said, 'That's not blood, Hank. Some native red wine I happened to spill. Part of the ceremony.'

"I started to ask what ceremony, and then I saw he was wearing one of the gold earrings. I thought that was damn funny, but he started talking to Lecky, and he looked and acted all right—well, fairly all right. Lecky was telling him what a few of the grunts meant, and he acted awful interested—but somehow I got the idea he was pretending most of that interest so he wouldn't have to talk to me. He acted as though he was thinking hard, inside, and maybe he was making up a better story to cover that stain on his clothes and the fact that he'd changed his mind so quick about the earring.

"I was getting the notion that something was rotten in the state of Ganymede, but I didn't know what. I decided to keep my yap shut and my eyes open till I found out.

"I'd have plenty of time to study Haynes later, though, so I wandered off again to the edge of the village and just outside it. And it occurred to me that if there was anything I wasn't supposed to see, I might stand a better chance of seeing it if I got under cover. There were plenty of bushes around and I picked out a good clump of them and hid. From the way my lungs worked, I figured I had maybe a half hour before we'd have to start back for the ship.

"And less than half that time had gone by before I saw something."

I stopped talking to hold the pistol up to the light and squint through the barrel. It was getting pretty clean, but there were a couple of spots left up near the muzzle end.

Blake said, "Let me guess. You saw a Martian traag-hound standing on his tail, singing Annie Laurie."

"Worse than that," I said "I saw one of those Ganymede natives get his legs bit off. And it annoyed him."

"It would annoy anyone," said Blake. "Even me, and I'm a pretty mild-tempered guy. What bit them off?"

"I never found out," I told him. "It was something under water. There was a stream there, going by the village, and there must have been something like crocodiles in it. Two natives came out of the village and started to wade across the stream. About half-way over one of them gave a yelp and went down.

"The other grabbed him and pulled him up on the other bank. And both his legs were gone just above the knees.

"And the damnedest thing happened. The 

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