their stalker.

"I've been thinking about those natives," Wallace said, as they lay stretched on the grass. "If they are lost colonists—have you wondered how they managed to survive here so long?"

"I did wonder how they protected themselves against the cats," Saxton answered. "They don't seem to have any weapons."

"Al-fin demonstrated that they must have exceptionally good hearing," Wallace said. "But would that be enough? You'd think the cats would get them—when they're sleeping, if not during the day—or kill off their young."

"That's what I meant," Saxton said. "We saw no weapons, so they must have some other means of defense."

"They live pretty much like animals," Wallace observed. "Maybe they stay alive the same way. If animals aren't powerful, they're usually swift. Or they have some other survival characteristics, such as prolific propagation. But what do these savages have—except perhaps the sharp hearing that you mentioned? That alone shouldn't be a deciding factor. Yet they were able to survive here for two thousand years."

"How about an instinct of dispersal?" Saxton asked. "There might be hundreds of groups like the one we saw."

"That would help. But my thought was that if they don't use weapons they might have gone at it from another angle: they adjusted themselves, instead of their tools, to their environment."

"Special ability stuff?" Saxton asked.

Wallace glanced over at the other man. By the look of abstraction on Saxton's face he knew that no answer was necessary. Saxton's imagination was a moving force. When a subject intrigued him he could no more abandon it and turn to something else than he could stop breathing. The trait was one that made him an ideal partner for Wallace, with his more logical reasoning, and his insistence on weighing fact against fact and belief against belief. It was, in fact, the reason the two men had been teamed. One was the intuitive, the other the harmonizing, controlling, factor in their combination.

Saxton rose and stretched. "I think I'll go inside," he said. "I want to poke around in the library a while."

Wallace smiled and followed his companion into the ship. This at least would take Saxton's mind off their troubles. Their enforced inactivity would be less tedious for the more imaginative man.

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