"I'm afraid I don't—" Wallace began.
"Don't you see?" Saxton asked. "Something about the food here has made the natives different. We've got to find that food."
"That might be true also," Wallace answered slowly. "But I'm not as interested in finding what caused the difference as I am in finding the difference itself."
"Find one and you find the other," Saxton argued. He held up his hand as Wallace made as though to speak. "Sleep on it," he said. "Maybe we'll have some ideas by tomorrow."
They were able to extract no new clues from the tracking of the bloodhound by the next forenoon. Neither man could arrive at any means of thwarting the alien machine. Wallace had checked the graph track minutely, looking for signs of a cycle, or cycles, in its movements. He ended up convinced that none existed. It apparently operated entirely at random.
At the mid-day meal Saxton suggested, "Let's pay those fellows in the woods another visit."
"We may as well," Wallace agreed. "We're helpless here until we can come up with some new idea."
They finished eating and strapped on their sidearms. They were not certain that the path they took through the woods was the same they had taken with Al-fin two days before, but at least it led in the same general direction.
An hour later they were lost. Their way had not led them to the tribe of naked savages and they had no idea where else to look. They were debating whether or not to return to their ship when they stepped out into a clearing—one larger than any they had come on earlier.