"Here, see what you can do."

Toto took the toad and set it gently on the couch beside him.

"Buffo, I want you to picture something for me. Would you do that?"

"I suppose."

"Picture a pair of yellow legs rising out of the swamp where you and all your family once lived. They stretch up and up for what seem like miles, before they disappear in a cloud of white feathers. Above that cloud stretches a long powerful neck. And that neck terminates in a malicious head with nasty beady bird eyes. And set in that head is a rapierlike ivory beak about a skidillion miles long. And now you've to nowhere to hide, and that beak is plunging down toward your stinking carcass!"

"Oooooh, nooooo!"

From rugose glands atop Buffo's head, tiny droplets of sticky exudate began to emerge.

Otto greedily grabbed up the toad and began to suck its tacky warty skin, using his sandpapery strop of a tongue.

"Aaaaah!"

Toto snatched the sartorized animal back and slurped down his share. Rising unsteadily, he tried to stuff Buffo back into its container, but instead locked it in the nearby breadbox.

"I can feel the electrons in my amygdala jumping orbits!"

"My brain is bigger than the heliosphere!"

Otto suddenly popped up the ship's control stalk from the floor. It was configured currently in the form of a large mushroom, atop which sat an anthropomorphic caterpillar whose lower body fused with the mushroom cap.

"You are speaking to the incarnate deva of the Grigori Bearford," said the caterpillar. "How may I help you?"

"There's an escape seed orbiting Tethys. Change our course to intercept."

"Allow me to confirm." The caterpillar paused a moment, then said, "At the extreme limits of my SQUID sensors, I do detect a tiny black body that might be an escape seed. It is not putting out a distress signal, however. May I ask how you knew about it?"

"It's the frog," said Otto. "It fosters stochastic bursts. Now get busy changing course"

"This command is acceptable."

"All of my commands are acceptable, you stupid ship! I'm the real human!"

"I'm sorry, bit I read a tattoon on your foot through the floor."

Furious, Otto turned to Toto. "Now see what you've done with your idiot pranks, you moron! The ship won't even accept me as the original!"

"That's because you're not."

"That does it. Ship dissolve his template."

"That command is not acceptable from a copy."

"Arrrgh!"

Otto lunged for the caterpillar, but it merged swiftly into the mushroom before he could grab it, and he was left draped across the fungal platform. Then the mushroom itself pulled back into the floor.

Picking himself up from the ship's soft deck, Otto turned toward Toto, seemingly ready to hurl himself at his nemesis. Then he sagged as the inevital unpleasant after-effects of toad-licking kicked in.

"My brainstem's being plucked!"

"A black hole's eating my cortex!"

Otto staggered toward the breadbox. "I'll get some manna to set us straight."

He opened the breadbox, stuck his hand in, and made a retching noise.

"Buffo's pissed all over our manna!"

Toadlike laughter issued from the breadbox. Otto slammed the door shut.

"Let him sit in his own mess," Toto advised, "and have the ship make us some more manna."

Before Otto could issue the command, however the mushroom with its seated figure popped up again.

"We are in orbit a few klicks behind the escape seed," announced the deva of the Grigori Bearford.

"What took so long?' demanded Otto.

"We were on the opposite side of the Sun from Saturn when you issued the orders."

"Oh, that's OK then."

"What is our next step?"

Otto looked at Toto. "My head hurts too much. I'm going to get some manna. You decide."

Toto scratched himself thoughtfully. "Well, we spent all this time and effort getting here. Let's bring the seed onboard."

"It is a very primitive type," advised the caterpillar. "A Macbride-Allen design. What if it dates from the Ree-Rep era and contains something dangerous?"

Toto gave the caterpillar a disdainful look. "You've told us often enough that you possess more processing power in your optical-protein circuits and more manufacturing ability in your cornucopion cadcammers than the entire twentieth-century Earth. Our hourly energy budget is greater than that period's annual global total. I think we'll be able to deal with a few itty-bitty rogue recursive replicators, don't you?"

"Without clear signs of danger, trusting more in my abilities than yours, I shall obey."

The stalk withdrew. Returning from another part of the ship, Otto clutched two thick fanlike slices of lacey manna. He gave one to Toto.

"Thank you. You are a good servant."

Otto only vented a porcine snort.

Soon the caterpillar came back to provide a running commentary on its actions.

"The seed has been englobed within a newly created neutronium-hardened area of the ship some 50 thousand cubic meters in volume. Surface markings indicate that it once served as an emergency pod on a ship called the Peppermint Stith. Or perhaps that should be Stick. The legend has been mostly obliterated by centuries of space dust and interstellar ionization, and I have been forced to reconstruct the information based on the few molecules of paint left."

"Quit boasting," said Otto around a mouthful of manna, "and crack that sucker."

"I am already doing so... A very simple utility fog has poured out revealing a single inhabitant of the seed who appears to have been in some kind of stasis. Now that the fog is dispersing, however, she appears to be awakening."

"She!"

"A woman!"

"What the hell are you fooling around for? Get her up here pronto!"