to fit inside my jaws any more, even if I tried cramming it in with these stupid pads of mine...."

He stopped the pointless line of reasoning and lifted his pair of double-elbowed "arms" before his failing sextet of eyes.

"They look strong enough, but are they?"

He could feel his control slipping. His life would hang upon the success or failure of his experiment, but there was no time to try and reason out a better attempt at survival.

Swiftly, ignoring the wriggling protests of the segment before his own, he encircled it tightly with those two-jointed "arms" and held it tight and painfully taut. It was still soft, still relatively raw from its rapid growth, and was not equipped to fend off attack from the rear. Jerry, straining terribly, ignoring the searing pain that licked his consciousness, cruelly and methodically tore out what had been his tongue.

The dripping end of the thing flopped once, then lay still. And Jerry's vision, after swimming in gray haze for a moment, coalesced once more into sharp focus and he knew his host was alive again.

"Whew!" he gasped, grateful to shut the great jaws once more. "It'll be tough, but I know how to survive, now. My segment's low enough on the evolutionary scale to regenerate lost parts; it will grow itself a new tongue. If I don't get lifted to a new Contact in the meantime, I'll simply tear that one out, too, and hang on until I get out of this damned thing!"

Then the segment ahead of him moved, and Jerry knew cold fear.

At the mouth of the burrow, one of the squiggly jellyfish-things had inserted a tentacle into the burrow and was busily ingesting the torn-out segment into a gaping hole in its underside amongst the shiny, wiggling arms. Even as he watched, it had completed its meal, and with a shiver of gustatory pleasure, readjusted its relative dimensions until it was three times its former size.

"This," said Jerry, bitterly, "is one hell of an ecology. Each creature is the other's chief natural enemy!"

Then his fright grew as he saw that the jellyfish—he could no longer think of it as anything else—was methodically ripping down the walls of the burrow, and coming for him.

Frantically, Jerry tried getting at the thing with his tongue, but the raw stump within his jaws was still in 

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