“The starseed,” said Margo via intercom. There was cool authority in her public-speaking voice. “This one appears to be returning to the galactic core, having presumably left its fertilized egg near the tip of this galactic arm. When the egg hatches, the infant starseed will make its own way home across fifty thousand light-years of space…”

The starseed was moving fast, straight at the sensing eye, with an immediacy that jarred strangely against Margo’s dry lecture voice. Suddenly I knew what she’d done. She’d placed us directly in the path of the starseed. If this one was typical of its brethren, it would be moving at about point eight lights. The starseed’s light image was moving only one-fifth faster than the starseed itself, and both were coming toward us. Margo had set it up so that we watched it five times as fast as it actually happened.

Quite a showman, Margo.

“…believe that at least some eggs are launched straight outward, toward the Clouds of Magellan or toward the globular clusters or toward Andromeda. Thus, the starseeds could colonize other galaxies and could also prevent a population explosion in this galaxy.” There were pinpoints of blue light around the starseed now: newsmen from Down, come to Gummidgy to cover the event, darting about in fusion ships. “This specimen is over a mile in thickness and about a mile and a half in length…”

Suddenly it hit me.

Whatinhell was the Kdatlyno watching? With nothing resembling eyes, with only his radar sense to give form to his surroundings, he was seeing nothing but a blank wall!

I turned. Lloobee was watching me.

Naturally. Lloobee was an artist, subsidized by his own world government, selling his touch sculptures to humans and kzinti so that his species would acquire interstellar money. Finagle knew they didn’t have much else to sell—yet. They’d been propertyless slaves before we took their world from the kzinti, but now they were building industries.

He didn’t look like an artist. He looked like a monster. That brown dragon skin would have stopped a knife. Curved silver-tipped horns marked his knees and elbows, and his huge hands, human in design, nonetheless showed eight retractile claws at the knuckles. No silver there. They were filed sharp and then buffed to a polished glow. The hands were strangler’s hands, not sculptor’s hands. His arms were huge even in proportion to his ten-foot height. They brushed his knees when he stood up.

But his face gave the true nightmare touch. Eyeless, noseless, marked only by a gash of a mouth and by a goggle-shaped region above it where the skin was stretched drumhead taut. That tympanum was turned toward me. Lloobee was memorizing my face.

I turned back as the starseed began to unfold.