Their eyes—LeCleur had seen harbingers of that wild, collective red glare in the countenance of the one that had bit him a week ago. When they opened their mouths to peep, the change that had taken place within was immediately apparent. Instead of a succession of smooth, white eruptions of bone, the diminutive jaws were now filled with a mixture of grinding projections and triangular, assertively sharp-edged canines. It was as if the creatures had visited en masse some crazed muffin cosmetic dentist.

He lowered the scope. “Christ—they’re metamorphosing. And moving. I wonder how extensive the metamorphosis is?”

Bowman already had the command heads-up in place. A few verbal directives were sufficient to materialize an image. Atop the single-story station, remote instrumentation was responding efficiently.

The plain around the outpost was alive with rustling, festering movement. Come midday they no longer needed the instruments to show them what was happening. The two men stood on the porch, seeing with their own eyes.

All around them, as far as they could see and beyond, the grass was coming down, mowed flat by a suddenly ravenous, insatiable horde. Within that seething, frenzied mass of brown fur, red eyes, and munching teeth, nothing survived. Grass, other plants, anything living was overwhelmed and consumed, vanishing down a sea of brown gullets. From the depths of the feeding frenzy arose an unsettling, relentless, ostinato peeping that drowned out everything from the wind to the soft hum of the outpost’s hydrogen generator.

Bowman and LeCleur watched, recorded, and made notes, usually without saying a word. By evening the entire boundless mass of muffins had begun advancing like a moving carpet in a southeasterly direction. The Akoe, Bowman suddenly recalled, had gone northwest. The two agents needed no additional explanation of the phenomenon they were observing.

The migration was under way.

“I suppose we could have offered to let the Akoe stay here,” he commented to his partner.