"I learned quick not to ask about stompers. I gather they're twenty feet high or so and they're penned up behind a stockade. I never saw one." "Well dammit! I read they couldn't be domesticated." "They're not. Bidgrass Station is in a clearing the New Cornish cut from sea to sea across a narrow neck of land. On the west is this stockade and beyond it is Lundy Peninsula, a good half-million square miles of the damndest forest ever grew on any planet. That's where the stompers are." "How thickly settled is this Lundy Peninsula?" "Not a soul there, Doc. The settlement is around Car Truro on the east coast, twelve thousand miles east of Bidgrass. I never been there, but you can see from the air it isn't much." "How big a city is Bidgrass? Does it have a university?" Daley smiled again and shook his head. "They got fields and pastures, but it's more like a military camp than a town. I see barracks for the workers and egg hunters, hangars and shops, a big egg-processing plant and warehouses around the landing field. I never get away from the field, but I'd guess four, five thousand people at Bidgrass." Cole sighed and put down his cup on the log desk. "What is it they import, one half so precious as the stuff they sell?" Daley chuckled and rocked on his toes. "Drugs, chemicals, machinery parts, hundreds of tons of Warburton energy capsules. Pistols, blasters, cases of flame charge, tanks of fire mist--you'd think they had a war on." "That's no help. I'll make up for lost time when I get there. I'll beat their ears off with questions." Daley's gnomish face grew serious. "Watch what you ask and who you ask, Doc. They're suspicious as hell and they hate strangers." "They need my help. Besides, I'll deal only with scientists." "Bidgrass isn't much like a campus. I don't know, Doc, something's wrong on that planet and I'm always glad to lift out." "Why didn't you and the others eat any of that stomper egg?" Cole asked abruptly. "Because the people at Bidgrass turn sick and want to slug you if you mention eating it. That's reason enough for me." Well, that was data too, Cole thought, heading back to his stateroom. * * * * * Two days later Daley piloted the cargo tender down in a three-lap braking spiral around New Cornwall. Cole sat beside him in the cramped control room, eyes fixed on the view panel. Once he had the bright and barren moon Cairdween at upper left, above a vastly curving sweep of sun-glinting ocean, and he caught his breath in wonder. "I know the feeling, Doc," Daley said softly. "Like being a giant and jumping from world to world." Clouds obscured much of the sprawling, multi-lobed single continent. The sharpening of outline and hint of regularity Cole remembered noting on Tristan and his own planet of Belconti, the mark of man, was absent here. Yet New Cornwall, as a human settlement, was two hundred years older than Belconti.