And yet, poor beast, her own wickedness was plain. You could see the drip of poisonous saliva from her mouth, and the fetuslike thing impaled on a lower tooth--it couldn't be her own, so she must have stolen it somewhere. No wonder they were after her. Serve her right! (Or if the fetus was her own she ought to have taken better care of it)--therefore one could understand the primitive justice of it as the gray jaw of a pursuer hooked over her narrow rump. His hind legs massively firmed themselves. Callista could observe the sudden scarlet erection, sense the weight of the one lifted gray indifferent paw; but he did not swing about to rear up and clamp her loins, he merely held her in the angle of his jawbone and under that paw while others closed in to slit her throat--she womanly now lying on her back as a clean white fang thrust out of a surgical mask to run deftly down from the throat along the mid-line of the body, opening up the internal apparatus not for eating but for a better clinical view. "Like a theater Oh-doctor," said the child's intelligent profile in Callista's arms. Someone said: "Gentlemen, this is the pancreas--a remarkably pancreative bitch to be sure, aware of nature and consequences. Notice the inadequate uterus, a primipara yes yes, but evidence of miscarriage early in term--and by the way, Potter's Field is bungfull of that type." "I resent that," Callista said. Able now to pick up the child and walk away with her through the woods where all light was granite-gray, she did so, seeking her father to show him a long overdue report card on progress in pancreation. The little girl--naturally, a little girl, with that lyre waist and tumbling hair and dainty genital groove--said to her: "I am so sorry, Callista Johnson Blake, I have to stop here and paint a picture. Can I look at that thing?" "I got my paw stuck in it." "Irrelevant," said the little girl. "Incompetent Callista." "All right," Callista said, and walked away from her through the grayness, uncertain whether she could find her father. He sat (she thought) behind a gray screen, by a lighted window. "_Daddy, please!_--" Now the bracelet on her wrist had caught, snarled itself in a tangle of black vines, and Callista called: "Daddy, I can't seem to fix it. Can I go now?" She could not go, because in front of her beyond the vines were the two doors, so very nearly alike, and someone--NOT Daddy, because Daddy NEVER said anything so unkind--someone said: "It's one or the other." Callista tried then to scream with all her power: "_Daddy! My back hurts_--" nothing in her throat but a mumble, hardly even that, a scream in silence without breath: "Daddy! _Please_ come--my back hurts--" Callista sat up drenched in sweat that soaked her pajamas, and shivering. No relief at first, rather a frustrated anger, since in another moment her father might have been able to hear and answer. Comprehension then; reorientation; qualified relief--_Is waking any better?_