I might have saved my feelings, because two seconds later I was gazing wide-eyed at the shattered stock of my rifle and the zloor was still eating away at the tree.

I tried just one more experiment before I called it a day. I put the rifle barrel under him and tried to pry him off the ground. The zloor still ignored me, but the steel barrel bent under the pressure. The animal hadn't budged.

Without knocking, I walked back into Mike Holiday's room. He was lying stretched out on the bed, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling.

He didn't need to look at me. He said, "Nap, you are now a full-fledged member of the zloor club."

"What does one of those things weigh?" I snapped.

"Hey, red-head," he grunted, "don't take it out on me, I didn't invent them. Far as I know, nobody's ever weighed one, but it's been estimated that they go about five tons here on Mars. Six times that on earth."

"That's insane!"

"Sure is. That's why the government wants one so badly. Just isn't natural for such an animal to develop in the solar system."

"Or anywhere else!"

He got up on one elbow and grinned over at me. "The theory is that it's a life form from some planet belonging to a white dwarf star. Some time ago a guy named Adams at the Mount Wilson observatory, back on Earth, estimated that the density of some of the white dwarfs was two thousand times greater than platinum. I'm not much up on it myself."

I scowled down at him. "How'd it get here?"

He was serious now. "That's the reason the government wants one so badly, Nap. They want to get it to their laboratories and find out everything they can. There only seems to be one possibility, though."

"What's that?"

"If it is alien to the solar system and from a white dwarf's planet, it might have been brought here deliberately and left as a guinea pig."

I began to say something there but he held up a hand to stop me. "Possibly an exploring spaceship from the alien planet was looking for colony sites. When it got to our solar system it left some of these animals with the idea of coming back in a few thousand years or so to see if the zloors were able to adapt themselves to the conditions 

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