The tail stopped its slow oscillation. They held this position like statues for several minutes, then unwound to lie once more on the soggy ground. After that they did not move at all. The brief effort to defy gravity seemed to have exhausted them.

Drake drifted closer. He could see that each of the long brown cylinders of the nests curved down at one end to become a tunnel into the spongy surface. Tall stacks of uprooted plants stood next to each pipe. The top plants of the heap were still wriggling feebly, trying to find their way back to ground level.

Nesting materials or food? If the Snarks were herbivores, the source of possible danger to Drake became harder to explain. One of the Snarks had just ripped a plant out of the gritty surface with a pair of its front pseudopods. It was facing right toward Drake, and at last he could see a narrow horizontal slit like a dark gash across the whole lower edge of the face.

Drake moved closer yet. He itched to see just what the Snark was doing with that wriggling fern. It was not eating it.

The pseudopods seemed to be peeling off an outer layer, but they were not moving it to the face slit. They werepassing it backward, to other pairs of stubby feet. Again he wondered, Had he confused front and back? The curved tail was slowly swinging back and forth, like a lazy radar antenna.

He had been concentrating hard on the one Snark, ignoring the plants at his feet. His attention was brought back to them only when warm fingers reached up his legs.

It was because he had not been moving, He glanced down and scuffled his feet, encouraging the tendrils to fall away.

"Shoo!" he hissed under his breath. The plants were warm-blooded, regulating their own temperature. They were mobile. Was there a chance that they would someday achieve sentience? Spaceflight? He shook his foot. "Go on, there's nothing for you. Get out of here!"

When they finally gave up and dropped away, he looked up again at the nests. Everything was the same as before.

The Snark was still fiddling lethargically with its fern.

Then he realized that no other Snark was visible. While he had been watching one, all the rest had quietly vanished.

They must have crept into the nests, to the pipes and then maybe underground. He could go closer, or move around so that he could look into the open end of one of the pipes.

As other versions of Drake had done twice before? And never made it back to where Milton was waiting.

Drake decided that he had seen enough for one day. He could always return tomorrow. He turned and started back across the boulder-strewn landscape. The bright green sun was just as high in the sky, but he felt a colder breeze at his back. It encouraged him to hurry. By the time that he was halfway to the shore, he was loping along as fast as his stocky legs would carry him.

It seemed like gross overreaction-until he came to a place where a rock-free stretch of graveled surface made it safe to quickly turn his head.

The rocky surface behind him was clear. But to each side, converging on his path, he saw a dozen pale shapes. They were arranged in a fan-shaped pattern with him as its center. The closest Snarks were at the edge of the fan. They must have been setting up a wide circle, all the time that he was observing the nests. He had been lucky enough to leave when the encircling operation was only half-done.

He had time for no more than a quick look, then he had to turn his attention back to the boulder-strewn ground across which he was running. That one glance was enough to force him to seek more speed. The Snarks, slow as snails when he had first encountered them, were transformed. The pseudopods moved too fast to be seen, except as a pale blur beneath the segmented bodies. The Snarks themselves had become longer and thinner. The curved tail no longer swung from side to side but was flattened along the back.

The worst news was that they were gaining. He was sure of it, even though he dared not look around again. He took more risks, hurdling midsized boulders instead of going around them. He cursed his stumpy and heavyset body. He was low to the ground. That made it harder to see what lay on the other side. If he landed on a rock and fell over, or broke a leg . . .

The flier was visible ahead. Less than a kilometer. Where were the Snarks? He had to know.

Don't do it. Remember the runner who loses a race because he turns his head to see how big a lead he has.

It didn't matter. He had to know. He turned and saw two Snarks no more than twenty steps behind him.

He looked straight ahead and made a desperate final effort. He knew he wasn't going to make it. Only another couple of hundred meters, but he would need at least a second when he reached the flier. It would take time to jump in and slam the door closed. That's when the Snarks would get him. They would catch him and bring him down in the moment when he stopped to open the flier door.

"Milton!" He screamed the name, expecting nothing. He had told the Servitor to stay with the flier. Even if Milton heard him, the response would come too late.

But the little wheeled sphere was suddenly where it was not supposed to be-right in front of him. It made a quick sideways zigzag out of Drake's path, then veered in behind him. He heard the thump of a solid collision.

The flier was a dozen steps away, door open and waiting. Drake jumped and in the same movement grabbed the handle, swung inside, and dropped the latch into position. There was a loud splat as something large and rubbery andmoving at high speed hit the outside of the door.

The sound came again, and then again. Drake looked out of the flier window. A dozen Snarks were hurling themselves in mad succession against the closed door. The car was rocking with their impacts.

Beyond them, twenty meters away, another Snark reared high on its hindmost pseudopods. It had gone through a dramatic change of size and shape. It was about seven feet tall, swollen at the lower end like a giant pear. The white skin was stretched tight. As Drake watched, the skin undulated and bulged and squirmed. There was no sign of Milton.

Drake knew now what his own fate would have been. If the Servitor had not intercepted the Snarks and drawn their attention, he would be that great bulge. He might be wriggling, but not for long.

After another thirty seconds the bloated Snark toppled from its upright position. The slit on the blind face remained closed, but that dark gash stretched longer and longer. The Snark was changing shape again. Its broadest section was moving from one end to the other, traveling like a wave of obesity from tail to head.

The white skin dimpled and swelled and thrust out every few seconds at isolated points, randomly and erratically. The other Snarks one by one abandoned their attack on the flier and eased forward to form a circle around their bloated nestmate.

The featureless face could show no expression, but the squirming and wriggling suggested that the Snark was not enjoying itself. More waves of muscular contraction were running from front to back. Finally, slowly, reluctantly, the slit of a mouth began to alter in shape. It went from a single line to a narrow ellipse, then steadily expanded until it was a round hole three feet across. There was one final heave of peristalsis. Milton suddenly popped out, whisk broom first.

The Servitor was coated with dark-green slime. Milton started to roll upright, but before the move was complete another Snark had dived in. Pseudopods gripped the whisk-broom head and drew it toward a mouth that leered wider and wider.

Milton offered no resistance. Within a minute the Servitor was ingested, while the body of the Snark stretched to accommodate something wider than its usual dimension.

This time Drake was able to watch the whole process. It took about four minutes, from Milton's disappearance to his rebirth. The Snarks did not give up easily. Five more of them had a go at Milton. Five more times the Servitor was swallowed and regurgitated, before finally rolling unimpeded out of the waiting circle.

The little wheeled form moved to the aircar, and the wired head stared up at Drake. Let me in. The message did not need words. But Drake in the past half hour had acquired lots of respect for the Snarks.

"Just a minute."

He extended a cargo flap from the base of the car and waited as Milton rolled onto it. Once the Servitor was in position, Drake raised them a hundred feet into the air. That should be more than enough to foil the Snarks, leaping alone or working in concert. Even so, he moved the car sideways, out over the brooding blue sea, before he finally opened the door and allowed Milton to climb inside.

The Servitor was covered thicker than ever with slime. Milton looked disgusting and smelled worse. Drake didn't wait to learn what the Snarks were doing now but told the flier to return them at once to the main ship.

"I assume that we are done with the Snarks," Milton said. It was the closest that the Servitor would ever come to asking, "Can we go home now?"

Drake was inclined to say yes. Humans needed all the help they could get in combating the Shiva, but blind ferocity was not enough. It must be matched with intelligence. The Snarks had cunning and murderous intent, but having seen them throwing themselves one after another against the flier, Drake felt sure that they operated mainly at the level of instinct. They knew how to hunt in packs, even to set impressive traps for their prey. But a hundred Earth species had done that, and never been credited with intelligence.

On the other hand, if that huge Snark aggressiveness had been coupled with high intelligence . . .

Drake sat in the flier and stared down at his own heavily built body. "I want to try one more thing."

"Very well." Milton did not sigh. Servitors did not sigh."You took my somatic DNA and incorporated changes to give me a body suited to this planet. Where did you get those changes from?"

"From the genetic codes of certain life-forms native to this world-not, of course, from the Snarks."

"So it ought to be easy to perform a small variation to the procedure. Use my genetic material. We have a complete record of that. In particular, use the elements in me that code for intelligence. Merge them with Snark genetic material-and produce a smart Snark."

Milton received that suggestion with all the enthusiasm of a being who has been swallowed and disgorged half a dozen times in the past half hour. After a few seconds, the Servitor said, "I do not think that is possible."

"Why not? The technology sounds quite routine. No harder than what you did to put me in this body."

"The technology, perhaps. But we do not know the Snark genetic code."

"Not yet. But we'll find out all about it."

"How?"

"That's the easiest part," Drake snapped the fingers of his scaly paw. "Tomorrow we'll come back to the nests and kidnap one."

Chapter 20.

"When half-gods go, the gods arrive."

The syncarpal synthesis was a surprise to Drake. A merger of human and Snark genetic materials suggested many possible outcomes: a four-limbed sting-tailed caterpillar that stood upright; a faceless segmented cylinder with hair and hands; or maybe a bright-eyed human worm, using dozens of scaly protolimbs to grasp, to lift, and to walk.

The creature in the imager resembled none of these. The syncarpal synthesis-shortened to the carp, or usually just Carp, by Drake and Milton, could have walked among a crowd of humans and passed unnoticed. Drake, looking hard, could observe a few minor differences. The temples bulged too much, only partly concealed by long brown hair. There was something odd about the hips, as though the socket for the upper end of the thigh bone lay outside the pelvis.

The bare skin was coarse and rough, protected by a dense layer of gray bristles (but Drake had seen hairier humans).

Suitable clothing would hide all this, just as it would cover the unusual genitals. Those were hidden, withdrawn into the pelvic cavity, making sex determination impossible by observation. Drake thought of the carp as "him," but that probably reflected his own sense of identification with the naked being on the surface.

"And you, of course, are looking for differences," Milton said. Drake was seeing Carp in action for the first time, and the Servitor sounded defensive. Most of this was Milton's work, and no one else's. "In any case, outward appearance is of less importance than the modified inner features. And those are invisible to you."

The Servitor was not present in person. Drake, embodied in the scaled form designed for use on Graybill, had insisted on three levels of separation. He knew what he had asked for: extreme aggression combined with great intelligence; but neither he nor anyone else yet knew what they had.

So Drake and the only ship that could carry them to orbit sat in one location, close to the Graybill equator. Milton and an aircar were in another, on a long peninsula of the south polar continent; and Carp had been set free and remotely animated in a third place, on the shore close to the nests where Drake himself had narrowly escaped the Snarks.

Carp was independently monitored by both Drake and Milton. Drake zoomed in for a close-up of the face as Carp walked steadily toward the nests. The heavy features wore a placid and relaxed expression. The broad mouth was humming softly and tunelessly, and the eyes glanced from side to side, like a walker on a pleasant summer stroll.

Maybe that was the way Carp felt. Graybill's polar summer was ending in a lingering twilight, and already thetemperature on the island of the Snarks was falling fast. The dusting of snow on the boulders and gravel was made of solid carbon dioxide. Carp's physical structure, however, had been optimized to its local conditions. In spite of his naked skin he probably felt right at home.

If only Drake could read the dark eyes hidden beneath bony and prominent brow ridges! What did Carp know? What did he feel? In many ways, Carp was Drake himself; all the human genetic material had come from him. In biological terms, this was his child.

His only child, in so many billion years. Yet how far from their dreams, when they bought the old brick Colonial with its four bedrooms and shady fenced yard, and made their happy plans. One moment in annihilation's waste. One moment of the well of life to taste. But one moment together. Now he walked through eternity alone. Oh, Ana. . . .

Carp was heading confidently inland, toward the location of the Snark nests. Going home. The Snark from which Milton extracted the nonhuman part of Carp's genetic material had been taken from this very set of nests. When that Snark had been released and returned, unharmed and apparently unchanged, the others had torn it to pieces. Maybe, like a migrating bird, Carp carried the homing instinct in every cell of his body; maybe that would prove fatal when he arrived home.

They would know soon enough. Carp was walking steadily across blue-green vegetation that soaked up a last dribble of sunlight before digging down below-ground and hibernating until spring. The nest was in view, with its broad pipes. As before, dozens of Snarks were creeping around them, stacking piles of plant life against their sides.

Carp walked right into their midst. They did not turn or attack or crawl away. They went on exactly as before, taking no more notice of him than they did of each other. He squatted down by one of the heaps of dead plants, and did not move for many minutes.

"There is no sign that the others are stalking him," Milton said at last. "In your own case, they by this time had you close to surrounded. And had you approached the nests themselves, as you did in one previous embodiment, you would have been attacked. It seems that in spite of his appearance, they accept Carp as one of their own. What now?"

It was a good question. Drake was seeking evidence that Carp was a prototype for the fighting machine that humanity needed so desperately. Everything that he had tried against the Shiva had led to failure; every day the Silent Zone grew like a cancer, eating its way in a growing arc across the Galaxy.

The Snarks themselves had seemed like a good first test. The action would take place in a remote location, far from interference or assistance from Milton. If Carp so much as survived, he would be doing a lot better than Drake. In fact, he had already done better.

Drake zoomed in closer, studying Carp's face. It was thoughtful, as thoughtful as Drake himself. And quite unreadable.

"Milton, do you know how the Snarks decide what they'll attack, and what they'll leave alone?"

"Not from observation. However, if they are like most animals who form nesting colonies, the principal sense and signal is olfactory. It seems probable that Carp smells right to them."

Just as Drake had smelled wrong. He still had no answer to his old question: From what distance could a Snark detect a strange animal from its scent? But even if Carp smelled right to the Snarks, he certainly looked wrong. And Milton, who presumably smelled nothing at all like anything organic, had been attacked and swallowed mindlessly. Why hadn't the Snarks given Carp at least a test swallow?

For the same reason that they were not constantly swallowing each other. Maybe the test hadn't failed after all. Maybe Carp had taken it-and passed, by changing his smell to one acceptable to the Snarks.

And what was he doing now? He was still squatting by the heap of leaves, apparently lost in thought.

Drake noticed that the Snarks had begun a common activity. They were removing plants from the piles and dragging them across to make a master heap. In the first sign of peaceful cooperation that he had seen, four of them were using their many pseudopods to shape the heap. The sickle-shaped tails patted and smoothed the edges to round them off and provide a compact, flat-topped structure.

It only became obvious what they were doing when they were finished, and Carp moved across to lie down on the heap.

"Milton! They've made him a damned bed. ""So it would appear."

"But how did he tell them what to do? You said that the Snarks have no language."

"Apparently I was wrong. Do you wish me to-abandon the experiment?"

The Servitor, like other composites, could not handle certain notions. What Milton meant was, Do you wish me to destroy Carp?

"Of course not. He found an answer that's a lot more effective than aggression: he has the Snarks working for him. I want you to go ahead with the next test. Pick him up-as soon as he's had some sleep."

If Carp was indeed proposing to sleep. He was stretched out comfortably on his back on the bed of plants, arms raised to cushion his head on his open hands. The dark, expressionless eyes were open, gazing up into a gentle downward drift of CO2 snow.

He was awake, Drake realized. And thinking . . . what?

The Snarks were Graybill's most feral and dangerous species, but they were not the planet's only predator. The soundbugs were big gray invertebrates with formidable exoskeletons. They ruled the "tropics," where Graybill's sun could, at zenith, sometimes melt mercury.

The soundbugs were solitary hunters. "They do not resemble the Snarks in appearance, form, or habits," Milton assured Drake. "Also, they hunt at night, and they use primarily sound and echo-location, like the bats of your own home world. It seems unlikely that smell will play any part in Carp's survival."

"If he survives." Drake had seen a close-up of a soundbug, and he shriveled inside at the idea of fighting one. The animal was like a hard-shelled scorpion, about two meters long and supported by a dozen strong and leathery legs. It weighed three or four hundred pounds, most of that the thick shield of dense armor on its back and belly. Like the Snarks, it swallowed its food whole; unlike them, it could not expand its body and mouth because the massive exoskeleton was of fixed width. Instead, two constriction rings at the front of the maw crushed the prey, living or dead, to a size where it could be engulfed.

"It is my opinion that our Carp will do more than survive. He will triumph." Milton had initially been dubious about the prospects of any combination of Snark and human. The idea that such a creature might be of value in the battle with the Shiva had seemed preposterous. Now the Servitor's position was changing. Milton had become a supporter, rooting for their creation and ready to believe that it could do anything.

The Servitor was ready to order Carp's release. At Drake's insistence, all activities would still be carried out using remote handling equipment. As an extra precaution, the pilotless flier that had taken Carp from the Snark colony to the equator contained no sentient components. Milton and Drake were directing operations from a station several hundreds of kilometers away and monitoring everything with ground-based, airborne, and spaceborne observing systems.

Graybill's long twilight was beginning when the door of the aircar automatically opened, and Carp was free to step out onto the crumbling, orange-gray surface.

The planet's atmosphere was too thick for most stars to shine brightly through. Night observations had to rely on thermal and microwave signatures, and those pictures tended to be grainy and monochrome. Milton was already complaining of their poor quality and augmenting the results with sonic imaging. Drake worried that those high-frequency sound beams might interfere with the soundbug's own sonic pulses.

Milton reassured him. "It is a different frequency regime. The worst that can happen is occasional signal aliasing, and the soundbug's interpretation system has enough redundancy to compensate for that. Do not worry. The soundbug will be able to see Carp."

There was a problem with Milton's assessment. Unless Carp came out, no one would see him at all; and at the moment, nothing moved in the clearing where the flier stood.

"What's he doing in there?" Drake asked at last.

"I am sorry, but I am unable to answer your question. The flier's imaging systems are directed toward observation outside the car. Maybe we should change that in the future. But it is all right. Here he comes."A shadowy figure was emerging from the flier's open door. Carp paused just a few feet from the flier, turning his head slowly from side to side.

"He won't see clearly for much longer. And when it is fully dark, he will lack our night sensors." Milton increased the image intensity. The scene became brighter, but no less grainy. "What can he be doing?"