"They've been sent up," said Terry very grimly, "by an entity that didn't evolve on the earth. They're ... domesticated, in a way. They're watchdogs for whatever arrives in bolides that fall in the Luzon Deep. They are the reason for the shining circle of sea from which thousands of tons of living fish were drawn down into the abyss. The creatures--the ... _ellos_ who listen to what fish and fishermen say--they keep these things as domestic animals. And they have to feed them. Those mooings were the ... cries of these things waiting to be fed. Try to imagine that, Deirdre! In the blackness of the pit, in the abyss at the bottom of the sea...." A tentacle broke surface. Terry swung the sound-beam. A mantle reared above the waves. A bazooka-shell hit it. Something huge and stupid and monstrous fought the impalpable thing that hurt it.... Davis approached. "These," he said absurdly, "aren't the creatures who made the plastic objects. Maybe we ought to try to open communication with their masters. Why should we fight? If we prove we can defend ourselves...." "I suspect," said Terry, "that all intelligent beings think the same way, intelligently. If we landed on another planet, on some part of that planet that the natives didn't use but we could, it wouldn't be sensible for those natives to welcome us! Trade with us, perhaps. But let us settle down, no!" There was a bomb explosion out at sea. A plane had dropped a hundred-pound bomb on a monster at the surface. The flattop was now distinct. Golden, almost horizontal sunlight struck upon it. Off to the west a plane dived steeply, something dropped from it, and the plane levelled off. A three-hundred-foot fountain erupted from the surface. Then there came absolute proof that intelligence lay behind all this. It was not human intelligence, to be sure. Men are tool-using creatures nowadays. They imagine robots for fighting, and nowadays they make them, but many centuries ago men ceased to try to use animals as combatants in war.