Finally, he stood still and waited. Movement ceased around him. He shut off the radilume and shifted his position slightly. Again he waited. He stood still, scarcely breathing. Movement began again, and oddly, it seemed to move away from him. But one fragment of the movement drew closer. It edged toward him and stopped. It came on, slowly, softly, warily. Wilding could see nothing, scarcely hear the cautious breathing. But his instincts sensed the creature and placed it exactly. It was curious. Suddenly Wilding leaped. There was quick, huddled violence in the darkness. The thing seemed all body. Wilding could find no arms or legs for leverage. But its strength was no match for his. Wilding overpowered the creature, felt it fall under him. In a flash, he was down on top of it, holding it against the rock floor, straddling a furry bulk, pinioning its struggles. The thing writhed feebly, then subsided and lay still. Wilding hoped he had not killed or seriously injured the Pit Man. He eased the pressure, and felt the soft body stir slightly. Relieved, he eased the strain a little more, but held his advantage. His fingers clicked the radilume switch. Light was momentarily blinding after the darkness. Wilding ventured a quick glance at the captured Pit Man and turned away in revulsion. How could people eat such things! Wilding sat on the prostrate Pit Man and felt very unhappy about the capture. The Pit Man goggled out of excited eyes and geysered an insane gibberish of sound. There were no recognizable words, and not even an indication that the sounds were words. It was like the notes of a curious, chittering birdsong, chromatic, waveringly melodic and set to vague rhythms, but it resembled no speech Wilding had ever heard. Easy enough to carry out his plan to speak to the Pit Men, but what language did one use? Wilding tried slum Venusian, two Earth languages, a smattering of canal Martian dialects. He got nowhere. The Pit Man stayed put and bird-sounds sprayed from him. Wilding straddled the creature and spoke words in every language he knew. That was all. A similar difficulty had baffled trained semantics men. Even the cipher experts, though admitting that the birdsong sounds seemed to have a musical or mathematical basis, could go no further. No dictionaries or word-books exist, and the language, if it were even a language, seemed not phonetic. No actual words had ever been distinguished, let alone their meanings.