Eric the Only turned pale. He knew heresy when he heard it.

His uncle patted him on the shoulder, drawing a deep breath as if he’d finally spat out something extremely unpleasant. He leaned closer, eyes glittering beneath the forehead glow lamp and his voice dropped to a fierce whisper.

“Eric. When I asked you how we’ve been hitting back at the Monsters, you told me what we ought to do. We haven’t been doing a single thing to bother them. We don’t know how to reconstruct the Ancestor-Science, we don’t have the tools or weapons or knowhow—whatever that is—but they wouldn’t do us a bit of good even if we had them. Because they failed once, they failed completely and at their best. There’s just no point in trying to put them together again.”

And now Eric understood. He understood why his uncle had whispered, why there had been so much strain in this conversation. Bloodshed was involved here, blood-shed and death.

“Uncle Thomas,” he whispered, in a voice that kept cracking despite his efforts to keep it whole and steady, “how long have you been an Alien-Science man? When did you leave Ancestor-Science?”

Thomas the Trap-Smasher caressed his spear before he answered. He felt for it with a gentle, wandering arm, almost unconsciously, but both of them registered the fact that it was loose and ready. His tremendous body, nude except for the straps about his loins and the light spear sling on his back, looked as if it were preparing to move instantaneously in any direction.

He stared again from one end of the burrow to the other, his forehead lamp reaching out to the branching darkness of the exits. Eric stared with him: no one was leaning tightly against a wall and listening.