After three days Cole saw his stompers in a stone-floored pen at the slaughter house. Earth breed cattle lowed in adjacent pens. Four stompers still lived, their bodies blaster torn and their legs crudely hamstrung so they could not stand. They lay with heads together and the sun glinted on the blue-black, iridescent scales covering the domed heads and long necks. Three shock-headed butchers stood by, assigned to help him. Their distaste for Cole and the job was so evident that he hurried through the gross dissection of the two dead stompers at one end of the same pen. After an hour he thought to ask, as best he could, whether the living stompers were being given food and water. When one man understood, black hatred crossed his face and he spat on Cole's shoe. The ecologist flushed, then shrugged and got on with the job. It brought him jarring surprises culminating in a tentative conclusion late on the second day. Then the situation began to fall apart. Working alone for the moment, Cole opened the stomach of the second stomper and found in it half-digested parts of a human body. Skull and humerus size told him it was one of the giants. First pulling a flap of mesentery over the stomach incision, Cole went into the office and phoned Dr. Rudall to come at once. Coming out, he heard angry shouts and saw two of his helpers running to join the third, who stood pointing into the carcass. Then all three seized axes, ran across the pen and began hacking at the necks of the living stompers. The great creatures boomed and writhed, clacking their beaks and half rising on their wings, unable to defend themselves. The butchers howled curses, and the stompers broke into a mournful wailing harmonized with flesh-creeping subsonics. Cole shouted and pleaded, finally wrested an axe from one and mounted guard over the last living stomper. He stood embattled, facing a growing crowd of butchers from the plant, when Dr. Rudall arrived. "Dr. Rudall, explain to these maniacs why I must keep this stomper alive!" he cried angrily. "I'm sorry, Mr. Cole, they will kill it in spite of you." "But Garth Bidgrass ordered--" "In spite of him. There are factors you don't understand, Mr. Cole. You are yourself in great danger." The old doctor's hands trembled. Cole thought rapidly. "All right, will they wait a day? I want tissue explants for a reason I'll explain later. If you'll help me work up the nutrient tonight--" "Our pisky nutrient will work. We can take your samples within the hour. Let me call the hospital." He spoke rapidly to the glowering butchers in the vernacular, then hurried into the building. An hour later the stomper was dead, and Hawkins drove Cole and the doctor back to their lab with the explants. "I've almost got it," Cole said happily. "Several weeks and two more bits of information and I'll tell you. In spite of all odds, one man against a planet--this will found my professional reputation back on Belconti."