I had been thinking. "Wait, now," I said, "it seems to me I read a piece in a digest about the Tomato Babies a couple of years ago. Yes, I do remember. It was by a professor of Folklore in Ares City College, and he said that the myth of the Tomato Baby proved that the folklore theme of the external soul--you know, like the stories in Grimm about the giants who can't be killed because their souls are in magical eggs or crystals--that that theme was system-wide." McBream looked at me. "It isn't a myth," he said with a hint of indignation, "it's perfectly true. The Folklorist who wrote that article didn't know what he was talking about. The Tomato Babies are a big red ovoid fruit that grows on floppy vines in a few odd places on Iapetus. They're hollow inside, and the Talipygians put their souls in them." "_Hunh?_" * * * * * "Well, more or less their souls. You remember I told you the Talipygians were hard to photograph because they were partly electrical energy. When one of them is sick or wounded, the others take his soul out--the electrical part of him--and put it inside one of these fruits. The Tomato Babies, as far as we can find out, are a sort of natural Leyden jar. Or maybe more like a storage battery. Anyhow, the point is that a sick Talipygian doesn't have to suffer for months and months while he's getting well. His electrical component is popped into one of these containers, and his body can devote itself quietly and painlessly to the business of recovering." "And you mean Farquarson cooked--?" I asked, boggling. "Yes. Of course after the containers had been destroyed, the electrical charge was lost. It wasn't quite as bad as murder, because the Talipygians say that when their personal electrical charge is released, it reshapes itself into a higher form; all the same, Farquarson had wiped out twenty or thirty relatives and friends of the beings who were bumping around outside the life craft in their sacrificial dance. When the electrical charge is dissipated, the bodies wither away. No wonder the Talipygians were sore. "I wobbled back to the viewing port and looked at them. I'd always thought they were quiet, harmless creatures, for all their nearly human size; now they seemed to be all teeth. I'd never realized before what particularly vicious lower jaws they had. "The thing to do was to try to get into communications with them. Now, I don't speak Talipygian. In my opinion, nobody does, though you'll meet a few space rats who'll tell you they could write a grammar of it. But the traders on Iapetus have worked out a system of conventionalized signs, noises, and so on, for talking to the Talipygians, and it works well enough most of the time.