But so far it seemed to be working out all right. He just hoped Ttra-mu would have the sense to look but not touch.

“We’ve got the preliminary layer scans done now,” Peyton continued. “Is the data coming through clearly enough up there?‘

“Dr. Tenzing?” Roman invited.

“Coming in very clear,” the voice of the survey section’s chief came promptly over the intercom. “We’ve already started sifting through it.”

“Good. Ttra-mu, how’s your hand?”

“The damage is not serious, Rro-maa,” the Tampy whined. “As I said before, the inner skin was not broken.”

Which ought to eliminate any risk of infection or poisoning, even if there was anything in the lobster-clawed creature that could affect Tampy physiology. “Keep the analyzer on it, anyway,” Roman ordered him. “Dr. Peyton, have you figured out yet how the creature did that?”

“You mean how it could pinch Ttra-mu through the net at a distance further than its claw-arm could physically reach?” she asked dryly. “Not yet; but at least I’ve proved that what happened wasn’t actually impossible. This thing has no bones.”

Roman frowned. “None at all?”

“None at all,” she confirmed. “And very little cartilage, either. Most of its skeletal framework seems to be nothing more or less than an organic type of bi-state memory plastic, which can apparently be rigid or flexible as the need arises.”

Roman eyed the creature on his display with new respect. “Interesting. Is this something unique to this particular species, or do you expect it to be the Alphan norm?”

“Well know in a minute,” a new voice broke into the conversation. “This is Singh, Captain; Llos-tlaa and I are just about to net you a rabbit.”

Roman scanned the split screen, found Audrey Singh’s chest camera and switched to it. Sitting on its haunches among the squat gray ground shrubbery was a creature that bore not a shred of resemblance to an Earth rabbit. “That’s a rabbit, is it?” he asked Singh.

“Well, it looks like it would fill that niche in the ecosystem, anyway.” A hand clutching a net gun appeared at the edge of the screen as Singh eased toward his prey, and across the way Roman could now see Llos-tlaa, similarly armed, moving in from the opposite direction. “Easy, friend,” Singh murmured soothingly under his breath. “We’re not going to hurt you, just take a painless look at your insides.”

He carefully raised the netter—

And the creature abruptly changed into something else and leapt away.

“Bloody hell!” Singh gasped, the view swinging dizzyingly as he spun around to watch the new creature’s bounding escape. “It can’t do that.”

His last word was almost swallowed up by the hoarse sputter of a rapid-fire needle gun. Across the field, the creature jerked in mid-jump and slammed unmoving to the ground. “Hold your fire!” Roman barked. “Who was that?”

There was a moment’s hesitation. “It was me, sir—Garin,” the head of the landing party’s four-man guard detail spoke up. “I figured the scientists would want the thing caught for study—”

“There was no need to kill it!”

Roman jumped. The scream was high-pitched, almost shrill, its tones rich with grief and agony and a sense of frustration and reproach. His eyes skated across the split screen, seeking the creature still netted to the analysis table, his first horrible thought that the scream had somehow come from it. “Who said that?” he demanded.

“Forgive me, Rro-maa.” —And in those three words the shrill pitch of the voice dropped down the scale back to the normal Tampy whine. “I was angered.”

“So I gather, Llos-tlaa,” Roman said, his own anger at Garin’s unauthorized killing vanishing in the shiver running up his back. Nowhere in any of the briefings had there been any hint that Tampy voices could do that. “Garin, unless you’re under a deadly and immediate threat, you will not fire again without orders. Understood?”

“Yes, sir,” Garin growled, his tone just short of surly.

“That goes for the rest of you, too,” Roman reminded the other guards. “Dr. Singh, is there enough of the rabbit left to study?”

Singh was leaning over the creature now, and the close-up view of the needleriddled body made Roman slightly queasy. “We can try, Captain,” he said, working the edge of his net underneath it. “Interesting—you notice it became a rabbit again when it died?”

“Actually, in a sense it was never anything else,” Ferrol spoke up from across the bridge. “I think the landing party ought to see this.”

“We’ve got something, Dr. Singh,” Roman told him. “Switch for reception from here.”

Ferrol had taken the transmission from Singh’s camera, scrubbed it through the computer, and run it at slow motion. It made the rabbit’s transformation easier to follow… but no less astonishing.

“It’s like the skin is flowing,” Singh muttered. “Like some kind of high-stretch elastic or even a semi-fluid.”

“And you can see the skeletal structure changing beneath it, too,” Peyton put in from the analysis table. “I was right—it’s exactly like a bi-state plastic. The muscles must be doing something similar—if they weren’t, the legs couldn’t lengthen like that without losing strength.”

“Muscles, and organs, too,” Singh pointed out. “Notice how the lung capacity has already nearly doubled?”

“It’s becoming a running machine,” Burch breathed, sounding awed.

It was, too. If the creature’s first appearance had reminded Singh of a rabbit, the new form that leaped slow-motion out of the camera’s range reminded Roman of a racing greyhound. “Opinions? Anybody?” he asked.

“It’s pretty obvious we’ve stumbled on something unique here,” Tenzing said.

“We’ll have to do more study to see whether this shape-changing ability is only used for fight/flight situations or whether each creature actually fills two entirely different ecological niches, sharing time between them.”

“Ah, yes,” Burch offered, half under his breath. “A planet called ‘Werewolf.’ ”

“Let’s just leave it at ‘Alpha,’ shall we?” Sanderson said shortly. “I think there’s plenty here to occupy our attention without wasting brainpower on names.

Especially when that’ll be the Tampies’ job, not ours.”

There was a moment of strained silence, an awkwardness Roman could feel as well on the bridge. Caught up in the excitement, everyone seemed to have forgotten the bottom-line reality of the situation. Four hundred thirty light-years from Earth, Alpha was far outside the range of Mitsuushi-equipped ships. Whatever they found down there—whether a site for a future colony, marketable plant and animal life, or even just exotic and exciting biology—it would be the Tampies, not humanity, who would gain from their work.

“They’re not content with just stealing us blind anymore,” Ferrol muttered, just loudly enough for Roman to hear. “Now they’ve got us delivering the loot for them.”

“That’s enough, Commander,” Roman growled, but the damage was already done.

“Dr. Singh, I’ll want you to do a complete microbe check on the rabbit, with an eye toward whether it’ll be safe to bring it back to the Amity. As long as it’s already dead,” he added, to forestall any potential argument from the Tampies, “we might as well make full use of it.”

“If our pre-exit air and soil checks didn’t show anything dangerous, the rabbit isn’t likely to be carrying anything,” Sanderson reminded him.

“I know that,” Roman said. “Do the checks anyway.”

“A-ha” Peyton cut in abruptly. “Got it, I think. Ells, do a quick electric field reading on a couple of the plants out there, will you?”

“Okay,” Sanderson said, his part of the split screen tilting abruptly as he and his chest camera knelt down.

“What, you suggesting an electric sense?” Burch asked, sounding doubtful.

“Why not? You were the one who commented on the high density of ions in the air when we took the first readings, if you’ll remember.”