There was amusement in Ptarra's thoughts. "If your hunger is so great, why didn't you eat them? They aren't much, of course, but the blood smells sweet enough." Arnek sighed along his nerves, unable to answer. Let Ptarra put it down to another male whim if she liked, but he hadn't thought of eating them before. There had been something cute and pathetic about them. They reminded him of the little gulla he had owned in his youth, in a long-lost, ruined universe. "It had a weapon," he commented, changing the subject. Ptarra rumbled an assent. "I noticed. Interesting conditioning. The probe builders must have superb nerve development to do that to the lower orders. They'll make good silths.... Now let's see what we can find in the probe." * * * * * She slipped a claw into the base opening and began working it upwards as delicately as the clumsy foreleg would permit. Arnek moved forward to help, but she waved him back impatiently, and he waited meekly until she finished. She was right, of course. As a male, he had no training with mechanisms. He would only have ruined whatever lay inside. It was a marvelously delicate set of machinery ... though the theory behind the engineering seemed rather elementary. Arnek studied what he could of it, growing more puzzled. "Maybe the creatures operated it," he suggested. "What makes you think so?" "I don't know. It just seems somehow--" "Intuition!" Ptarra snorted. Then she seemed less certain. "Yet I can't blame you this time. It _does_ almost look that way. But it's logically impossible. Besides, there are automatic controls for guiding the probe. The builders probably just amused themselves, the way we once put slurry-pods in the gulla pens. Ah, this looks sound enough!" She pulled a tiny box out of the wreckage that had been spread out flat on the ground. With infinite care, she managed to hook one claw over a miniature control. Almost immediately, radio waves began forming a recurrent pattern along their nerves, coming in long and short pulses. Half an hour later, there was another faint quiver of radio waves from space, this time completely modulated. Even Arnek could realize that it was on the same frequency, but dopplered to indicate something approaching their world. He stopped browsing for the few stunted trees and came back to join his mate. Night was just falling. Ptarra led them back toward the rock ledge from which they had first spied the probe. There was a large fissure in the rocks into which they could just squeeze, and which would hide them from the sight of any landing craft. A moon came up, and they could see the depression clearly in its light. Now Arnek saw the larger human slipping across the ground toward the wreck of the probe. It darted about frantically, but with an appearance of purpose. A few moments later, it was retreating, carrying a load of packages with it. "It seems almost intelligent," he said softly.