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you suggested," Chtexa was saying behind him, while he struggled out of his raincoat and boots. "They show very definite, very strong magnetism, as you predicted. We now have the whole of our world alerted to pick up these nickel-iron meteorites and send them to our electrical laboratory here, regardless of where they are found. The staff of the observatory is attempting to predict possible falls. Unhappily, meteors are rare here. Our astronomers say that we have never had a'shower' such as you describe as frequent on your native planet."
    "No; I should have thought of that," Ruiz-Sanchez said, following the Lithian into the front room. This, too, was quite ordinary by Lithian standards, and empty except for the two of them.
    "Ah, that is interesting. Why?"
    "Because in our system we have a sort of giant grinding-wheel-a whole ring of little planets, many thousands of them, distributed around an orbit where we had expected to find only one normal-sized world."
    "Expected? By the harmonic rule?" Chtexa said, sitting down and pointing out another hassock to his guest. "We have often wondered whether that relationship was real."
    "So have we. It broke down in this instance. Collisions between all those small bodies are incessant, and our plague of meteors is the result."
    "It is hard to understand how so unstable an arrangement could have come about," Chtexa said. "Have you any explanation?"
    "Not a good one," Ruiz-Sanchez said. "Some of us think that there really was a respectable planet in that orbit ages ago, which exploded somehow. A similar accident happened to a satellite in our system, creating a great flat ring of debris around its primary. Others think that at the formation of our solar system the raw materials of what might have been a planet just never succeeded in coalescing. Both ideas have many flaws, but each satisfies certain objections to the other, so perhaps there is some truth in both."
    Chtexa's eyes filmed with the mildly disquieting "inner blink" characteristic of Lithians at their most thoughtful.
    "There would seem to be no way to test either answer," he said at length.
    "By our logic, the lack of such tests makes the original question meaningless."
    "That rule of logic has many adherents on Earth. My colleague Dr. Cleaver would certainly agree with it."
    Ruiz-Sanchez smiled suddenly. He had labored long and hard to master the Lithian language, and to have recognized and understood so completely abstract a point as the one just made by Chtexa was a bigger victory than any quantitative gains in vocabulary alone could have been.
    "But I can see that you are going to have difficulties in collecting these meteorites," he said. "Have you offered incentives?"
    "Oh, certainly. Everyone understands the importance of the program. We are all eager to advance it."
    This was not quite what the priest had meant by his question. He searched his memory for some Lithian equivalent for "reward," but found nothing but the word he had already used, "incentive." He realized that he knew no Lithian word for "greed," either. Evidently offering Lithians a hundred dollars for every meteorite they found would simply baffle them. He had to abandon that fact.
    "Since the potential meteor fall is so small," he said instead, "you're not likely to get anything like the supply of metal that you need for a real study-no matter how thoroughly you co-operate on the search. A high percentage of the finds will be stony rather than metallic, too. What you need is another, supplementary iron-finding program."
    "We know that," Chtexa said ruefully. "But we have been able to think of none."
    "If only you had some way of concentrating the traces of the metal you actually have on the planet now… Our smelting methods would be useless to you, since you have no ore beds. Hmm… Chtexa, what about the iron-fixing bacteria?"
    "Are there such?" Chtexa said, cocking his head dubiously.
    "I don't know. Ask your bacteriologists. If you have any bacteria