"Dope! And you my best and only medical student." He worked at the cutting dubiously, inexpertly. "Conventional mammalian setup, more or less. Small lungs, big stomach. Hah--two pairs of kidneys?" He spread the viscera out on the wing. "Short intestine, also like a bird. And she was preparing a blessed event multiplied by--count 'em--six." "Too many," said Paul. "Altogether too industrious." "What I really want to know--Oh...?" With the lungs removed, it could be seen that the hump on the back was caused by a great enlargement of four thoracic vertebrae, which swelled into the chest cavity as well as outward. Wright cut away spinal cartilage. "Damn, I _wish_ Sears was doing this. Well, it's neural tissue, nothing else--a big swelling of the spinal cord." He sliced at the ugly head, but the hermorrhage from a .30-caliber bullet confused the picture. "The brain looks too simple. Could that lump in the cord be the hind brain? I hereby leave the theories to Sears. But, son, you might slit the stomach and see what the old lady had for breakfast." Paul's clumsy cut on the slippery stomach bag made it plain what the omasha had eaten--among other things, an almost complete seven-fingered hand. Dorothy choked and walked away, saying, "I am going to be--" "Cheer up." Paul held her forehead. "Never mind the clean floor--" "Go away. I mean stay very close. Sorry to be so physiological. Me a medic student! Even blood bothers me." "Never mind, sugar--" "Sugar yourself, and wash your paws. We smell." Mijok was muttering in alarm. Wright had abandoned the dissection and gone out in the meadow, cautious but swift, to the spot where yesterday they had found the pygmy soldiers. He took up a small skull and arm bone, pathetically clean--perhaps there were insect scavengers that followed after the omasha--and the discarded bow. But instead of bringing back these relics, Wright held them high over his head, facing westward. Tall and gray in the heavy sun, he stepped twenty paces further toward the region where the pygmies had entered the jungle; then he set the bones down in the grass and strode back to the shelter, fingers twitching, lips moving in his old habit of talking half to himself, half to the world. "The omasha," he said, "cracked the enlarged vertebrae--favorite morsel maybe." Mijok moaned, blinking and sighing. He stared long at the silent grace of the lifeboat, then at Christopher Wright. He too was talking to himself. Abruptly, something gave way in him. He was kneeling before Wright, bending forward, taking Wright's hands and pressing them against the gray-white fur of his face and his closed eyes. "Oh, now," Wright said, "now, friend--" Paul remarked, "You're elected." "I will not be a god." 6