McAllister backed away until he came up against the outcropping beside the girl. Squirming qualmishly, he kicked out and caught the crab broadside, sending it skittering back. Then he shouted in pain and gripped his instep with both hands. "My foot! It's broken!" But, a moment later, Stewart was certain the injury was negligible, judging from the adequate support the foot provided in McAllister's sprint for the Photon. * * * * * Bigboss completed his transmission and turned full attention on the eureka signals coming frantically from Grazer. Interested, he inspected the sequenced data and took note of the modulation peaks that exactly duplicated the C_{5}H_{8} parameter. Grazer had sensed _hydrocarbon_! More important, one of his spectrometric biodetectors was getting a whiff of DNA molecules! Even those significant findings, however, accounted for but part of the frenzy with which Grazer was transmitting his impulses. There was much more behind the eurekas than that. But all the lesser worker could convey telemetrically was his general excitement, for there were no parameters dealing with the third element of his discovery. Perplexed, Bigboss pondered this inadequacy of communication between him and his servitor--until a rationalization circuit came up with the recommendation: Tap in on Grazer's direct video system. He did. And Bigboss went momentarily irrational as motor circuits fought one another to express the exultation flooding from his evaluation pack. He leaped three meters high. His upper command section turned up a hundred revolutions per minute in triumphant delirium. He extended and retracted his vises, leveled his blaster and spat out a lance of vicious destruction that slashed a concentric trench in the ground about him. Then he damped all activity and steadied himself with a sober appreciation of the telemetric signals Grazer had contributed. The servitor was confronting three hated non-Totemic mobiles! They had emerged from their needle! They had come finally to hurl direct challenge at the Supreme Being! Circuit currents surging once more toward irrational levels, Bigboss calmed himself with dedication to the vengeful destruction of those insolent creatures. He transmitted a "stop-what-you're-doing-and-follow-me" order and headed into Grazer's telemetric signals. Every twenty meters or so, a discrimination circuit peaked in its erratic pattern and he hurled out a bolt of raw energy, annihilating a boulder here, leveling a rise there, pulverizing an occasional crag. In his excitement, however, he had neglected the environs-scanning procedure he had devised to compensate for his damaged video sensor. And he didn't realize that, while he had been stabilized for transmission, Minnie had almost reached him in a stealthy advance. But now he was pulling steadily away from her.