On the first night of its roaming, nothing in particular happened. The explorer became completely familiar with the way the controls of the machine worked. As a machine, of course, it was vastly more powerful than an animal. It could make leaps no mere creature of flesh and blood could duplicate; its balancing devices were admirable; it was, naturally, immune to fatigue. The Qul-En inside it was pleased with the job.
That night Antonio and Salazar bedded down their sheep in a natural amphitheatre and Antonio slept heavily, snoring. He was a highly superstitious ancient, so he wore various charms of a quasi-religious nature. Salazar merely turned around three times and went to sleep. But while the man slept soundly, Salazar woke often. Once he waked sharply at a startled squawking among the lambs. He got up and trotted over to make sure that everything was all right, sniffed the air suspiciously. Then he went back, scratched where a flea had bitten him, bit—nibbling—at a place his paws could not reach, and went back to sleep. At midnight he made a clear circle around his flock and went back to slumber with satisfaction. Toward dawn he raised his head suspiciously at the sound of a coyote's howl, but the howl was far away. Salazar dozed until daybreak, when he rose, shook himself, stretched himself elaborately, scratched thoroughly, and was ready for a new day. The man waked, wheezing, and cooked breakfast; it appeared that the normal order of things would go undisturbed.
For a time it did; there was certainly no disturbance at the ship. The small silvery vessel was safely hidden. There was a tiny, flickering light inside—the size of a pin-point—which wavered and changed color constantly where a sort of tape unrolled before it. It was a recording device, making note of everything the roaming pseudo-mountain-lion's eyes saw and everything its micro-phonic ears listened to. There was a bank of air-purifying chemical which proceeded to regenerate itself by means of air entering through a small ventilating slot. It got rid of carbon dioxide and stored up oxygen in its place, in readiness for further voyaging.
Of course, ants explored the whole outside of the space-vessel, and some went inside through the ventilator-opening. They began to cart off some interesting if novel foodstuff they found within. Some very tiny beetles came exploring, and one variety found the air-purifying chemical refreshing. Numbers of that sort of beetle moved in and began to raise large families. A minuscule moth, too, dropped eggs lavishly in the nest-like space in which the Qul-En explorer normally reposed during space-flight. But nothing really happened.
Not until late morning. It was two hours after breakfast-time when Salazar found traces of the mountain-lion which was not a mountain-lion. He found a rabbit that had been killed. Having been killed, it had very carefully been opened up, its various internal organs spread out for examination, and its nervous system traced in detail. Its brain-tissue, particularly, had been most painstakingly dissected, so the amount of a certain complex hormone to be found in it could be calculated with precision. The Qul-En in the lion shape had been vastly pleased to find the sought-for hormone in another animal besides a mountain-lion.
The dissection job was a perfect anatomical demonstration; no instructor in anatomy could have done better, and few neuro-surgeons could have done as well with the brain. It was, in fact, a perfect laboratory job done on a flat rock in the middle of a sheep-range, and duly reproduced on tape by a flickering, color-changing light. The reproduction, however, was not as good as it should have been, because the tape was then covered by small ants who had found its coating palatable and were trying to clean it off.
Salazar saw the rabbit. There were blow-flies buzzing about it, and a buzzard was reluctantly flying away because of his approach. Salazar barked at the buzzard. Antonio heard the barking; he came.
Antonio was ancient, superstitious, and unwashed. He came wheezing, accompanied by flies who had not finished breakfasting on the bits of his morning meal he had dropped on his vest. Salazar wagged his tail and barked at the buzzard. The rabbit had been neatly dissected, but not eaten. The cuts which opened it up were those of a knife or scalpel. It was not—it was definitely not!—the work of an animal. But there were mountain-lion tracks, and nothing else. More, every one of the tracks was that of a hind foot! A true mountain-lion eats what he catches; he does not stand on his hind paws and dissect it with scientific precision. Nothing earthly had done this!
Antonio's eyes bulged out. He thought instantly of magic, Black Magic. He could not imagine dissection in the spirit of scientific inquiry; to him, anything that killed and then acted in this fashion could only come from the devil.