ose to view instead. The main
difficulty was with the business of relaxing mentally, which wasn't at
all her natural method of approaching a problem.

But when she could do it, information of a kind that was beginning to
look very interesting was likely to come filtering into her awareness.
Whatever was at work deep in her mind--and she could give a pretty fair
guess at what it was now--seemed as weak and slow as the Psychology
Service people had indicated. The traces of its work were usually faint
and vague. But gradually the traces were forming into some very definite
pictures.

Lazing around in the waters of Plasmoid Creek for an hour or so every
morning had turned out to be a helpful part of the process. On the
flashing, all-out run to Luscious, subspace all the way, with the
Commissioner and Quillan spelling each other around the clock at the
controls, the transmitters clattering for attention every half hour, the
ship's housekeeping had to be handled, and somebody besides Mantelish
needed to keep a moderately beady eye on the Ermetyne, she hadn't even
thought of acting on Pilch's suggestion.

But once they'd landed, there suddenly wasn't much to keep her busy, and
she could shift priority to listening to herself think. It was one of
those interim periods where everything was being prepared and nothing
had got started. As a plasmoid planet, Luscious was pretty much of a
bust. It was true that plasmoids were here. It was also true that until
fairly recently plasmoids were being produced here.

By the simple method of looking where they were thickest, Selan's people
even had located the plasmoid which had been producing the others,
several days before Mantelish arrived to confirm their find. This one,
by the plasmoid standards of Luscious, was a regular monster, some
twenty-five inches high; a gray, mummylike thing, dead and half rotted
inside. It was the first plasmoid--with the possible exception of
whatever had flattened itself out on Quillan's gravity mine--known to
have died. There had been very considerable excitement when it was first
discovered, because the description made it sound very much as if they'd
finally located 112-113.

They hadn't. This one--if Trigger had followed Mantelish
correctly--could be regarded as a cheap imitation of 112. And its
productions, compared with the working plastic life of Harvest Moon,
appeared to be strictly on a kindergarten level: nuts and bolts and less
than that. T