“Understand, now, we had these things under twenty-four-hour-a-day observation, cameras on the microscopes around the clock, and not a damn one of ’em ever did anything except make more of the same. No meiosis, no conjugation, nothing to account for the diploid chart or make any use of it. No mutations--but, _none_, see? That’s about the only thing that kept anybody interested. “We figured at first maybe the lab is too clean. So we x-rayed a few batches, and _still_ no mutations. Then some bright lad pops up with figures showing that the increase in cell _deaths_ under radiation corresponded to what you’d expect statistically for total of deaths plus mutations in protozoa down here. So these damn things would rather die than change--they’re just not _capable_ of adaptation. It says here. “We had a couple of bio men around who thought this was the most fascinating thing since the original rib job, and I was kind of tickled at the idea of getting whatever those cells were using to resist radiations with--or I was until those statistics popped up to show it wasn’t resistance, it was just complete lack of flexibility. “So one of the bio boys gets the bright notion of trying a culture in Earth-normal atmosphere. I think he was chasing some notion about mutations being a complex result of radiations and some elements in the atmosphere. And the first reaction looked like high score for him, because the damn bugs went wild. Not one friggin one of them stayed the way it was. _Every single one_ changed at least slightly. “So they started all over again, and when we ran off the first rolls of film, we found out we were not only getting meiosis and conjugation, but getting it between what were supposed to be different species--which was what we’d figured all along. The only thing we _weren’t_ getting was mutation! “Johnny, every damn one of those changes could be charted on the maps! And every damn one of ’em came out the way they were supposed to. Some of ’em were wild but not wild, crazy--just wild, way-out. You’d get a bacterium conjugating with an alga--or what we had figured for bacteria and algae, and the one of the products mixing with one of the water-retentive fungi, maybe, while the other one went into symbiosis with an unchanged alga and wound up like a new lichen--oh, some of those things mixed and matched seven or eight times around before they were done. But it all settled down into a group of five different types perfectly adapted to the environment they were in, and just as viable in it as they’d been on Mars.” It seemed to be time to say something again. Chris looked like it was time for an answer. It was damn sure time to wrap the whole thing up. “So?” he said. “What’s the scoop?”