On and on past the thinning stars raced the patient electronic
bloodhound; invisible, irreversible, indestructible; slowly, but
inexorably accelerating. It flashed by the planet Damocles at multiples
of the speed of light, and sensing the proximity of the prey on which it
was homed, spurted into the intergalactic depths after the receding
ship, intent on meshing with and thereby distorting the encephalograph
pattern of its target. It was quite mindless, and the final pattern its
meshing would create would be something quite strange, and not very
human.