On an alien seed traveling through the Orion Arm, Singer performs the low-status but necessary work of examining broadcast coordinates and deciding which ones are sincere enough to cleanse. Singer reflects that all low-entropy civilizations must survive by hiding themselves and cleansing others, and that terror often reveals sincerity in a coordinate broadcast.

Singer identifies a sincere set of coordinates near the seed's course and prepares to attack it with a mass dot. When Singer locates the target, one star in a three-star system is already gone, replaced by dust. Singer realizes the world has already been cleansed, then notices a nearby slow fog that marks the destroyed world as dangerous and explains why another civilization acted so quickly.

While filing the dead world's information in the tomb data bank, Singer finds records of primitive communications between that three-star world and another nearby system. The other civilization, which Singer calls the Star-Pluckers, had used its star to send messages, including a self-decoding broadcast. The exchange exposes the short distance between the two systems, meaning that once the three-star world's coordinates were known, the Star-Pluckers' location would eventually be revealed too.

Singer then reconstructs a more troubling chain of events: the Star-Pluckers later broadcast coordinates, another long-membrane coordinate broadcast exposed the three-star world, and the three-star world was cleansed twelve time grains earlier. Because the Star-Pluckers have not hidden themselves in slow fog despite having time to do so, Singer concludes they may be especially dangerous, either unable or unwilling to make themselves appear harmless.

Singer asks the seed's Elder to use the big eye for a closer look, but the Elder refuses. Singer decides a mass dot might fail because the Star-Pluckers' planetary system has blind corners, so Singer requests and receives a dual-vector foil. The easy approval reveals how common such weapons have become and leads Singer to fear rumors that the home world may be preparing to transform into two dimensions because of its war with the fringe world.

Singer suppresses these troubling thoughts and resumes singing an old song. Treating the act as routine, Singer picks up the dual-vector foil with a force field feeler and casually throws it toward the Star-Pluckers' system.