He killed it, mercifully. And then bent down to examine it. Because something had caught his eye: a flash of metal.

The m-gopher wore a harness. It was artificial, of course ; the harness fitted snugly around the animal’s thick neck. Almost invisible, hair-like wires passed from the harness and disappeared into the scalp of the gopher near the front of the skull.

“Lord,” Tony Costner said, picking the gopher and its harness up and standing in futile anxiety, wondering what to do. Right away he connected this with the carnival dolls ; they had gone off and done this, made this — the settlement, as Hoagland had said, was under attack.

Later, he sat beside Hoagland Rae in the workshop; Rae, with care, had opened the harness, inspected its interior.