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straight down into the mud of the ditch.
    "OK," Roan said, climbing out of the oozy mud. "OK. I just wanted to be sure I was in the game."
    One of the trees was a young purplefruit tree, and Roan found a straight rope vine and cut off a good length from it, several times longer than he was tall. He tied a slip knot in one end and then coiled the rope and slung it in his belt. At the edge of the grove by the ditch, he picked a quarter-grown sapling and climbed up its straight trunk, hanging by his hands when it began to bend, and edging along the length of the young, springy tree until the top of it bent down to the ground. Then carefully, using his full strength, he bent the tree all the way back on itself and used a length of rope to tie the top to the lower part of the thin trunk. He still had plenty of rope left.
    The gracyls gathered around and jeered. "That's a silly game," they said.
    "Who ever played that?"
    "It's part of swoop ball," Roan said. "You just watch."
    "Yah, yah," said the gracyl who had the ball at the moment. He was up in a nearby tree and he swooped to a lower branch. Then another gracyl swooped the ball away from him and Roan was twirling his rope as the last gracyl was flying across the grove with the ball.
    He caught the gracyl around the leg in a beautiful loop and drew him in squawking.
    Roan calmly took the ball away and threw it to another gracyl to start the game again, and trussed the lassoed gracyl to the sapling and slipped the rope, so the gracyl went sailing away over the ditch.
    Roan climbed up the sapling and bent it again. It no longer stood straight but there was plenty of spring left in it. He looped his lasso again and caught the next gracyl that came sailing by.
    "I seem to keep winning," Roan said, trussing the next gracyl to the tree and slipping the rope again. This one landed right in the ditch and scrambled out and made for home.
    The gracyls could have played swoop ball higher up in the trees, where Roan's lasso couldn't reach them. Or they could have moved the game. But they didn't; this was where gracyls played swoop ball.
    Roan took care of two more gracyls. "Give up?" he asked the rest.
    "Yah, you can't even fly," they said, and kept on playing exactly the same way. No one tried to take his rope away. No one tried to keep him from bending the sapling.
    Pretty soon there were no more gracyls. The last one went sailing over the ditch and hopped off home, whining.
    All except Clanth, of course, with his one undeveloped wing. He'd learned to sit and watch games.
    "That was fun," Clanth said.
    Roan tossed the rope into the muddy ditch and leaped across it and turned back to watch the deserted spot where the swoop ball game had been. He rubbed the mud off his hands down the sides of his trousers.
    "I won," he said, and grinned, and went home to practice his reading.

Chapter Three
    Roan sat on the stoop of his house with a large book spread in his lap. It was entitled Heroes of Old Terra, and it was packed with shiny tri-D
    pictures of men and ships and great towering cities. It was a very old book, and some of the pages were missing, but the pictures were still bright.
    "Hey, c'mon," someone said. Roan's mind swam out from the book. Clanth, who was the nearest thing Roan had to a friend, stood waiting.
    "Where?" Roan asked.
    "Where!" Clanth flapped his one, useless wing. His black, leathery gracyl face was alight with excitement, the round amber eyes asparkle. "It's the spring pre-mating. Out in the grove."
    Roan's fair cheeks flushed, back to the roots of his deep red hair. "Don't be ridiculous," he said. "But . . . good flying," he added, so as not to offend his friend. It might have been an offensive phrase to Clanth, because of his disability, but Roan had found that Clanth preferred for him not to be sensitive about it.
    "I . . . Oh, I'm not like the others, either." But Clanth was handsome, gracyl handsome, and well developed for fourteen, and you noticed that before you