"Or anywhere else!"
He got up on one elbow and grinned over at me. "The theory is that it's a life form from some planet belonging to a white dwarf star. Some time ago a guy named Adams at the Mount Wilson observatory, back on Earth, estimated that the density of some of the white dwarfs was two thousand times greater than platinum. I'm not much up on it myself."
I scowled down at him. "How'd it get here?"
He was serious now. "That's the reason the government wants one so badly, Nap. They want to get it to their laboratories and find out everything they can. There only seems to be one possibility, though."
"What's that?"
"If it is alien to the solar system and from a white dwarf's planet, it might have been brought here deliberately and left as a guinea pig."
I began to say something there but he held up a hand to stop me. "Possibly an exploring spaceship from the alien planet was looking for colony sites. When it got to our solar system it left some of these animals with the idea of coming back in a few thousand years or so to see if the zloors were able to adapt themselves to the conditions existing here."
I ran my tongue over suddenly dry lips. "You mean that if the zloors can live in our solar system, then these more intelligent aliens would figure they could use our sun system for a colonizing project?"
He nodded.
"Holy Wodo," I said. "No wonder they want some specimens to work on back on Earth."