The overall fire danger was less ambiguous. If that small gullywasher hadn’t poured tons of water on the burning house, there might have been a chain reaction, destroying all of the houses on the lake side of Lake Road, or even the entire town. They had to spread out.

Leaving the burned-out ruin as a memorial and goad, they proceeded to disassemble every other house, reassembling them on both sides of town with a spacing of thirty meters between sites. The end result was unsettling, esthetically wrong to a society of agoraphobes, but they would learn to live with it. The three exceptions to agoraphobia, hermits who had erected shacks well outside the town’s perimeter, had to pull up stakes again. And their number quadrupled, nine more people willing to haul food and water for the exotic luxury of not having any neighbors.

The next week, on the same night, two of those hermits were attacked by a floating spider, or by two different spiders. Both men passed out, from anoxia or sheer panic. One staggered into town before dawn and woke up Doc Bishop; the other had crawled back to the safety of his lean-to until light. Neither one of them suffered any permanent physical injury. Both of them had the same experience as Kisti Seven, with the important exception of not having been able to get to their knives. The thing gnawed on their hair, leaving a little bloody spot, and apparently rejected them as food, fortunately releasing them before they asphyxiated.

The hermit population was suddenly reduced to three again—one of them, surprisingly, one of the beast’s vietims. “They obviously don’t have any taste for me,” he said, and moved his lean-to farther out. People sometimes saw him at first light, though, standing in a field bareheaded, with a knife in each hand.

The other victim, Mark Ollen, had more subtle but more serious psychological problems. He was one of the scientists in die primary group, an agronomist. For some weeks he was almost useless at work, unable to concentrate, dragging into the lab and falling asleep over his samples or his console. Every night he would wake up repeatedly with the same graphic unsettling nightmare: the creature drinking his brains. Doc Bishop gave him pills, but the dream was stronger than them. One night he took all of the remaining pills at once, left a short note, and swam out into the lake. The top half of his body washed ashore in the next tide.

The remains were frozen and sent to ’Home, where things were better set up for autopsy. The surgeons there found nothing wrong with Ollen’s brain itself. But there was one detail that Doc Bishop had missed: a hole about a third of a millimeter in diameter had been drilled through his scalp and skull, and there was a healed spot in the durum directly underneath.