Keep Your Shape

Twenty Grom expeditions have landed on Earth, and not one has ever reported back. Pid the Pilot means for the twenty-first to be different. His mission is to slip a Displacer into an atomic power plant so the Grom armies can step across space and take the planet.

The Grom can become anything, but law and caste allow each of them only a few approved shapes, and Pid's crew are already bending the rules. Ger the Detector keeps wanting to hunt. Ilg the Radioman keeps standing very still as a tree and Thinking. And Earth, with its dogs and sparrows and hawks and endless smells, turns out to be far more tempting than anyone on Grom ever imagined.