exploding pellets struck against Arnek's snout. He bellowed in annoyance and took a step forward, lifting a foreleg to swat at the midge.

It jerked back. Then it darted forward, bending to lift its companion in its forelimbs. Either the gravity here was less than on its home world, or the thing was stronger than it looked. The first leap sent the burdened human backwards more than twenty feet. Then it was bounding off in frantic efforts to reach the further side of the depression where a jumble of rocks might give it cover.

There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. "If your hunger is so great, why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood smells sweet enough."

Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer.

Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe.

"It had a weapon," he commented, changing the subject.

Ptarra rumbled an assent. "I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can find in the probe."

She slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit.

Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male, he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery...though the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary.

Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. "Maybe the creatures operated it," he suggested."What makes you think so?" "I don't know. It just seems somehow--"
"Intuition!" Ptarra snorted. Then she seemed less certain. "Yet I can't blame you this time. It _does_ almost look that way. But it's logically impossible. Besides, there are automatic controls for guiding the probe. The builders probably just amused themselves, the way we once put slurry-pods in the gulla pens. Ah, this looks sound enough!"
She pulled a tiny box out of the wreckage that had been spread out flat on the ground.
With infinite care, she managed 

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