Marin looked down. The robot cat lay on the floor. He knelt and
examined it. The steel skeleton hadn't broken; it had been bent,
badly. The tough plastic skin had been torn off and, inside, the
delicate mechanism had been chewed into an unrecognizable mass.
Around the cat were rats, twenty or thirty of them, huge by any
standards. The cat had fought; the dead animals were headless or
disemboweled, unbelievably battered. But the robot had been
outnumbered.
Biological Survey had said there weren't any rats on Glade. They had
also said that about mice. What was the key to their error?
[Illustration]