Page 52 - Jeremiah Lollipop
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Chapter Ten
The Bright Dot
When Floobles collect food, they like to follow a plan. First they do a
scan of the planet. This gives them a handy reference, so they can take
orders from customers in their restaurants.
Then, if there are any intelligent creatures on the planet with
transmitters and receivers, they announce to them that they have come in
friendship, so they aren’t shot at. Some planets don’t take kindly to a
food collector cleaning all the protein off a planet!
After the first contact they take a few samples, to make sure the
protein is safe to eat. This is usually done secretly and involves picking a
wide selection and arranging it in order – from very safe to eat, to highly
dangerous.
The Flooble who visited Earth kept to the plan. He was up to the ‘take
samples’ stage. He watched as the green gas spread in a wide circle, till
it was the size of a football field. He then turned the gas off and waited
for the last bit to drain from the pipe. Then, using a transporter, he began
to identify different sizes and shapes of living things and brought them
up into a huge room in the enormous ship. As each living thing
appeared, it was scanned, and a sample taken, the DNA identified,
