emitting eager mouse-squeaks of hunger.

They rushed upon the body in which they'd been so violently incubated and swiftly, systematically devoured it, blood, bone and sinew.

And when not even a memory of the dead beast was left upon the soil, the tiny pink-white things began to burrow downward into the ground. Soon there was nothing left in the area but a dried fragment of vine, a few loose mounds of soil and a vast silence.

"I'll be a monkey's uncle!" said Jerry ... forgetting in his excitement that this phrase was nearly a concise parody of the Space Zoologists' final oath of duty, and kiddingly used as such by the older members of the group.

The whole damned planet was symbiotic! After witnessing those alien life-death rites, it didn't take him long to figure out the screwball connections between the species. Insects, once born of vine-gourds and fully grown, then propagated their species by a strange means: laying bear-eggs in a bear-thing and dying. And dying, eaten by the surviving bears, they turned to seeds which—left in the tunnels by the bear-things as droppings—in turn took root and became trees.

And the trees, under the onslaught of another bear-thing on a dangling pod, would produce new insects, then drip its ichor to fertilize the eggs in the newly dead bear-thing....

Jerry found his mind tangling as he attempted a better pinpointing of the plant-animal-insect relationship. A dead adult insect, plus a trip through a bear-thing's alimentary canal, produced a tree. A tree-pod, with the swatting stimulus of a bear-thing's paws, gave birth to new insects. And insect eggs in animal flesh, stimulated by the tree-ichor, gestated swiftly into young animals....

That meant, simply, that insect plus bear equals tree, tree plus bear equals insect, and insect plus tree equals bear. With three systems, each relied on the non-inclusive member for the breeding-ground. Insect-plus-ichor produced small animals in the animal flesh. Dead-insect-plus-bear produced tree in the tree-flesh (if one considered dead tree leaves and bark and such as the makeup of the soil.) Bear-swats-plus-tree produced insects.... "Damn," said Jerry to himself, "but not in the insect-flesh. The thing won't round off...."

He tried again, thinking hard. In effect, the trees were parents to the insects, insects parents to the bears, and bears parents to the trees.... Though in another sense, 

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