"He likes you, Skipper," Harkaway explained. "_Urg'h n gurg'h_--or, to give it the crude Terran equivalent, living is loving. He can tell that beneath that grizzled and seemingly harsh exterior of yours, Captain--" But, with a scream of rage, Iversen had locked himself into his cabin. Outside, he could hear the zkoort beating its wings against the door and wailing disappointedly. * * * * * Some days later, a pair of rapidly dulling wings were found on the floor of the hydroponics chamber. But of the zkoort's little body, there was no sign. An air of gloom and despondency hung over the _Herringbone_ and even Iversen felt a pang, though he would never admit it without brainwashing. During the next week, the men, seeking to forget their loss, plunged themselves into _mpoola_ with real fanaticism. Harkaway took to wearing some sort of ecclesiastical robes which he whipped up out of the recreation room curtains. Iversen had neither the heart nor the courage to stop him, though this, too, was against regulations. Everyone except Iversen gave up eating fish and eggs in addition to meat. Then, suddenly, one day a roly-poly blue animal appeared at the officers mess, claiming everyone as an old friend with loud squeals of joy. This time, Iversen was the only one who was glad to see him--really glad. "Aren't you happy to see your little friend again, Harkaway?" he asked, scratching the delighted animal between the ears. "Why, sure," Harkaway said, putting his fork down and leaving his vegetable _macedoine_ virtually untasted. "Sure. I'm very happy--" his voice broke--"very happy." "Of course, it does kind of knock your theory of the transmigration of souls into a cocked hat," the captain grinned. "Because, in order for the soul to transmigrate, the previous body's got to be dead, and I'm afraid our little pal here was alive all the time." "Looks it, doesn't it?" muttered Harkaway. "I rather think," Iversen went on, tickling the creature under the chin until it squealed happily, "that you didn't _quite_ get the nuances of the language, did you, Harkaway? Because I gather now that the whole difficulty was a semantic one. The Flimbotzik were explaining the zoology of the native life-forms to you and you misunderstood it as their theology." "Looks it, doesn't it?" Harkaway repeated glumly. "It certainly looks it." "Cheer up," Iversen said, reaching over to slap the young man on the back--a bit to his own amazement. "No real harm done. What if the Flimbotzik are less primitive than you fancied? It makes our discovery the more worthwhile, doesn't it?" At this point, the radio operator almost sobbingly asked to be excused from the table. Following his departure, there was a long silence. It was hard, Iversen realized in a burst of uncharacteristic tolerance, to have one's belief, even so newly born a credo, annihilated with such suddenness.