said sharply. “Look there!”

A head broke the water a few dozen feet away. A round, furry head like a seal’s, with staring eyes. The nose was a snout, the mouth broad and loose and lipless. But for all the animalism of the creature, the curve of its head above the eyes, its obvious cranial index, showed that it must possess a brain of some intelligence.

Quade and Wolfe remained motionless. The water broke into a seething rush of bubbles and the Zonal came shoreward. It waded out and stood knee-deep in water, staring blankly.

Its body was thoroughly anthropoid in outline, and curiously graceful in its sleekly furred, streamlined contours. The Zonal was a little more than five feet tall. Its hands and feet were huge and webbed.

The Zonal squirted jets of liquid from its eyes. Then it bent and submerged its head briefly. Wolfe had involuntarily stepped back. Quade spoke softly.

“Take it easy. Its eyeballs are hollow—it’s got an opaque diaphragm stretched over ’em, like a kettle-drum. No lens. There’s a hole in the center of the diaphragm to admit light, and the hollow’s kept filled with water. Acts as a lens. It’s got perfect vision, though. And—look at that thing on its back!”

The Zonal, having filled its hollow eyes with water, stood up again, but Quade and Wolfe had already got a glimpse of the creature’s flight-sac, a great sausage-shaped object that made it look humpbacked. The sac had a gristly projection at one end that suddenly moved and twisted. The Zonal, tiring of the two men’s company, disappeared.

Wolfe was left blinking at the place where it had been. Quade, who knew what to expect, looked up. The creature was shooting through the air like a streamlined spaceship, thirty feet high and going fast. Quade pointed it out to his companion.

“Uh!” Wolfe said. “It’s worse than a flea. How does it do that?”

“Same way a squid does,” Quade explained, watching the Zonal fall like a stone toward the ground. A dozen feet above a mound of gnarled lava the amphibian seemed to halt in the air, then sank down gently, to stand quietly surveying its surroundings.

“A squid?”

“Or a cuttlefish. Squirts water out of a sac—the old repulsion principle. Only the Zonals are a little more scientific about it. Those sacs on their back look soft, but 

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