The satellite of their planet had cooled. The sun around which they swung was shielded by thick banks of the carbon dioxide they breathed off from their myriad bodies. They had stabilized most of the animals. Despite the repeated cataclysms they had arrived at descendants who could flower just as they themselves originally had flowered. As a matter of fact, he was quite deeply taken with an offshoot wood of flowering trees. In the guise of honeysuckle he spent most of his time wooing tenderly round their trunks, to the fury of her grasses and the lashing of her reeds. An object that was a rudimentary improvement on an ape came shambling into the wood where he was and quite idiotically tore off some of his prettier flowers. On checking, he found there were several varieties of this object in various parts of the planet. None appeared any better than this brute, who whizzed through the trees and bred and died in a flicker of time. "He'll never last," he said to her. "His metabolism burns out before he has time to do anything." "He'll reproduce all the faster," she answered. "And leave those trees alone. At your age, really!" She was right about the prototype brute. Never in their experiments had they produced a creature that was so active. They had raised animals that bred much faster, but none that bred at a reasonable pace and also kept flashing about the planet in a restless motion. They had to litter the ground with suitable seeds before the humanoids stopped long enough in one spot to try planting for themselves. And even then, the idea did not take root for many many generations. But here and there, at last, they had the beginnings of a culture, and the beginnings of speech. The telepathic content of the humanoids' speech was intelligible to them, though not apparently intelligible to the humanoids themselves. They concentrated on the temperate zones, where they could most easily encourage the humanoids to stand still from generation to generation. The humanoid dwellings flickered into existence and decayed too rapidly for any reliable observations until several tribes of them took to using stone for building materials. "Well," he said thankfully, "at last I can tell where they are without dashing from branch to branch like one of your monkeys." He still did not believe her monkey experiments had had much to do with it. Secretly he suspected she had encouraged that development to annoy him--by putting multitudes in his hair, so to speak. It was just and proper, therefore, that the humanoids trampled all over her grasslands by preference. It was in this mood that he created cool groves of tall trees and concentrated in them thoughts of love and pleasure. The humanoids took the hint remarkably quickly. He had many happy generations encouraging the humanoids to sport in his groves. She was furious. But trees were his province and there was nothing she could do about it. "You're debasing them," she complained.