"Yes, let's," Margaret agreed, "particularly if, as you said about that other one, it has a form of life on it that would make our grandfather's whiskers curl up into a ball." "We'll do that little thing; we haven't got _Three's_ equipment now, and without it I'm no keener on smelling around this planet than you are," and he flipped the projection across a few hundred million miles of space to the neighboring planet. Its air, while somewhat murky and smoky, was colorless and apparently normal, its oceans were composed of water, and its vegetation was green. "See, Mart? I told you something was fishy. It's all wrong--a thing like that can't happen even once, let alone twice." "According to the accepted principles of cosmogony it is of course to be expected that all the planets of the same sun would have atmospheres of somewhat similar composition," Crane conceded, unmoved. "However, since we have observed two cases of this kind, it is quite evident that there are not only many more suns having planets than has been supposed, but also that suns capture planets from each other, at least occasionally." "Maybe--that would explain it, of course. But let's see what this world looks like--see if we can find a place to sit down on. It'll be nice to live on solid ground while I do my stuff." He swung the viewpoint slowly across the daylight side of the strange planet, whose surface, like that of Earth, was partially obscured by occasional masses of cloud. Much of that surface was covered by mighty oceans, and what little land there was seemed strangely flat and entirely devoid of topographical features. The immaterial conveyance dropped straight down upon the largest visible mass of land, down through a towering jungle of fernlike and bamboolike plants, halting only a few feet above the ground. Solid ground it certainly was not, nor did it resemble the watery muck of our Earthly swamps. The huge stems of the vegetation rose starkly from a black and seething field of viscous mud--mud unrelieved by any accumulation of humus or of débris--and in that mud there swam, crawled, and slithered teeming hordes of animals. "What perfectly darn funny-looking mud puppies!" Dorothy exclaimed. "And isn't that the thickest, dirtiest, gooiest mud you ever saw?" "Just about," Seaton agreed, intensely interested. "But those things seem perfectly adapted to it. Flat, beaver tails; short, strong legs with webbed feet; long, narrow heads with rooting noses, like pigs; and heavy, sharp incisor teeth. But they live on those ferns and stuff--that's why there's no underbrush or dead stuff. Look at that bunch working on the roots of that big bamboo over there. They'll have it down in a minute--there she goes!" * * * * * The great trunk fell with a crash as he spoke, and was almost instantly forced beneath the repellant surface by the weight of the massed "mud puppies" who flung themselves upon it.