I walked up to him cautiously. He didn't move. In my surprise, I even prodded him gently with my shoe. He still didn't move. He looked up at me again, his eyes a wistful yellowish color, then went back to his meal. I shook my head, wondering if I was still suffering from the effects of the woji binge, or what. This was just too easy--maybe it was a sick one or something. I reached down and grasped it by the ears and started to pick it up. Have you ever tried to pick up something and found out it either weighed considerably more, or was fastened to the floor? That's what happened to me. With Martian gravity what it is, I figured I'd have a weight of possibly one earth pound of lift. Instead, I nearly broke my back--and the zloor still didn't budge. I put more pressure to bear, all my strength--and the zloor complacently went on eating. Hands on hips, I stood above the rabbit-like animal and stared at it. Finally, I muttered, "More than one way to bring home a zloor," and, taking my gun by the barrel, I swung it viciously down at the gentle looking little animal--feeling like a heel as I did it. 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."