The Lovers   ::   Фармер Филип Хосе

'Moreover, his refusal to grow a beard was enough to make us suspicious. A man was put on his trail. He saw Yarrow buying twice the groceries he should have. Also, when you wogs learned the tobacco habit from us and began making cigarettes too, he bought them from you. The conclusion was obvious. He had a female in his apartment.

'We didn't think it'd be a wog female, for she wouldn't have to stay hidden. Therefore, she must be human. But we couldn't imagine how she got here on Ozagen. It was impossible for him to have stowed her away on the Gabriel. She must either have come here in a different ship or be descended from people who had.

'It was Yarrow's talk with Turnboy that furnished the clue. Obviously, the French had landed here and she was a descendant. We didn't know how the joat had found her. It wasn't important. We'll find out, anyhow.'

'You're due to find out some other things, too,' Fobo said calmly. 'How did you discover she wasn't human?'

Yarrow muttered, 'I've got to sit down.'

19



He swayed to the wall and sank into a chair. One of the Uzzites started to move toward him. Macneff waved the man back and said, 'Turnboy got a wog to read to him a book on the history of man on Ozagen. He came across so many references to the lalitha that the suspicion was bound to rise that the girl might be the one.

'Last week one of the wog physicians, while talking to Turnboy, mentioned that he had once examined a lalitha. Later, he said, she had run away. It wasn't hard for us to guess where she was hiding!'

'My boy,' said Fobo, turning to Hal, 'didn't you read We'enai's book?'

Hal shook his head. 'We started it, but Jeannette mislaid it.'

'And doubtless saw to it that you had other things to think of... they are good at diverting a man's mind. Why not? That is their purpose in life.

'Hal, I'll explain. The lalitha are the highest example of mimetic parasitism known. Also, they are unique among sentient beings. Unique in that all are female.

'If you'd read on in We'enai, you'd have found that fossil evidence shows that about the time that Ozagenian man was still an insectivorous marmoset-like creature, he had in his family group not only his own females but the females of another phylum. These animals looked and probably stank enough like the females of prehomo marmoset to be able to live and mate with them. They seemed mammalian, but dissection would have indicated their pseudoarthropodal ancestry.

'It's reasonable to suppose that these precursors of the lalitha were man's parasites long before the marmosetoid stage.