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are pretty similar, as well. Sphinxian genes and chromosomes are actually a lot like terrestrial ones, too. I’m speaking in a general sense, of course, because there are at least as many differences as similarities. For example, the Sphinx equivalent of RNA forms double strands, not single, and it forms longer chains than anything we’ve found in terrestrial biology. Humans and the critters we tend to take with us when we colonize planets can eat Sphinxian plants and animals just fine, though—it just doesn’t give us everything we need, like most of the essential vitamins, so we have to supplement it. Which is one reason your mom and I fuss at you about eating your vegetables, now isn’t it?”
    He glowered at her, and she grinned again.
    “Anyway, my point is that there are quite a few things growing here on Sphinx that humans have decided are tasty. We like the way they taste , even if they don’t have all the food values we need. So I don’t see any reason to assume some Sphinxian animal wouldn’t find celery a real delicacy.”
    “Um.” Stephanie considered that for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay, I guess I can see that. Although the thought that anyone would feel that way about celery is kind of hard to accept.
    “But what I was saying is that whatever it is, it’s small and sneaky, and it doesn’t go anywhere near tripwires. So they decided to try motion sensors, but that didn’t work too well, either. There are so many small critters running around Sphinx, like the chipmunks, that the motion sensors kept going off all the time. They tried dialing their sensitivity down, so they’d only go off for something bigger than a chipmunk, but then whatever’s stealing the celery started getting past them again. So then they tried setting infrared barriers just around the greenhouses themselves, but that isn’t working either.”
    “I thought I remembered reading somewhere that at least a couple of alarms had gone off,” her father said thoughtfully, and she nodded.
    “Yes, but whatever’s behind this, it seems to like bad weather. My data search couldn’t nail down the weather conditions when all the robberies took place. For one thing, sometimes the people filing the report couldn’t pin down the time any closer than a day or two. I mean, most people have better things to do than stand around in a greenhouse counting celery plants to make sure none of ’em have disappeared. No wonder they don’t always notice immediately when one of them takes missing! But almost all the raids I could check the weather on took place when it was snowing, or during a thunderstorm, or at least when it was raining pretty heavily even for Sphinx. And all of them—all the ones I could nail down, at least—happened at night, too.”
    “So whatever it is, it’s probably nocturnal, and it only comes out when it rains or snows? It’s smart enough to use bad weather for cover?”
    “That’s what it looks like to me, anyway.”
    “And would it happen that you’ve shared this particular insight with any of the other investigators trying to figure out what’s going on?” her father inquired politely.
    “Gosh!” Stephanie widened her eyes at him. “I guess it must’ve slipped my mind, somehow.”
    “That’s what I thought.” Her father shook his head with a long-suffering expression, and Stephanie laughed.
    “Anyway,” she continued, “they have had a couple of cameras go off, and something tripped the alarms on one of the experimental farms over in Long Grass, but the weather was so bad they didn’t get anything. Well, one of the cameras in Seaview got some really nice holos of snowflakes , but that wasn’t much use. All of them were motion sensor-controlled, but with no pictures, all anyone’s really sure about was that it was bigger than a chipmunk because that’s where the filters were set.”
    Her dad nodded in understanding. Sphinxian “chipmunks” didn’t look a lot like Meyerdahl’s (or, for