"Thanks, Nadreck. That will perhaps make my story believable. From the thoughts of one of the entities in question, I reconstructed such a solar system. More, that entity himself belonged to just such a race. It was _such_ a nice reconstruction," Camilla went on, plaintively, "and it fitted all those other life-forms so beautifully, especially Kat's 'four-cycle periods.' And to prove it, Kat--put up your block, now--you never told anybody the classification of your pet to more than seven places, did you, or even thought about it?" "No." Kathryn's mind, since the moment of warning, had been unreadable. "Take the seven. The next three were S-T-R. Check?" "Check." "But that makes it _solid_, Sis!" Kit exclaimed. "That's what I thought, for a minute--that we had Boskone at last. However, when Tregonsee and I first felt 'X,' long before you met yours, Kat, his classification was TUUV. That would fit in well enough as a spring form, with Kat's as the summer form. What ruins it, though, is that when he killed himself, just a little while ago and long after a summer form could possibly exist--to say nothing of a spring form--his classification was _still_ TUUV. To ten places it was TUUVWYXXWT." "Well, go on," Kinnison suggested. "What do you make of it?" "The obvious explanation is that one or all of those entities were planted or primed--not specifically for us, probably, since we are relatively unknown, but for any competent observer. If so, they don't mean a thing." Camilla was not now overestimating her own powers or underestimating those of Boskonia. "There are several others, less obvious, leading to the same conclusion. Tregonsee is not ready to believe any of them, however, and neither am I. Assuming that our data was not biased, we must also account for the fact that the locations in space were--" "Just a minute, Cam, before you leave the classifications," Constance interrupted. "I'm guarded--what was my friend's, to ten places?" "VWZYTXSYZY," Camilla replied, unhesitatingly. "Right; and I don't believe that it was planted, either, so there--" "Let me in a second!" Kit demanded. "I didn't know that you were on that band at all. I got that RTSL thing even before I graduated--" "Huh? What RTSL?" Cam broke in, sharply. "My fault," Kinnison put in then. "Skipped my mind entirely, when she asked me for the dope. None of us thought any of this stuff important until just now, you know. Tell her, Kit." * * * * * Kit repeated his story, concluding: "Beyond four places was pretty dim, but Q P arms and legs--Dhilian, eh?--would fit, and so would an R-type hide. Both Kat's and mine, then, could very well have been summer forms, one of their years apart. The thing I felt was on its own planet, and it _died_ there, and credits to millos the thought I got wasn't primed. And the location--"