managed to suppress. It must have been almost a hundred degrees out there. And the damned thing was shivering.

Here and there, Jerry noticed suddenly, other half-opened trapdoors were framing other bear-things' heads. The air was taut with electric tension, the tension of a slow trigger-squeeze that moves millimeter by millimeter toward the instant explosion....

The soft shuffling sounds of the animal's movement jogged Jerry's memory then, and he knew it for the sound he had heard when enhosted in the grasshopper-thing. Was a bear-thing what they'd been waiting in the trees so silently for? And what would be the culmination of that vigil?

Then the bear-thing he was in Contact with hitched itself up another root-rung. Jerry saw the thing toward which the quaking creature was headed, in a hunched crawl, its whimpers more anguished by the moment.

Pendant in the green gloaming, about four feet above the spongy brown jungle floor, hung a thick yellow-gray gourd at the tip of a long vine. Its sides glittered stickily with condensed moisture that mingled with the effluvium of the gourd itself. The odor was both noisome and compelling, powerful as a bushel of rotting roses. It sickened as it lured, teased the nostrils as it cloyed within the lungs.

To this dangling obscenity the bear-thing moved. Its eyes were no longer afraid, but glazed and dulled by the strength of that musky lure. Its movements were fluid and trancelike.

It arose on sturdy hind limbs and struck at the gourd with a gentle paw, sending it jouncing to one side on its long green vine. As it bobbed back, the creature struck it off in the opposite direction with a sharper blow.

Jerry watched in fascination. The gourd swung faster; the mottled pink-white alien creature swayed and wove its forelimbs and thick body in a ritual dance matching the tempo of the arcing gourd.

Then Jerry noted that the vine was unlike earth-vines which parasitically employ treetops as their unwilling trellises. It is a limp extension of the tip of a tree branch itself. So were all the other vines in that green matting overhead.

A ripping sound yanked his gaze back to the dazed creature and the gourd again.

A ragged tear had riven the side of the gourd. Tiny coils of green were dribbling out in batches, like watchsprings spilled from a 

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