silver, round object: There was a face carved in this side, nothing but a rigid, slightly smiling mouth under a single wide-open eye... Crude as it was, the thing seemed alive. And it was the brutal wrongness of it, the mouth smiling with such placid idiocy, noseless, under the solitary gaping eye, that made the face so repellent. The Piggy. Barney realizes that the game is real, the clock is running, and his neighbors— aliens in disguise— will do anything to get the Piggy. Each tries to bribe him with a unique incentive, similar to the Judgement of Paris, but Barney turns them down. Unfortunately, by doing so, he's just entered the real game as a player representing the human race. As Barney hurries to select his weapons and equipment before a horde of aliens descends on his cottage, he makes the startling discovery that he shares a psychic link to the Piggy. The Piggy tells him that it created the game so that it could be loved and appreciated, despite its tendency to detonate whole planets (and their surrounding solar systems) from time to time when it hiccups. Barney concludes that the object of the game is backward, and it is only the possessor of the Piggy that will be blown up. Minutes before his home is destroyed, Barney concocts a plan to pass the Piggy off to another player convincingly enough so that it won't arouse suspicion. He tells the carnivorous lichen where to find the Piggy. However, as they approach it he realizes that the same logical inconsistency exists with Piggy's version of the story. He decides that the only explanation that makes sense is that Piggy created both stories in order to learn about new people. He abandons the Piggy and lets the lichen board their spaceship home, drawing off the other alien players. Once they depart, no damage is done to either the lichen or to Earth. The Piggy Barney determines the Piggy to be a recording device created to learn about different races throughout the galaxy. The Piggy is sentient and can communicate, but often answers questions with irrelevant recordings. "Are you the Piggy?" I thought at it. "Is that who you are?" "Yn swlllyyybg k'sshhhhrlkthththwzzz," the voice replied, in a kind of reptilian gurgle. Alien Races There are several alien races mentioned in the book. The lichen are a race of carnivorous pseudo-sentient