties...." Garlock was floundering; to be called upon to
explain his ingrained antipathy to such a custom was new to his
experience.

"You are silly. Worse, squeamish. Worst, supremely illogical." The
Arpalone paused, then went on as though trying to educate a hopelessly
illogical inferior, "While we do not kill Arpales purposely--except when
they over-breed--why waste good meat as fertilizer? If a diet is
wholesome, nutritious, well-balanced, and tasty, what shred of
difference can it _possibly_ make what its ingredients once were?"

"Well, I'll be damned." Garlock quit.

Belle agreed. "This whole deal makes me sick at the stomach and I think
my face is turning green too. But I'm devilishly and gleefully glad,
Clee, that I was here to hear _somebody_ give you cards, spaces, and big
casino and still beat the lights and liver out of you at your own game
of cold-blooded logic!"

"We gunners must go now. Would you like to come along with us and see
the end of this particular breeding-hole of sencors?"

At high speed the seven flew back along the line of advance of the
flying-tiger horde; across a barren valley, toward and to the side of a
mountain.

* * *

An area almost a mile square of that mountain's side was a burned,
blasted, churned, pocked, cratered and flaming waste; and the four
helicopters were still working on it. High-energy beams blasted, fairly
volatilizing the ground as they struck in as deep as they could be
driven. High-explosive shells bored deep and detonated, hurling
shattered rock and soil and yellow smoke far and wide; establishing new
craters by destroying the ones existing a moment before.

While it seemed incredible that any living thing larger than a microbe
could emerge under its own power from such a hell of energy, many flying
tigers did; apparently being blown aloft along with the hitherto
undisturbed volume of soil in which the creatures had been. Most of them
were not fully g