Duncan Chalk is usually a monstrous media mogul with a vast appetite for additional people’s pain. He feeds off it and carefully nurtures it in order to feed it to the public. It is inevitable that Chalk should house in on Minner Burris, an area tourist whose body was used aside by alien doctors and then place back together again-differently. Burris’ discomfort is constant. Therefore is definitely that of Lona Kelvin, used by scientists to supply eggs for just one hundred kids and ruthlessly discarded.

Only an emotional vampire like Chalk can see the huge audience wanting to watch a relationship develop between these two damaged people. And only Chalk makes it happen.

“Where Silverberg moves today, the rest of technology fiction will observe tomorrow!”-Isaac Asimov, praise for the writer