Medusa: A Tiger by the Tail the Agent in the picket ship, who calls himself "Mr. Carroll", a Lewis Carroll reference as one of the planets of the Warden system is named "Momrath" with a moon named "Boojum" from Carroll's poem "The Hunting of the Snark". This is because the organic transmitter in Tarin Bul's head has been removed during his transformation. The Agent, Mr. Carroll, believes he now has enough information to know what the alien motives are, and what the Confederacy's likely response is to be. He submits his report to the Confederacy, in which he states his belief that the aliens, called the
The Betrothed (poem) The Betrothed (poem) "The Betrothed" is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, first published in book form in "Departmental Ditties" (1886). It is a tongue-in-cheek work by the young bachelor Kipling, who affected a very worldly-wise stance. In it, he takes as his epigraph the report of evidence in a breach of promise case, ""You must choose between me and your cigar"". The poem simply has a narrator musing on the difference between his fiancée Maggie and his habit of smoking cigars: He weighs up Maggie's looks, and what she will be at fifty; the limitations of monogamy against "a harem