"How's the little critter doing?" he asked.
"Still absorbing the goop," Trigger said. She held Mantelish's small mystery plasmoid cupped lightly between thumbs and fingers, its bottom side down in a shallow bowl half full of something which Mantelish considered to be nutritive for plasmoids, or at least for this one. Its sides pulsed lightly and regularly against her palms. "The level of the stuff keeps going down," she added.
"Good," said Holati. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat down opposite her. He looked broodingly at plasmoid 113-A.
"You really think this thing likes me—personally?" Trigger inquired.
Her boss said, "It's eating, isn't it? And moving. There were a couple of days before you got here when it looked pretty dead to me."
"Hard to believe," Trigger observed, "that a sort of leech-looking thing could distinguish between people."
"This one can. Do you get any sensations while holding it?"
"Sensations?" She considered. "Nothing particular. It's just like I said the other time—little Repulsive is rather nice to feel."
"For you," he said. "I didn't tell you everything."
"You rarely do," Trigger remarked.