The Hard One said, “Did you do this yourself, Tritt?”

“Yes, Hard-sir.”

“How did you know how?”

“I looked at how it was done in the Hard-caverns. I did it exactly the way I saw it done there.”

“Didn’t you know you might have harmed your mid-mate?”

“I didn’t. I wouldn’t. I—” Tritt seemed unable to speak for a moment. Then he said, “It was not to hurt her. It was to feed her. I let it pour into her feeder and I decorated her feeder. I wanted her to try it and she did. She ate! For the first time in a long while she ate well. We melted.” He paused, then said in a huge, tumultuous cry. “She had enough energy at last to initiate a baby-Emotional. She took Odeen’s seed and passed it to me. I have it growing inside me. A baby-Emotional is growing inside me.”

Dua could not speak. She stumbled back and then rushed for the door in so pell-mell a fashion that the Hard Ones could not get out of the way in time. She struck the appendage of the one in front, passing deep into it, and then pulled free with a harsh sound.

The Hard One’s appendage fell limp and his expression seemed contorted with pain. Odeen tried to dodge around him to follow Dua, but the Hard One said, with apparent difficulty. “Let her go for now. There is enough harm done. We will take care.”

4b

Odeen found himself living through a nightmare. Dua was gone. The Hard Ones were gone. Only Tritt was still there; silent.

How could it have happened, Odeen thought in tortured fashion. How could Tritt have found his way alone to the Hard-caverns? How could he have taken a storage battery charged at the Positron Pump and designed to yield radiation in much more concentrated form than Sunlight and dared—

Odeen would not have had the courage to chance it. How could Tritt; stumbling, ignorant Tritt? Or was he unusual, too? Odeen, the clever Rational; Dua, the curious Emotional; and Tritt, the daring Parental?

He said, “How could you do it, Tritt?”

Tritt retorted hotly. “What did I do? I fed her. I fed her better than she had ever been fed before. Now we have a baby-Emotional initiated at last. Haven’t we waited long enough? We would have waited forever, if we had waited for Dua.”

“But don’t you understand, Tritt? You might have hurt her. It wasn’t ordinary Sunlight. It was an experimental radiational source that could have been too concentrated to be safe.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying, Odeen. How could it do harm? I tasted the kind of food the Hard Ones made before. It tasted bad. You’ve tasted it, too. It tasted just awful and it never hurt us. It tasted so bad, Dua wouldn’t touch it. Then I came on the food-ball. It tasted good. I ate some and it was delicious. How can anything delicious hurt. You see, Dua ate it. She liked it. And it started the baby-Emotional. How can I have done wrong?”

Odeen despaired of explaining. He said, “Dua is going to be very angry.”

“She’ll get over it.”

“I wonder. Tritt, she’s not like ordinary Emotionals. That’s what makes her so hard to live with, but so wonderful when we can live with her. She may never want to melt with us again.”

Tritt’s outline was sturdily plane-surfaced. Then he said, “Well, what of it?”

“What of it? You ask. Do you want to give up melting?”

“No, but if she won’t she won’t. I have my third baby and I don’t care any more. I know all about the Soft Ones in the old days. They used to have two triad-births sometimes. But I don’t care. One is plenty.”

“But, Tritt, babies aren’t all there is to melting.”

“What else? I heard you say once you learned faster after you melted. Then learn slower. I don’t care. I have my third baby.”

Odeen turned away, trembling, and flowed jerkily out of the chamber. What was the use of scolding Tritt? Tritt wouldn’t understand. He wasn’t sure he understood himself.

Once the third baby was born, and grown a little, surely there would come a time to pass on. It would be he, Odeen, who would have to give the signal, who would have to say when, and it would have to be done without fear. Anything else would be disgrace, or worse, and yet he could not face it without melting, even now that all three children would have been formed.

Melting, somehow, would eliminate the fear.... Maybe it was because melting was like passing on. There was a period of time when you were not conscious, yet it did not hurt. It was like not existing and yet it was desirable. With enough melting, he could gain the courage to pass on without fear and without—

Oh, Sun and all the stars, it wasn’t “passing on.” Why use that phrase so solemnly? He knew the other word that was never used except by children who wanted to shock their elders somehow. It was dying. He had to get ready to die without fear, and to have Dua and Tritt die with him.

And he didn’t know how.... Not without melting...

4c

Tritt remained alone in the room, frightened, frightened, but sturdily resolved to remain unmoved. He had his third baby. He could feel it within.

That was what counted.

That was all that counted.

Yet why, then, deep inside, did he have a stubborn faint feeling that it wasn’t all that counted?

5a

Dua was ashamed almost beyond endurance. It took a long time for her to battle down that shame; battle it down enough to give herself room to think. She had hastened— hastened—moving blindly out and away from the horror of the home-cavern; scarcely caring that she did not know where she was going or even where she was.

It was night, when no decent Soft One would be on the surface, not even the most frivolous Emotional. And it would be a considerable time before the Sun rose. Dua was glad. The Sun was food and at the moment, she hated food and what had been done to her.

It was cold, too, but Dua was only distantly aware of it. Why should she care about cold, she thought, when she had been fattened in order that she might do her duty— fattened, mind and body. After that, cold and starvation were almost her friends.

She saw through Tritt. Poor thing; he was so easy to see through; his actions were pure instinct and he was to be praised that he had followed them so bravely. He had come back so daringly from the Hard-caverns with the food-ball (and she—she herself had sensed him and would have known what was happening if Tritt hadn’t been so paralyzed at what he was doing that he had dared not think of it, and if she had not been so paralyzed at what she was doing and at the new depth of sensation it brought her that she would not take care to sense what most she needed to).

Tritt brought it back undetected and had arranged the pitiful booby trap, decorating her feeder to entice her. And she had come back, flushed with awareness of her rock-probing thinness, filled with the shame of it and with pity for Tritt. With all that shame and pity, she ate, and helped initiate birth.

Since then she had eaten but sparingly as was her custom and never at the feeder, but then there had been no impulse to. Tritt had not driven her. He had looked contented (of course) so there was nothing to reactivate the shame. And Tritt left the food-ball in place. He didn’t dare risk taking it back; he had what he wanted; it was best and easiest to leave it there and think of it no more.

—Till he was caught.

But clever Odeen must have seen through Tritt’s plan, must have spied the new connections to the electrodes, must have understood Tritt’s purpose. Undoubtedly, he said nothing to Tritt; that would have embarrassed and frightened the poor right-ling and Odeen always watched over Tritt with loving care.

Of course, Odeen didn’t have to say anything. He needed only to fill in the gaps in Tritt’s clumsy plan and make it work.