As he lay there, Jenner tried to imagine a great mass of living substance growing into the shape of buildings, adjusting itself to suit another life form, accepting the role of servant in the widest meaning of the term.

If it would serve one race, why not another? If it could adjust to Martians, why not to human beings?

...How did one let a living village know that it must alter its processes? In a way, it must already have grasped that it had a new tenant. How could he make it realize he needed food in a different chemical combination than that which it had served in the past; that he liked music, but on a different scale system; and that he could use a shower each morning — of water, not of poison gas?

...Late in the afternoon, he remembered the shrubs and the tree he had torn up the day before, and wondered what had happened to them.

He couldn’t even find the holes where he had torn them out. The living village had absorbed the dead tissue into itself, and repaired the breaks in its “body.”

That galvanized Jenner. He began to think again . . . about mutations, genetic readjustment, life forms adapting to new environments. There’d been lectures on that before the ship left Earth, rather generalized talks designed to acquaint the explorers with the problems men might face on an alien planet. The important principle was quite simple: adjust or die.