"But I'd think, just for efficiency if nothing else," Garlock argued, "you'd support the Arpales _some_ way. Lighter guns or something. Why, thousands of them must have been killed, just in this last hour or so." "Yeah, but that's their business. They breed fast and die fast. Everything has to balance, you know." "Perhaps so." Garlock was silenced, if not convinced. "Well, it's about over. What happens to the bodies they're dumping down manholes? They can't go down a sewer that way?" "Oh, you didn't know? Food." "Food? For what?" "The Arpales and us, of course." "What? You don't mean--you _can't_ mean that they--and by your thought, you Arpalones, too--are cannibals!" "Cannibals? Explain, please? Oh, eaters-of-our-own-species. Of course--certainly. Why not?" "Why, self-respect ... common decency ... respect for one's fellow-man ... family ties...." Garlock was floundering; to be called upon to explain his ingrained antipathy to such a custom was new to his experience. "You are silly. Worse, squeamish. Worst, supremely illogical." The Arpalone paused, then went on as though trying to educate a hopelessly illogical inferior, "While we do not kill Arpales purposely--except when they over-breed--why waste good meat as fertilizer? If a diet is wholesome, nutritious, well-balanced, and tasty, what shred of difference can it _possibly_ make what its ingredients once were?" "Well, I'll be damned." Garlock quit. Belle agreed. "This whole deal makes me sick at the stomach and I think my face is turning green too. But I'm devilishly and gleefully glad, Clee, that I was here to hear _somebody_ give you cards, spaces, and big casino and still beat the lights and liver out of you at your own game of cold-blooded logic!" "We gunners must go now. Would you like to come along with us and see the end of this particular breeding-hole of sencors?" At high speed the seven flew back along the line of advance of the flying-tiger horde; across a barren valley, toward and to the side of a mountain. * * * An area almost a mile square of that mountain's side was a burned, blasted, churned, pocked, cratered and flaming waste; and the four helicopters were still working on it. High-energy beams blasted, fairly volatilizing the ground as they struck in as deep as they could be driven. High-explosive shells bored deep and detonated, hurling shattered rock and soil and yellow smoke far and wide; establishing new craters by destroying the ones existing a moment before.