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The Phaelonian looked at him, but didn't answer. And a moment later, he moved away.

An odd response, the Doctor mused. Perhaps I should have studied local customs a bit more thoroughly.

Looking about, he noticed a change in his companions' behavior. Many of them were bending over, stretching their limbs this way and that. A few even went so far as to help each other.

Rather than appear iconoclastic, the Doctor began to stretch as well. Still, he felt a little foolish. After all, how limber did one have to be to appreciate a parade?

Then the Phaelonians stopped stretching. But they seemed edgy, the Doctor thought, taut with anticipation. His curiosity got the better of him.

"Why is everyone so jumpy?" he asked one of them.

The Phaelonian laughed grimly. "As if you didn't know."

"In fact," he said, "I don't know."

But that Phaelonian didn't seem to believe him. No doubt the Doctor's native appearance had something to do with that.

Then the Doctor heard it. It started as a subtle rhythm in the ground beneath his feet. Then it got stronger, more insistent.

The Doctor looked around. "What is that?"

The Phaelonians on every side of him were still looking upriver. But now, one by one, they seemed to be bracing themselves in the manner of sprinters preparing for a race.

"Won't somebody tell me what's going on?" the Doctor entreated.

By then, the rhythm in the ground had become forceful enough to make his bones shudder. And soon it was more than a rhythm-it was a sound.

A sound of thunder.

As the Doctor watched, spellbound, a cloud of dust rose from somewhere upriver. Something was stirring it up, he concluded. He couldn't imagine what that something might be.

Or for that matter, how it would effect the processional.

"There!" yelled a Phaelonian, pointing to the cloud.

No, the Doctor realized. Not the cloud itself, but the mass of muscular black flesh and ruby-red eyes that was emerging from it.

The abendaar were coming, all right. But not in a neat parade, drawing well-dressed Phaelonians in festively decorated coaches. They were coming in a wild and untamed horde.

And they were advancing on the Doctor and his companions with the speed of summer lightning.

Suddenly, he understood. The Phaelonians hadn't gathered in the river bed to act as spectators. They had come here to race the abendaar from some prearranged point to some other point, presumably one of safety.

But in the process, they would be risking their lives against what amounted to a prodigiously powerful force of nature.

It was insane. It went against the entire complex of instincts that had enabled the Phaelonians to survive their evolution into sentient beings. And yet, in some ways, it was a classic sacrifice, offering up existing life in the hope the land would make new life possible.

Of course, the Doctor was tempted to put an end to the program then and there. He had no desire to suffer the indignity of being trampled by large, smelly beasts-or to watch his fellow celebrants become smears on the granular surface of the riverbed.

But he reminded himself of why he had initiated the program in the first place. He was seeking a particular kind of experience-and here it was, in all its primal splendor.

If he shut it down, he would never know what he had missed. So against his better judgment, he hunkered down like all the other Phaelonians and waited while the abendaar bore down on them.

The sound in the ground grew louder and louder still, loud enough to rattle the Doctor's holographic bones. But no one else was moving, so he didn't either. He just watched the darting eyes and tensing muscles of the Phaelonians and braced himself for the race's start.

In the event, there was no signal the Doctor could discerrmo cry of encouragement, no starting gun. The Phaelonians didn't seem to need one. They simply surged forward as one.

The Doctor started forward, too. But right from the beginning, he was a step behind them. With their natural grace and long strides,