the sky through glowing green obscurity, were the be-
fronded stems of the plant jungle which was their objective.
It was too dim with distance to allow him to see the clinging
castles of the Flosc yet, but he knew that the longest part
of the march was over. He narrowed his eyes and cleft the
sunlit waters with driving, rapid strokes of his webbed hands
and feet. The invaders poured after him over the crest of the
bar in an orderly torrent.
Lavon swung his arm in a circle. Silently, the following
squadrons glided into a great paraboloid, its axis pointed at
the jungle. The castles were visible now; until the formation
of the army, they had been the only products of close co-
operation that this world had ever seen. They were built of
single brown tubes, narrow at the base, attached to each
other in a random pattern in a-n ensemble as delicate as a
branching coral. In the mouth of each tube was a rotifer, a
Flosc, distinguished from other Eaters by the four-leaf-
clover of its corona, and by the single, prehensile finger
springing from the small of its back, with which it ceaselessly
molded its brown spittle into hard pellets and cemented
them carefully to the rim of its tube.
As usual, the castles chilled Lavon’s muscles with doubt
They were perfect, and they had always been one of the
major, stony flowers of summer, long before there had been
any First Awakening, or any men. And there was surely
something wrong with the water in the upper level; it was
warm and sleepy. The heads of the Flosc hummed content-