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 Hunting of the Snark refused his illustration of the Boojum, preferring that the creature go without a depiction, and made him change his initial portrayal of the Broker, as it could be perceived as anti-semitic. When finally published, the poem comprised 141 stanzas of four lines each, with internal rhymes in the first and third lines of irregular stanzas appearing in the poem from the second fit onwards. In his poem, Lewis Carroll might have alluded to a limerick by Edward Lear. Instead of faces turning red or white, both authors let waistcoats display the bodily reactions of their owners to stress. To illustrate