* * * * * I suppose you have played "tickling the dragon's tail" when you were a kid. I did. I guess all kids have. You know, worrying around two lumps of fissionable material and just keeping them from uniting and making a critical mass that will result in an explosion or lethal radiation. I caught my oldest boy doing it one day back on Earth and gave him a good tanning for it. Actually I thought it showed he had a lot of grit. Every real boy likes to tickle the dragon's tail. Maybe I was a little old for it, but that's what I was doing there in the Moran III jungle. I got the shield off my cigarette lighter and jerked out the dinky little damper rods for the pile and started easing the two little bricks toward each other with the point of my lead pencil. I heard something that resembled a death rattle come from Charlie's throat as the fingers of the alien closed down on it and my hand twitched. A blooming light stabbed at my eyes and I flicked the lighter away from me. The explosion was a dud. It lit up the jungle for a radius of half a mile like a giant flashbulb, but it exploded only about ten times as loud as a pistol shot. The mass hadn't been slapped together hard enough or held long enough to do any real damage. The natives weren't fools, though. They got out of there fast. I wished I could have gone with them. There was undoubtedly an unhealthy amount of radiation hanging around. "Now!" I told Bronoski. He ran into the clearing and found four bodies sprawled out: Charlie Baxter, his two guards and the native spokesman. Charlie and the native were both technically unconscious, but they each had a stranglehold on each other, with Charlie getting the worst of it. Bronoski pried the two of them apart. While he roused Sidney and Elliot from their punch-drunk state, I examined Charlie. He had a nasty burn on his leg and two toes were gone. If there was an explosion anywhere around, he was bound to be in front of it. He was abruptly choking and blinking watery eyes. "You did it, Charlie," I lied. "You beat him fair and square." * * * * * Charlie was in bed for the next few days while his grafted toes grew on, but he didn't seem to mind. We knew enough not to use the blood-brothers approach after fifty years and therefore it did not take us long to find out why we shouldn't. The Moran III culture was isolated in small colonies, but we had forgotten that a generation of the intelligent life-forms was only three Earth months. It seems a waste at first thought, but all things are relative. The Crystopeds of New Lichtenstein, for instance, have a life span of twenty thousand Terrestrial years. With so fast a turnover in Moran III individuals, there was bound to be a lot of variables introduced, resulting in change.