The interior of the ship was a crawling mass of insect life. There were ants and earwigs, silverfish and mites, spiders and centipedes, mantises and beetles. There were moths, larvae, grubs, midges, gnats and flies. The recording-instrument was shrouded in cobweb and hooded in dust which was fragments of the bodies of the spiders' tiny victims. The air-refresher chemicals were riddled with the tunnels of beetles. Crickets devoured plastic parts of the ship and chirped loudly. And the controls—ah! the controls! Insulation stripped off here; brackets riddled or weakened or turned to powder there. The ship could rise, and it did. But there were no controls at all.
The Qul-En went into a rage deadly enough to destroy the insects of itself. The whole future of its race depended on the discovery of an adequate source of a certain hormone. That source had been found. Only the return of this one small ship—fifteen feet in diameter—was needed to secure the future of a hundred-thousand-year-old civilization. And it was impeded by the insect-life of the planet left behind! Insect-life so low in nervous organization that the Qul-En had ignored it!
The ship was twenty thousand miles out from earth when the occupant of the mountain-lion used its ray-beam gun to destroy all the miniature enemies of its race. The killing beam swept about the ship. Mites, spiders, beetles, larvae, silverfish and flies—everything died. Then the Qul-En crawled out and began to make repairs, furiously. The technical skill needed was not lacking; in hours, this same being had made a perfect counterfeit of a mountain-lion to serve it as a vehicle. Tracing and replacing gnawed-away insulation would be merely a tedious task. The ship would return to its home planet; the future of the Qul-En race would be secure. Great ships, many times the size of this, would flash through emptiness and come to this planet with instruments specially designed for collecting specimens of the local fauna. The cities of the civilized race would be the simplest and most ample sources of the so-desperately-needed hormone, no doubt. The inhabitants of even one city would furnish a stop-gap supply. In time—why—it would become systematic. The hormone would be gathered from this continent at this time, and from that continent at that, allowing the animals and the civilized race to breed for a few years in between collections. Yes....
The Qul-En worked feverishly. Presently it felt a vague discomfort; it worked on. The discomfort increased; it could discover no reason for it. It worked on, feverishly....
Back on Earth, morning came. The sun rose slowly and the dew lay heavy on the mountain grasses. Far-away peaks were just beginning to be visible through clouds that had lain on them overnight. Antonio still trembled, but Salazar slept. When the sun was fully risen he arose and shook himself; he stretched elaborately, scratched thoroughly, shook himself again and was ready for a new day. When Antonio tremblingly insisted that they drive the flock on toward the lowlands, Salazar assisted. He trotted after the flock and kept them moving; that was his business.
Out in space, the silvery ship suddenly winked out of existence. Enough of its circuits had been repaired to put it in overdrive. The Qul-En was desperate, by that time. It felt itself growing weaker, and it was utterly necessary to reach its own race and report the salvation it had found for them. The record of the flickering flame was ruined. The Qul-En felt that itself was dying. But if it could get near enough to any of the planetary systems inhabited by its race, it could signal them and all would be well.
Moving ever more feebly, the Qul-En managed to get lights on within the ship again. Then it found what it considered the cause of its increasing weakness and spasmodic, gasping breaths. In using the killing-ray it had swept all the interior of the ship. But not the mountain-lion shape. Naturally! And the mountain-lion shape had killed specimens and carried them about. While its foreleg flamed, it had even rolled on startled, stupid sheep. It had acquired fleas—perhaps some from Salazar—and ticks. The fleas and ticks had not been killed; they now happily inhabited the Qul-En.
The Qul-En tried desperately to remain alive until a message could be given to its people, but it was not possible. There was a slight matter the returning explorer was too much wrought up to perceive, and the instruments that would have reported it were out of action because of destroyed insulation. When the ventilation-slit was closed as the ship took off, it did not close completely; a large beetle was in the way. There was a most tiny but continuous leakage of air past the crushed chitinous armor. The Qul-En in the ship died of oxygen-starvation without realizing what had happened, just as human pilots sometimes black out from the same cause before they know what is the matter. So the little silvery ship never came out of overdrive. It went on forever, or until its source of power failed.
The fleas and ticks, too, died in time; they died very happily, very full of Qul-En body-fluid. And they never had a chance to report to their fellows that the Qul-En were very superior hosts.