"I don't care why that thing does it," Joyce said icily. "I want it stopped, and the sooner the better. If it won't turn the gravity off, we'll just have to do away with it."
"How?" asked Four. "Fweep's skin is pretty close to impervious and you can't shoot him, stab him or poison him. He doesn't breathe, so you can't drown or strangle him. You can't imprison him; he 'eats' everything. And violence might be more dangerous to us than to him. Right now, Fweep is friendly, but suppose he got mad! He could lower his radioactive shield or he might increase the gravity by a few times. Either way, you'd feel rather uncomfortable, Grammy."
"Don't call me 'Grammy!' Well, what are we going to do, just sit around and wait for that thing to die?"
"We'd have a long wait," Four observed. "Fweep is the only one of his kind on this planet."
"Well?"
"Probably he's immortal."
"And he doesn't reproduce?" Reba asked sympathetically.
"Probably not. If he doesn't die, there's no point in reproduction. Reproduction is nature's way of providing racial immortality to mortal creatures."
"But he must have some way of reproduction," Reba argued. "An egg or something. He couldn't just have sprung into being as he is now."
"Maybe he developed," Four offered. "It seems to me that he's bigger than when we first landed." "He must have been here a long, long time," Fred said. "Fweepland, as Four calls it, kept its atmosphere and its water, which a planet this size ordinarily would have lost by now."