Paul tried to, his mind restless in weary flesh. No permissible margin of error, said the twenty-first century. But _Argo_ lay at the bottom of a lake because of an error. Not an error like the gross errors twenty-first century man still made in dealing with his own kind and still noisily disregarded, but an engineering error--something twenty-first-century man viewed with a horror once reserved, in not so ancient times, for moral evil. The cardinal sin was to drop a decimal. If, like Wright, or Paul himself, you were concerned with the agony and growing pains of human nature, disturbed by the paralytic sterility of state socialism and the worse paralysis of open tyranny, you kept your mouth shut--or even yielded, almost unknowingly, to the pressures that reduced ethical realities to a piddling checker game perverting the uses of semantics. They said, "There won't be any war. If there is, look what we've got!" If you were like the majority of Earth's three billion, you hoped to get by with as much as the traffic would bear and never stuck your neck out. They celebrated the turn of the third millennium with a jolly new song: "Snuggle up, Baby--Uncle pays the bill...." But for all that, you mustn't use the wrong bolt. Unreasonably quiet here. A jungle evening on Earth would have been riotous with bird and insect noises.... He slept. It was dark when Wright's finger prodded him. "A visitor." The darkness was rose-tinged, not with sunset. There were two moons, Paul remembered, one white and large and far away, one red and near. Should the red moon be shining now? He gazed through the half-open doorway, wondering why he was not afraid, seeing something pale and vast, washed in--yes, surely in reddish moon-light. A thing swaying on the pillars of its legs, perhaps listening, tasting the air for strangeness. And scattered through the night, sapphires on black velvet, were tiny dots of blue, moving, vanishing, reappearing. "Blue fireflies," Dorothy whispered, "blue fireflies, that's all they are." He felt her controlled breathing, forced down a foolish laugh. _We could have done without a white elephant._ Nine or ten feet tall at the shoulder, a tapir-like snout, black tusks bending more nearly downward than an elephant's, from milk-white flesh. The ears were mobile, waving to study the night. There was an oval hump near the base of the neck. The beast had been facing them; it turned to pull down a branch, munch the leaves, casually drop the stalk. In silence it drifted away, pausing to meditate, grumbling juicily, but with no alarm. Wright whispered, "The planet Lucifer did not ask for us." "Paul--I stepped out for a minute, while you were both asleep. Firm ground. A smell--flowers, I think--made me remember frangipani." "I'll try it." "Oh, but not with that thing----"