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asked them which they preferred, a long life or a glorious one. Only Man chose the glorious life. And he's always been proud of it." There was another sibilance of Veed going by outside and Roan scurried to the dark front window and saw a second group, headed the same way, toward the gracyl mating grove, the grove of trees by the ditch, where long ago Roan had used his lasso to win a game of swoop ball. The sapling was a tree with spread limbs now, and maybe Clanth would be waiting in it to drop down and catch his female.
    The moonlight shown yellowish pink now, and the garbage dump outside the window was jeweled with it. It was Veed garbage, Roan thought, and for some reason this made him love the gracyls and hate the Veed.
    "There's going to be trouble tonight," Roan said, and finished his dinner thoughtfully.
    Raff silently got down his big hammer and nailed a panel and a bar of wood across each plastiflex window.
    "No," said Roan, when Raff started to nail the door bolt from the inside. He wiped the last of the grits off his knife and stuck it through his rope vine belt. He pulled his tunic up short, so that it draped over his belt and left his legs free for running. Raff looked at him.
    "Clanth's out there," Roan said. "I'll be back after a while."
    "Now, boy," Raff started. But Roan was already gone, out into the moonlight and the warm spring night.
    "Why did you tell him that silly story?" Bella asked, sitting in the darkened house and miserable at the thought of the long, dark hours before Roan might come home.
    "Because," Raff said, "I think it's true." Roan knew something the Veed didn't know. He knew every shack and rock and ditch and garbage pile in the slum. As he came out of the house he sensed another group approaching, and he ducked into a tunnel through the heaped garbage.
    They were speaking Veed, their hushed, hissed tongue, so Roan could not tell all of what they were saying, though they passed so close he could have spit on them. But he did catch "gracyl" and "moon," which were the same in all their languages.
    If it were only the children out, that meant it was a lark, not a hunt in retribution for some crime or suspected crime. "Ten half-breeds for one Veed," was their rule. Half-breeds included anybody that wasn't Veed. But this. This was children playing. Or practicing.
    Roan gave the Veed a good head start.
    He went through the back yard of the funny old voiceless couple that kept mud-swine, and around another garbage heap, and through a series of gullies, and then crept up the knoll that overlooked the ditch and the grove of trees where the gracyl were sporting.
    In the grove, where the moonlight could pick them out through the trees, Roan could see the running gracyl, and hear their high, shrill calls. They had no thought for anything but each other. He even thought he could make out Clanth, flapping grotesquely in the tree that Roan had known as a sapling. And he thought he saw something else, very strange. It looked like a white figure, high in one of the trees, looking on very still.
    Around the grove, in the ditch, the Veed boys were gathered in full force, a ditch full of glittering Veed, swaying silently in unison. They must be almost ready for the attack.
    Roan leaped to the top of the knoll and filled his lungs. "Danger!" he screamed, and the gracyl began running about in the grove in confusion and making for the treetops.
    The Veed attacked immediately and furiously. No one seemed to have noticed that the scream had not come from within the grove. Roan was through the ditch and at the grove in seconds.
    The Veed filled the grove now, furious, slashing about with their razor-sharp wrist talons. They had planned to catch the gracyls on the ground. With the gracyls in the branches of the dark trees it was going to be harder, and less fun.
    Roan crept forward and into and up the side of the dry ditch. And got caught by a Veed as he started up the purplefruit tree on the edge of the grove. He'd