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The above drawings were done in preperation for a pen and ink water color illustration later completed minus Cortez. Both the Tauran and Cortez were drawn from various description in the book of their characters.

THE TAURAN from the book
"The creature…was a little more human looking. He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small that you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly undermuscled. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from this massive chest. Two eyes that looked like a cluster of fish eggs, a bundle of tassels instead of a nose, a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam's apple should have been."

CORTEZ from the book
"Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his ear was missing and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar trying to take a lap around his mouth. (Cortez) was the meanest-looking creature (Mandella had) ever seen. Still, if you didn't look at his head and considered the lower six feet of so, he could have posed as the "after" advertisement for a bodybuilding spa." 04/07/02