Swiftly, ignoring the wriggling protests of the segment before his own, he encircled it tightly with those two-jointed "arms" and held it tight and painfully taut. It was still soft, still relatively raw from its rapid growth, and was not equipped to fend off attack from the rear. Jerry, straining terribly, ignoring the searing pain that licked his consciousness, cruelly and methodically tore out what had been his tongue. The dripping end of the thing flopped once, then lay still. And Jerry's vision, after swimming in gray haze for a moment, coalesced once more into sharp focus and he knew his host was alive again. "Whew!" he gasped, grateful to shut the great jaws once more. "It'll be tough, but I know how to survive, now. My segment's low enough on the evolutionary scale to regenerate lost parts; it will grow itself a new tongue. If I don't get lifted to a new Contact in the meantime, I'll simply tear _that_ one out, too, and hang on until I get _out_ of this damned thing!" Then the segment ahead of him moved, and Jerry knew cold fear. At the mouth of the burrow, one of the squiggly jellyfish-things had inserted a tentacle into the burrow and was busily ingesting the torn-out segment into a gaping hole in its underside amongst the shiny, wiggling arms. Even as he watched, it had completed its meal, and with a shiver of gustatory pleasure, readjusted its relative dimensions until it was three times its former size. "This," said Jerry, bitterly, "is one hell of an ecology. Each creature is the other's chief natural enemy!" Then his fright grew as he saw that the jellyfish--he could no longer think of it as anything else--was methodically ripping down the walls of the burrow, and coming for _him_. Frantically, Jerry tried getting at the thing with his tongue, but the raw stump within his jaws was still in the process of generating a new head-and-eyes part. A mere stub shot forward to wag futilely at the approaching enemy. Jerry shot his tesselated pads forward, trying to push and pummel the thing away, but the few blows that landed rebounded from that shiny body like pith-balls bouncing from an electrostatic plate. Then the jellyfish grappled with, and held onto, one of Jerry's arms, and began calmly to tuck it into its digestive cavity. If the pad had been only lightly tactile before, it became supersensitive now, as the creature's digestive juices began to erode it into its component chemicals.