Two spidery creatures, their bodies more like grotesque matchstick creations than honest flesh and, blood, squatted facing one another. They had marked off upon the floor, with a piece of chalk, some sort of crude gameboard and had placed about upon it a number of strangely shaped pieces, which they were moving rapidly about, squeaking in excitement as the game developed.

Wheelers? Drayton had asked. Was there any tie-up with the crystal planet and the Wheelers?

It always was the Wheelers, thought Maxwell. An obsession with the Wheelers. And perhaps with reason, although one could not be sure. For there was little known of them. They loomed darkly, far in space, another great cultural group pushing out across the galaxy, coming into ragged contact along a far-flung frontier line with the pushing human culture.

Standing there, he recalled that first and only time he had ever seen a Wheeler-a student who had come from the College of Comparative Anatomy in Rio de Janeiro for a two-week seminar at Time College. Wisconsin Campus, he remembered, had been quietly agog and there had been a lot of talk about it, but very little opportunity, apparently, to gain a glimpse of the fabled creature since it stayed closely within the seminar confines. He had met it, trundling along a corridor, when he'd gone across the mall to have lunch with Harlow Sharp, and he recalled that he'd been shocked.

It had been the wheels, he told himself. No other creature in the known galaxy came equipped with wheels. It had been a pudgy creature, a roly-poly suspended between two wheels, the hubs of which projected from its body somewhere near its middle. The wheels were encased in fur and the rims of them, he saw, were horny calluses. The downward bulge of the roly-poly body sagged beneath the axle of the wheels like a bulging sack. But the worst of it, he saw when he came nearer, was that this sagging portion of the body was transparent and filled with a mass of writhing things which made one think of a pail of gaily colored worms.