his nerves with an ancient distaste for crawling things. "Let's go back," he suggested uneasily. "There's nothing here for us, and I'm hungry."

"Don't be silly," Ptarra answered, and the old female superiority was strong in the thought. "Of course it's too small for us; I knew that when I saw the landing trail yesterday evening. It must be an instrument probe, with test animals. If it has telemetering equipment, though--"

Arnek tested the three spectra uneasily. At this distance, even a tight beam should be detectable. But he could feel nothing. There was only the steady wash of inertia-gravitic wavules, the electromagnetic noise from the sun and the growing, contemptuous mental leakage from Ptarra. Then he squirmed in embarrassment as his eyes detected the cracked base of the little ship.

Obviously, it had landed hard--probably hard enough to ruin instruments and release the two creatures. He should have noticed that at once.

There was no time to admit his error, however. Ptarra's silth lunged upright and the great rear legs began pulping ground and rocks in a full charge. Arnek leaped to follow out of old hunting habit. On a down-grade, his lighter silth soon caught up with the other.

Below, the two humans swung around at the earth-shaking thunder of the charge and started a frantic scrambling. They were making shrill sounds now, and the extreme low band of the mental spectrum held faint impulses.

Ptarra's thoughts lashed against his nerves. "Cut them off! Don't let them back to the probe. They may have destruct conditioning."

In the hunt, Arnek had long since become only an extension of his dominant mate. Now he folded his forelegs and dropped his head and neck into a javelin aimed between humans and ships. The smaller of the two was almost at the ramp.

At the last moment, moved by a sudden impulse, Arnek dropped his head lower and retracted his neck to soften the blow. He felt the human midge strike against his snout and go caromming off, to land fifty feet away.

Dim pain impulses stirred in the low mental background. Anger—or something like it—came from the other creature.

Arnek braked and pivoted sharply. The larger human had run forward toward the bloodied smaller figure. But as the silth's head faced the creature, one of the human's arms darted to something strapped about its middle. There was a surprising blast of sound. A stream of tiny, 

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