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swinging fist must have hit Ling on the mouth, for now it was puffy and bleeding. A fist had also whacked the Chinese girl a real beauty on the left eye. Ling staggered out, leaving Giselda Horne with a big smile on her face.
    “Gee. that was real good,” said the American girl.
    It was two days, two waking and sleeping periods, before I saw Ling again. She still contrived to appear reserved and haughty, even though the furious set-to had left her with the blackest eye I ever saw and with hardly any remnants of clothing.
    “The American girl and I, we will share the Australian,” Ling said. “It is a pity you are not five years younger,” she added.
    Mary took it all with a great calmness. “I had become reconciled to it, captivity, I mean. This really proves the zoomen have a sense of justice, to go back all that way to put Daghri home again.”
    Somehow I couldn’t tell Mary. I knew the zoomen hadn’t made any mistake about Daghri. It was an experiment, done quite deliberately to see how we would react. The zoomen just couldn’t have read me so accurately and Daghri so badly. With Daghri gone, we made eight, four couples—the animals came into the Ark. Another thing, choose a smallish number. Being an irrational creature, a human might say, 7. A really rational creature would always choose a binary number, 8.
    Mary put a hand lightly on my arm. “You never said what it was
you
had done.”
    “My sin was the worst of you all. My sin was that I was a consumer. I ate the poor creatures McClay reared on his farm, the animals Bailey slaughtered, the bloody bits Schmidt stuffed into tins.”
    “But millions do the same. I did, everybody does!”
    “Yes, but they know not what they do.
I
knew what I was doing. For twenty years now I’ve been clear in my mind about it. Yet I’ve gone on taking the line of least resistance. I made minor adjustments, like eating more fish and less meat, but I never faced the real problem. I knew what I was doing.”
    The weeks passed, then the months. Long ago, Mary and I had begun to share the same cell for sleeping. We had no trouble with the sickness, even when we shared my rucksack for a pillow. The same favor was not immediately extended to the others. The favor perhaps was granted because I had kept my small scrap of knowledge about the zoomen strictly to myself.
    The day did come, however, when the others were allowed into physical contact. There was no mistaking the day, for Bill Bailey appeared in the cathedral clad only in his now tattered underpants, shouting, “Bloody miracle. We got on last night, real good and proper.” Then he was off, high-stepping, knees up, like a boxer trotting along the road. Round and round the cathedral he went chanting, “Raw eggs, raw eggs, mother. Oh, for a bloody basin of raw eggs.”
    Giselda Horne was standing nearby. “What does it mean?” she asked rather shyly.
    “It means, my dear, that we’re only nine months away from our destination,” I answered.
     
    This narrative was discovered in curious circumstances many many years after it was written, indeed long long after it had become impossible to identify the particular mountain mentioned by its author, Meall Ghaordie.
    Landing on a distant planetary system, the crew of the fifth deep interstellar mission were astonished to discover what seemed like a remarkable new species of humanoid. The language spoken by the creatures was quite unintelligible in its details, but in the broad pattern of its sounds it was strikingly similar to an archaic human language.
    The creatures lived a wild, nomadic existence. Yet they were imbued with a strong religious sense, a religion apparently centering around a “covenant,” guarded day and night in a remote stronghold. It was there, in a remote mountain valley, that the creatures assembled for their most solemn religious ceremonies. By a technologically advanced subterfuge, access to the “covenant” was at length obtained. It turned out to