Kettridge pondered on the simplicity and primitive common sense of Lad-nar’s religion.

When the storms gathered, when they finally built up sufficient potential to generate the lightning and thunder, Lad-nar knew that the cold would set in. Cold was anathema to him. He knew that the cold sapped him of strength, and that the lightning struck him down.

So he stole a cat litter and hid himself for weeks—until the gigantic storms abated. The high body heat- of the creature dictated that it must have a great deal of food to keep it alive when the temperature went down. When a cat litter wasn’t available, the logical alternative was to kill and eat an alien ecologist.

This was no stupid being, Kettridge reminded himself.

Its religion was a sound combination of animal wisdom and native observation. The lightning killed. Don’t go abroad in the storms. The storms brought cold. Get food and stay alive.

It was indeed strange how a terrifying situation could bring a man to a realization of himself.

Here is a chance, he thought. The words came unbidden.

Just four words. Here is a chance. An opportunity not only to survive—something he had long since stopped doing consciously—but a chance to redeem himself, if only in his own mind. Before him was an aborigine, a member of a dying race, a cowering creature of the caves. Before him was a creature afraid to walk in the storms for fear of the lightning, shackled by a primitive religion and doomed never to see the sky.

In that split moment Ben Kettridge devised a plan to save Lad-nar’s soul.

There are times when men sum up their lives, take accounting, and find themselves wanting. Lad-nar suddenly became a symbol of all the people who had been lost in the Mass Death.

In the mind of an old and tired man, many things are possible.