Back in the cabin, McFeen broke out a bottle of soma concentrate. He and Alice drank it slowly, with much inconclusive speculation as to the reason why the Hyra had ceased to breed. When the soma was gone, McFeen brought out a bottle of phlomis. Usually he and Alice began to quarrel bitterly when they reached the second bottle in their drinking bouts, but this time they were both feeling too good for it to happen. They went on from bottle to bottle, drink after drink, in a thickening haze of moist, maudlin goodfellowship. Finally they both passed out. Meantime the ship slid on and on into the deep. McFeen awoke some ten hours later with his sinuses thundering. Liquor always did that to him. He had a dim, uncomfortable feeling that at some point in their drinking he had insisted on telling Alice what he had really done with the 1,500 I.U.'s she thought had been stolen. Even more faintly he seemed to remember her responding with a full and equally indiscreet account of how she had spent the three months he had been on Uranus. Oh, well, it didn't really matter. Neither he nor Alice was the kind of drinker who remembers details. He sat on the edge of his bunk for a moment, gathering strength, and then groped his way over to the aid chest. He got out two sobrior pills and swallowed them. As his head began to clear, he looked around for Alice. She was lying on her back in her bunk, snoring heavily, with a long strand of her bleached blonde hair lying across her face. She'd be out for a while yet, he guessed. Meanwhile, he'd better go see how the cage of Hyra was. It was always possible that they'd begun to breed again. Or was he feeling too queasy to look at them now? Any tendency to queasiness was bound to be increased by looking at Hyra. No, he'd better not put it off. Still walking rather unsteadily, he left the cabin and went into two hold. His first impression was that the Hyra cage had grown. Surely it was much larger than it had been. Then he realized that the size of the cage was unchanged; it seemed larger because it was emptier. There were fewer Hyra in it than there had been before. There were no visible holes in the mesh. It was impossible. McFeen, cold sober now, knelt down beside the cage and inspected the mesh centimeter by centimeter. Everywhere it was whole and unbroken; he didn't think a flea could have got out through it. He turned on the floodlights and gave the hold an equally thorough scrutiny. No, no Hyra. Not a Hyra anywhere. Leaving aside the question of how they had got out through the mesh, where had they gone to? Number two hold, like the others, was hermetically sealed. And he knew no Hyra had gone past him when he had broken the seal on entering. The whole thing was impossible. He must be imagining it. After all, he hadn't counted them.