[1] In the story, a space ship brings a missionary and skeptical crew members to an alien planet; they get to understand unexpected features of the inhabitants' lives.
The space ship of a missionary society has landed on a planet, and the Reverend Winton is preaching to the natives, by means of a translator machine.
Spet later tells Winton, using the improved power of the translator, that when the rains come, young people like himself, in order to become adults, must hang upside down; some die, and the rest become long and thin.
as the water rises, Spet "felt his feet sending roots down into the mud.... As the water rushed into his lungs, the rooted sea-creature that was the forgotten adult stage of Spet's species began its thoughtless pseudo-plant existence...." In New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction (1960), Kingsley Amis commented: "I take this, not too fancifully I hope, as a justifiably horrifying little allegory of what you can do to people when you interfere with them for their own good.... [A] satire on organised religion, such as the story patently is, has its own place."
It was included in the anthology A Century of Science Fiction (1962), editied by Damon Knight; in his introduction to the story, Knight wrote that it is "a subtle interweaving of anthropology, social comment, depth psychology, irony, deadpan humor....What the whole story means is not expressible in a formula or a plot outline: it hits you below the level on which simple declarative sentences are put together".