And Alice carefully reached into the basket and lifted out a small, six pawed little animal similar to a kangaroo. The baby shusher had large, compound eyes. He was turning them every which way, clutching tightly at Alice’s dress with the upper pair of paws.

“See, he loves me already.” Alice said. “I’m going to make him a bed.”

I already knew the story about the shushers. Everyone knew the story about the shushers, my fellow biologists especially. I had five shushers in the zoo already, and in a day or so we were expecting additions to their family.

Poloskov and Zeleny had discovered the Shusers on one of the planets of the Sirius system. They were tame, harmless little animals who wouldn’t go a step from the spacemen once they found the Earthmen’s camp. They turned out to be mammals, although in behavior they more resembled terrestrial penguins. They exhibited quiet curiosity and were constantly attempting to crawl into the most unlikely and unhealthy places. Zeleny even had to save a shusher once before it could drown in a large can of condensed milk. The expedition made an entire film about the shushers which had been enormously successful on the entertainment channels and the web.

Unfortunately the expedition simply did not have enough time to study the shushers as they should have; they knew the shushers came into the expedition’s camp at sunrise and vanished with the sun, hiding in among the rocks.

However they managed it, when the expedition had already taken off for home, Poloskov discovered three shushers who had evidently gotten aboard the ship. Naturally Poloskov’s first thought was that the shushers had been brought on board as contraband by one of the expedition’s members, but the distress of his comrades was so sincere that Poloskov soon abandoned his suspicions.

The appearance of the shushers produced a whole mass of consequent problems. First of all they might very well be a source of some unknown infection. Secondly, they might very well die en route back to Earth when the ship made its jump. Thirdly, no one knew what they ate. And so on.