"Why, certainly." He opened the top drawer and handed a glossy print across the desk. Tom looked at it, and winced.
"Scales!" he said.
"Like a fish," Andrusco said sadly. "Pretty sad, isn't it?" He looked out of the window and sighed cavernously. "It's a menacing world up there...."
The rest of the day was wasted. Tom Blacker's mind wasn't functioning right.
He told Livia about it at lunch.
Livia Cord continued eating, chewing delicately on her food without flexing a muscle or wincing an eyebrow.
On the Third of April, the story of Sergeant Walter Spencer's first-born monster broke in newspapers, magazines, and telecasts across the country. It was a five-year-old story, but it carried too much significance for the space-minded present to be ignored.
Two days later, Sergeant Spencer, 32, and his wife, Laura, 30, were found dead of asphyxiation in their new home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The cause of death was listed as suicide.
Tom Blacker didn't hear the news until a day after it happened. He was in Washington, setting up a series of meetings with members of a House group investigating space flight expenditures. When he returned by 'copter that evening, he found Police Commissioner Joe Stinson waiting for him in Tom's own favorite chair.