The one exception was Tekla, who had become distracted by a detail. Attached to the wall of the arklet with strips of blue masking tape was a sheet of paper on which had been printed the seal of the president of the United States. Only two printers remained in existence, and both of them were on Izzy. So, by process of elimination, this must have been printed on Old Earth, prior to the Hard Rain, by a device that had been running a little low on cyan ink. It had seen hard service: it was torn in two places and repaired with clear tape. It had been creased and crumpled, then smoothed out. Its edges were fuzzy where previous applications of tape had been peeled away. And in the white space below and to the right of the presidential seal there was a brown smudge, oval, the size of the ball of a person’s thumb. As a matter of fact, Tekla was certain that it was actually a thumbprint, and the more she looked at it the more certain she became that the brown substance was blood.