_ROUGH BEAST_ The most dangerous, utterly vicious carnivorous animal the Galactics knew had escaped ... to Earth! Because contact with Earth was forbidden, they knew little of Earth ... which led to certain false conclusions. _=BY ROGER DEE=_ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration: Illustrated by Barbereis] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ■ The field of the experimental Telethink station in the Florida Keys caught the fleeing Morid’s attention just as its stolen Federation lifeboat plunged into the outer reaches of nightside atmosphere. The Morid reacted with the instant decision of a harried wolf stumbling upon a dark cave that offers not only sanctuary but a lost lamb for supper as well. With the pursuing Federation ship hot on its taloned heels, the Morid zeroed on the Telethink signals—fuzzy and incomprehensibly alien to its viciously direct mentality, but indicating life and therefore food—and aimed straight for their source. The lifeboat crashed headlong in the mangroves fringing Dutchman’s Key, perhaps ten miles west of the Oversea Highway and less than two from the Telethink station. The Morid emerged in snarling haste, anticipating the powerplant’s explosion by a matter of seconds, and vanished like a magenta-furred juggernaut into the moonlit riot of vegetation that crowded back from the mangroved strip of beach. The Morid considered it a success. The lifeboat went up in a cataclysmic roar and flare of bluish light that brought Vann, the Telethink operator on duty, out of his goldberg helmet with a prickly conviction of runaway range missiles. It all but blinded and deafened Ellis, his partner, who was cruising with a portable Telethink in the station launch through a low-lying maze of islands a quarter of a mile from Dutchman’s Key. Their joint consternation was lost on the Morid because both at the moment were outside its avid reach. The teeming welter of life on Dutchman’s Key was not. The Morid headed inland, sensing abundant quarry to satisfy the ravening hunger that drove it and, that craving satisfied, to offer ample scope to its joy of killing. * * * * * The Morid’s escape left Xaxtol, Federation ship’s commander, in a dilemma bordering upon the insoluble. It would have been bad enough to lose so rare a specimen even on a barren world, but to have one so voracious at large upon one so teeming—as the primitive Telethink signals demonstrated—with previously unsuspected intelligence was unthinkable. This, at the outset, was Xaxtol’s problem: