"How?" asked Four. "Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy." "Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?" "We'd have a long wait," Four observed. "Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet." "Well?" "Probably he's immortal." "And he doesn't reproduce?" Reba asked sympathetically. "Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures." "But he must have some way of reproduction," Reba argued. "An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now." "Maybe he developed," Four offered. "It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed." "He must have been here a long, long time," Fred said. "Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now." * * * * * Reba looked at Fweep kindly. "We can thank the little fellow for that, anyway." "I thank him for nothing," Joyce snapped. "He lured us down here by making us think the planet had heavy metals and I want him to let us go _immediately_!" Fred turned impatiently on his wife. "Well, try making him understand! And if you can make him understand what you want him to do, try making him do it!" Joyce looked at Fred with startled eyes. "Fred!" she said in a high, shocked voice and turned blindly toward her room. Grampa lowered his bottle and smacked his lips. "Well, boy," he said to Fred, "I thought you'd never do that. Didn't think you had it in you." Fred stood up apologetically. "I'd better go calm her down," he muttered, and walked quickly after Joyce. "Give her one for me!" Grampa called. Fred's shoulders twitched as the door closed behind him. From the room came the filtered sound of high-pitched voices rising and falling like some reedy folk music. "Makes you think, doesn't it?" Grampa said, looking at Fweep benignly. "Maybe the whole theory of gravitation is cockeyed. Maybe there's a Fweep for every planet and sun, big and little, polarizing the gravity in circles, and the matter business is not a cause but a result." "What I can't understand," Junior said thoughtfully, "is why the polarizer worked for a little while when we landed--long enough to keep us from being squashed--and then quit."