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Which meant that Vuffi Raa had to go to work again. In the end, the robot had cobbled up a huge tank out of metal and sheet plastic and filled it with recycler contents. Now Lehesu could travel without running out of nutriment. It had taken both man and droid to maneuver the tank into position beneath the enormous space-going creature. He grasped it in several dozen of his tentacles, gently stroking his new friends with a couple of others as his voice filtered through Lando’s suit-helmet radio.

“Many thanks to you, for you have given me life twice. My regret is that there is nothing I can do for you, you who can make food out of nothingness in the middle of nothingness.”

Lando was about to say a perfunctory “forget it” when Vuffi Raa raised a cautionary tentacle. “Master, he’s making pictures again, I can see them in my mind!”

“You’re a droid of many talents, and there are advantages to having an electronic brain. What’s he showing you, naked dancing-droids?”

“Master! On the contrary, he’s displaying things which he can fabricate from the chemicals he doesn’t need in his food. Apparently he does it atom by atom. Master! He’s showing me opals, sapphires, flame-gems and sun-stones. Why, that’s a life-crystal from the Rafa System! Lehesu, can you truly—”

“Yes, my little friend, if these objects interest you. There is more, much more that I can make. But tell me, is it true that Master cannot see what I am showing you this moment, without an artifact to assist him?”

Lando interrupted. “Core blast you, Vuffi Raa, now you’ve got him calling me master! I want him to stop it immediately, do you hear me, Lehesu? And Vuffi Raa?”

“Yes, Master?”

“Come on inside and we’ll take a look at what Lehesu’s offering over a screen.”

Lehesu’s people, the Oswaft, had had yet another talent, and that was what had gotten the young vacuum-breather into trouble the second time.

The interior of the StarCave, over a dozen light-years in extent, was huge even for the relatively enormous organisms and the rest of the complex ecology that inhabited it. Simply boring along at sublight velocities, as Lehesu had been doing on his last (figurative) legs when the Falcon had found him, wasn’t enough.

Lehesu hadn’t gone straight home when he left the Falcon. His curiosity hadn’t been satisfied—in fact it had been sharpened exponentially by contact with the human and the droid. He wanted to see what things were like in the regions of space that had produced them.

Holding firmly onto his canister of nutrients, he’d bidden them farewell and exchanged promises to get in touch again someday. The gambler had taken these no more seriously than any frequent traveler does with the strangers he gets to know superficially for a short time. He and Vuffi Raa had gone on about their own business, flipping switches and turning knobs to bring the Falcon up to full power once more when they reached the margin of the “desert.”

Lehesu had gone in search of civilization.

Unfortunately for the Oswaft and the subsequent security of his people, he had done his searching in a region patrolled by the Navy, whose sensors, acquired at the unwilling expense of quadrillions of taxpayers, were more sophisticated than those of the Falcon. They’d ferreted out the truth about the strange being upon first spotting him, noticing an ability Lando and Vuffi Raa had missed: not only to soar through space in a linear fashion, but to “skip” vast distances when it suited him, as hyperdrive starships do. They’d tracked him back to the ThonBoka when he’d returned with joyous news of his discoveries.

The navy, of course, had recognized a threat when they saw one: a race of beings at home in space, capable of faster-than-light travel—a terrible thing to contemplate. Their scouts’ estimate of the number of Oswaft was even more terrifying. It was like encountering a previously unknown superpower with millions of fully operational starships. There was only one thing to do.

The ThonBoka was an open system. It had to be, or exhaust its resources rapidly. The idea was to starve the Oswaft