e control
room, and complained loudly and bitterly at minor flaws in Dal's
shipboard work. Nothing Dal did seemed to please him.

But Tiger had a worse time controlling himself at the Blue Doctor's digs
and slights than Dal did. "It's like living in an armed camp," he
complained one night when Jack had stalked angrily out of the bunk
room. "Can't even open your mouth without having him jump down your
throat."

"I know," Dal said.

"And he's doing it on purpose."

"Maybe so. But it won't help to lose your temper."

Tiger clenched a huge fist and slammed it into his palm. "He's just
deliberately picking at you and picking at you," he said. "You can't
take that forever. Something's got to break."

"It's all right," Dal assured him. "I just ignore it."

But when Jack began to shift his attack to Fuzzy, Dal could ignore it no
longer.

One night in the control room Jack threw down the report he was writing
and turned angrily on Dal. "Tell your friend there to turn the other way
before I lose my temper and splatter him all over the wall," he said,
pointing to Fuzzy. "All he does is sit there and stare at me and I'm
getting fed up with it."

Fuzzy drew himself up tightly, shivering on Dal's shoulder. Dal reached
up and stroked the tiny creature, and Fuzzy's shoe-button eyes
disappeared completely. "There," Dal said. "Is that better?"

Jack stared at the place the eyes had been, and his face darkened
suspiciously. "Well, what happened to them?" he demanded.

"What happened to what?"

"To his eyes, you idiot!"

Dal looked down at Fuzzy. "I don't see any eyes."

Jack jumped up from the stool. He scowled at Fuzzy as if commanding the
eyes to come back again. All he saw was a small ball of pink fur. "Look,
he's been blinking them at me for a week," he snarled. "I thought all
along there was something funny about him. Sometimes he's got legs and
sometimes he hasn't. Sometimes he looks fuzzy, and other times he hasn't
got any hair at all."

"He's a pleomorph," Dal said. "No cellular structure at all, just a
protein-colloid matrix."

Jack glowered at the inert little pink lump. "Don't be silly," he said,
curious in spite of himself. "What holds him together?"

"Who knows? I don't. Some kind of electro-chemical cohesive force. The
only reason he has 'eyes' is because he thinks I want him to have eyes.
If you don't like it, he won't have them any more."

"Well, that's very obliging," Jack said. "But why do you kee