A panaflex had only one urge: getting the shot. It would do anything to get the shot-take a ride on a copter, dangle from a boom, go over a waterfall in a barrel. Its unblinking eye ogled everything, and when it was ready, it shot film. Somewhere in its innards guncotton and camphor and other unlikely substances came together under considerable pressure to form a continuous strip of celluloid. That strip was coated with photoreactive chemicals to produce a full-color negative. The strip moved behind the panaflex's eye and was exposed in discrete frames by a muscle-and-bone pull-down and shutter mechanism Edison would have recognized.

The producer rode on the back of the panaflex, facing the rear, ready for the emerging film, which it ate. Naturally, this required a close contact to prevent fogging by ambient light. It didn't faze the producer, who was always hungry for film. By eating it, the producer also developed and fixed it.

When they in turn defecated, the product was projector-ready footage, which was why Gaea called them producers.

It was sixty revs after the preliminary scout first discovered the site and found it good. The flacks and hypes were returning from their forays into the woods, laden with game. These were ape-like creatures: two of the few predatory species Gaea had ever produced. Gaea was not good at predators. A hype would have fared poorly in an African jungle. But in Gaea, most of the fauna were not good at flight, either, simply because they had no predators. The principal source of meat, the smilers, did not have to be stalked-they didn't run-or even killed. Meat could be harvested from them in long strips, doing no harm to the smiler. Many a smiler steak was sizzling in the commissary building as the first great feast was prepared and laid out on long trestle tables with immaculate white cloths and big crystal jugs of chablis. A breathless quiet fell over the site as all awaited the arrival of Gaea. It was broken only by the excited meet, meet, meeeet of the bolexes as they jostled each other for position.