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“Well, send them back a picture of themselves, for Core’s sake! Pretend we’re a pair of tourists taking each other’s snapshots. It beats shooting it out.”

“Yes, Master, I had already arrived at that conclusion, and am transmitting a slow-scan with the proper characteristics. I can put it on one of your gunnery screens if you think it’s worth the risk.”

“Go ahead. I can do better with the naked eye anyway, given our range and this thing’s weird composition.”

On a display to his left, the outline of the Falcon, as seen by the alien object, faded away to be replaced with an enhanced representation of the object itself. Vuffi Raa’s vision was better than Lando’s. He was making out or inferring a good deal more detail. The thing remarkably resembled some marine creatures Lando had seen in his travels although it was too large by at least an order of magnitude. It was also somewhat like a bird—

The picture jerked, the viewpoint changed, the object curled and uncurled its “wings.”

“Master, this picture’s coming from them! Master, I don’t think this is a spaceship! I think it’s a—”

At this point, Lehesu began his little video drama, showing himself starving to death and dying, then changing things to show himself feeding and prospering. By the time he was finished, Lando and Vuffi Raa had a much better idea of what they had encountered in that odd, empty region of interstellar space.

Lando knew that it was theoretically possible for organisms to evolve in free space. Chemical compounds formed spontaneously there, many of them very sophisticated and much like those that had preceded life in the oceans of millions of worlds. There were even substances which scientists argued were ultrasimple life, somewhere below the level of viruses on a scale of organization.

What bothered Lando was that they’d encountered Lehesu in a region utterly devoid of the chemical soup that was supposed to give rise to life. It didn’t make sense. One didn’t expect to find human beings in places where there was no light, no heat, no oxygen, no—then he remembered where he was, the same lifeless, empty stretch of nothingness the odd creature was navigating, and liked the situation even less than before.

“Master, I think it’s asking for help!”

“Tell it we gave at the office!”

“Master, those symbols! They’re atomic nuclei! It’s telling us what it needs. That settles it: those aren’t fuel compounds, they’re food. It’s a living creature, and it’s been starving to death!”

Lando thought about it. “What does it want, Vuffi Raa? We’re not very likely to have anything this alien can eat, are we?”

“Simple organic compounds, amino acids. Master, the contents of the ship’s recyclers are almost made for its requirements. Could we?…”

“Oh, very well, go ahead. We could always use a friend who breathes vacuum and can cross interstellar space by sheer force of personality. Let him have what he—”

The Falcon gave a small lurch as Vuffi Raa vented the recyclers. The creature reacted immediately, swooping and soaring ecstatically through the haze of muck they’d released into the void. Lando nearly went crazy trying to keep the energy weapons trained on it, then gave up. The thing wasn’t going to harm them; it ate garbage and had been starving to death. They’d made a friend, and friends don’t point guns at one another.

He switched off the gunnery circuits, unstrapped himself from the swiveling chair, and lumbered forward to join Vuffi Raa in the cockpit.

They’d remained in that one spot for several days, learning Lehesu’s language while Vuffi Raa adjusted the engines. At one point it had become necessary for the gambler to suit up and step outside so that the giant Oswaft could be made to understand that the Falcon was a thing containing people of a different size and shape than the Oswaft had been capable of imagining. For all his size and the idiotic fix he’d gotten himself into out there, the alien was not stupid. Artifacts were not entirely unknown to his culture, and, as soon as he’d grasped the concept of a spaceship, he’d come up with an idea of his