Ledo groped on the sand with his right hand until his fingers and countered the leathery skin of a sandtrout. It was the large one he had expected. The creature didn't try to invade him, but moved eagerly onto his flash. He explored it's outline with his free hand roughly diamond shaped. It had no head, no extremities, no eyes, yet it could find water unerringly. With the fellows you could join body to body, locking one on another by the course interlacings of extruded celia until the whole became one large sack-organism enclosing the water ...

The sandtrout squirm down his hand, elongating, stretching. He felt the sandtrout becoming thin, covering more and more of his hand. No sandtrout had ever before in counter to hand such as this one, every cell supersaturated with space. No other human has ever lived before and reasoned in such a condition.