He slid to the ground and extracted the antiseptic and swabs. "Sitka first," snapped Bordman. "I'm all right!" Huyghens swabbed the big bear's wounds. They were trivial, because Sitka Pete was an experienced sphex-fighter. Then Bordman grudgingly let the curiously-smelling stuff--it reeked of ozone--be applied to the slashes on his chest. He held his breath as it stung. Then he said: "It was my fault, Huyghens. I watched you instead of the landscape. I couldn't imagine what you were doing." "I was doing a quick dissection," Huyghens told him. "By luck, that first sphex was a female, as I hoped. And she was about to lay her eggs. Ugh! And now I know why the sphexes migrate, and where, and how it is that they don't need game up here." He slapped a quick bandage on Bordman then led the way eastward, still putting distance between the dead sphexes and his party. "I'd dissected them before," said Huyghens. "Not enough's been known about them. Some things needed to be found out if men were ever to be able to live here." "With bears?" asked Bordman ironically. "Oh, yes," said Huyghens. "But the point is that sphexes come to the desert here to breed, to mate and lay their eggs for the sun to hatch. It's a particular place. Seals return to a special place to mate--and the males, at least, don't eat for weeks on end. Salmon return to their native streams to spawn. They don't eat, and they die afterward. And eels--I'm using Earth examples, Bordman--travel some thousands of miles to the Sargasso to mate and die. Unfortunately, sphexes don't appear to die, but it's clear that they have an ancestral breeding-place and that they come to the Sere Plateau to deposit their eggs!" Bordman plodded onward. He was angry; angry with himself because he hadn't taken elementary precautions; because he'd felt too safe, as a man in a robot-served civilization forms the habit of doing; because he hadn't used his brain when Nugget whimpered, with even a bear-cub's awareness that danger was near. "And now," Huyghens added, "I need some equipment that the robot-colony has. With it, I think we can make a start toward turning this into a planet that man can live like men on!" Bordman blinked. "What's that?" "Equipment," said Huyghens impatiently. "It'll be at the robot-colony. Robots were useless because they wouldn't pay attention to sphexes. They'd still be. But take out the robot-controls and the machines will do! They shouldn't be ruined by a few months' exposure to weather!" Bordman marched on and on. Presently he said: "I never thought you'd want anything that came from that colony, Huyghens!"