did you power the ship? What were those crimson pellets which we saw pouring into the hopper in the ship?" Clyde Ellery asked.

The seeds of the Flame Tree. They are a more powerful explosive than anything known to your science.

"And the recordings?" asked Ellery.

The seed-bearing cones of our Repeater Tree. It took many trips of our first ship, for our message had to be made up of individual words from your languages. We could not communicate as we are now because of the distance.

"How did you know that we needed help?" Ellery asked.

We felt the waves of force set up by the explosion of what you called atomic energy. We had felt these waves before, coming from other planets, and each time all thoughts gradually died out on those planets and we knew that the intelligent life there had died. The last time it happened was on the fourth planet of our sun, a long time ago.

"And you were unable to save any of them?"

We could have saved them if we'd wished, came the thought.

"Which seems to bring us to the most important question of all," Clyde Ellery said with a wry smile. "Why did you save us?"

There was a hesitation, and then the thought came to them: The animal life on our planet died out because we could not, of course, permit it to feed on us. Yet, as you must know, we needed some form of animal life to maintain the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide necessary to our lives. You seemed ideal for our purpose, for you could bring with you other animal life and your undeveloped plant life to feed yourselves.

"And you did destroy the ships so that we could not leave?"

Of course.

For several minutes, the men looked silently at each other and considered that which they had received.

"It's hard to accept," Clyde Ellery said to the others, "but I suppose it's not too surprising when you stop to think about it. Even on Earth, the actual boundaries between animals and plants were artificial, as shown by our one-celled animal life which often couldn't be told from a unicell plant. It was just a question of where this evolutionary accident happened."

Not an accident, came the thought swiftly. It was an accident that 

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