Garlock strolled around a few minutes longer, but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Wherefore he flagged down a "taxi" and was taken out to the _Pleiades_. Belle and Lola were in the Main. * * * "I saw the _damndest_ thing, Clee!" Lola exclaimed. "I've been gnawing my fingernails off up to the knuckles, waiting for you!" Lola's experience had been very similar to Garlock's own, except in that her monster was an intense green in color and looked something like a bat about four feet long, with six-inch canine teeth and several stingers.... "Did you find out the name of the thing?" Garlock asked. "No. I asked half-a-dozen people, but nobody would even listen to me except one half-grown boy, and the best he could do was that it might be something he had heard another boy say somebody had told him might be a 'lemart.' And as to those lower-case Arpalones, the best I could dig out of anybody was just 'guardians.' Did you do any better?" "No, I didn't do as well," and he told the girls about his own experience. "But I didn't find any detectors or receptors, Clee," Lola frowned. "Where were they?" "'Way up--up here," he showed her. "I'll make a full tape tonight on everything I found out about the guardians and the Arpalones--besides my regular report, I mean--since they're yours, and you can make me one about your friend the green bat...." * * * "Hey, I _like_ that!" Belle broke in. "That _could_ be taken amiss, you know, by such a sensitive soul as I!" "Check." Garlock chuckled. "I'll have to file that one, in case I want to use it sometime. How're you coming, Belle?" "Nice!" Belle's voracious mind had been so busy absorbing new knowledge that she had temporarily forgotten about her fight with her captain. "I'm just about done here. I'll be ready tomorrow, I think, to visit their library and tape up some planetological and planetographical--notice how insouciantly I toss off those two-credit words?--data on this here planet Hodell." "Good going. You've been listening to this stuff Lola and I were chewing on--does any of it make sense to you?" "It does not. I never heard anything to compare with it." "Excuse me for changing the subject," Lola put in, plaintively, "but when, if ever, do we eat? Do we _have_ to wait until that confounded James boy gets back from wherever it was he went?" "If you're hungry, we'll eat now." "_Hungry?_ Look!" Lola turned herself sidewise, placed one hand in the small of her back, and pressed hard with the other her flat, taut belly. "See? Only a couple of inches from belt-buckle to backbone--dangerously close to the point of utter collapse."