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Gop's thoughts had the bluish-purple tint of abject apology: "They'relanding, Master."

Pud looked up from the tinythig-field he had been shaping in histentacles. "Of course they are," he thought-snapped. "You practicallyinvited them down, didn't you? If you'd only kept a few eyes on theDetector, instead of day-dreaming—"

"I'm sorry," Gop said unhappily. "I wasn't day-dreaming, I wasobserving the magnificent skill and finesse with which you shaped thethig. After all, this system is so isolated. No one ever came alongbefore.... I just supposed no one everwould—"

"A Scientist isn't supposed to suppose! Until he's proven wrong, he'ssupposed toknow!" Thirty of Pud's eyes glowered upward at the tinyalien spaceship, only ninety or so miles above the surface of thelaboratory-planet and lowering rapidly. The rest of Pud's eyes—morethan a hundred of them, set haphazardously in his various-sized headslikegurf-seeds on rolls—scoured every inch of the planet's visiblesurface, to make certain that no sign of the Vegans' presence on theplanet, from the tiniest experiment to the gigantic servo-mechanicaleating pits, was left operating or visible.

Irritatedly he squelched out of existence ayim-field thathad taken three weeks of laborious psycho-induction to develop.His psycho-kineticut stripped it of cohesion, and its faintwhine-and-crackle vanished.

"I told you to deactivateall our experiments," he snapped at Gop."Don't you understand Vegan?"

Abashed, the Junior Scientist lowered his many eyes.

"I—I'm sorry," Gop said humbly. "I thought theyim might wait untilthe creatures landed, Master ... perhaps their auditory apparatus wouldnot have been sufficient to reveal its presence to them, in which casethe field would not have had to be—"

"All right, all right," Pud grunted. "I appreciate your point ... but,dripping mouthfuls, you know thatany risk of detection is too great.You know the regulations on Contact!"

"Yes, Master."

"Speaking of which, part of your seventh head is showing."

The Junior Scientist included the head in the personal invisibilityfield which he himself was broadcasting.

"Of all the suns in this sector," Pud thought, eying the littlespaceship, "and of all the planets around this particular sun, theyhave to choose this one to land on. Chew!"

Gop flushed. A member of the Transverse Colon Revivalists, he foundPud's constant atheistic swearing very disturbing. He sighed inwardly.Usually at least one of Pud's heads could manage to keep its sense ofhumor, but right now all of them were like proton-storms. The SeniorScientist was on the verge of one of his totalitantrums.

"They must have sighted flashes from our experiments," Pud went on,"before you decided you could spare justone set of eyes for theDetector!"

Though both Vegans were invisible to other eyes, they remained visibleto each other because their eyes were adjusted to the wavelength oftheir invisibility fields. By the same token, they could see all theirinvisible experiments—a vast litter of gadgets, gismos, gargantuangimmicks, shining tools, huge and infinitesimal instruments, stacks ofsupplies, and various types of energy fields, the latter all frozen inmid-activity like smudges on a pane of glass. The sandy ground was thefloor of the Vegans' laboratory; small hills and outcroppings of rockwere their chairs and work-benches. Like a spaceship junkyard, or anenormous open-air machinery warehouse, the laboratory stretched awayfrom the two Scientists in every direction to the planetoid's nearhorizon.

Pud intensified the general invisibility field to the last notch, andthe invisible experiments became even more invisible.

Thethig-field was a nameless-colored whorl of energy in the SeniorScientist's tentacles. In his concern for the other experiments, he hadforgotten to deactivate it. It grew eagerly to the size of a back yard,then of a baseball diamond, then of a traffic oval, and one shimmeringedge of it touched his body, which he had not insulated. Energycrackled. Pud jumped forty feet into the air, swearing, and slapped thefield into non-existence between two tentacles.

His body, big as an apartment house, floated slowly downward in thelaboratory-planet's light gravity.

The tiny alien spaceship touched the ground just as he did. The rocketflare flickered and died.

The ship sat on its fins, about thirty feet—Vegan feet—away. In itsshining side, a few Vegan inches above the still smoking rocket tubes,was a small black hole.

"Master, look!" Gop thought. "Their ship is damaged ... perhaps that'swhy they landed!" And he started to extend a tentative extra-sensoryprobe through the hole.

Pud lashed out with a probe of his own, knocking Gop's aside before itcould enter the hole. "Nincompoop! ... don't go esprobing until we knowif they're sensitive to it or not! Can't you remember the regulationson Contact for just oneminute?"

The tiny spaceship sat silently, while its occupants evidently studiedthe lay of the land. Small turrets halfway up its sides twitched thisway and that, pointing popgun armament.

Pud inspected the weapons extra-sensorily, and thought an amused snort:the things tossed a simple hydrogen-helium pellet for a short distance.

Gop, nursing a walloping headache as a result of Pud's roughcounterprobe, thought sourly to himself: "I try to save theyim ...that's wrong. He forgets to deactivate thethig ... that's all right.I esprobe ... that's wrong. He esprobes ... that's all right."

At last: "They're getting out," Gop observed.

A tiny airlock had opened in the side of the ship. A metal ladder pokedout, swung down, settled against the ground.

The aliens—two of them—appeared; looked down, looked up, looked tothe right and to the left. Then they came warily down the ladder.

For a few minutes the giant Vegans watched the creatures wander about.One of them approached one of Pud's tails. Irritatedly Pud lifted itout of the way. The little creature snooped on, unaware that twentytons of invisible silicoid flesh hung over its head. Pud curled thetail close to him, and did likewise with all his other tails.

"You'd better do the same," he advised Gop, his thought-tone peevish.

Silently, Gop drew in his tails. One unwise move, he knew, and theSenior Scientist would start thinking in roars.

One of Gop's tails scraped slightly against a huge boulder. The scalesmade a tractor-on-gravel sound.

Pud thought in roars.

The tiny creature had stopped and was turning its helmeted head thisway and that, as if trying to see where the sound had come from. Ithad drawn a weapon of some sort from a holster at its belt—anotherthermonuclear popgun.

The creature turned and came back toward the Vegans, heading for hisship. Pud lifted his tail again. The creature passed under it, reachedthe ship, joined its partner.

"I heard it too, Johnny," Helen Gorman said nervously. "A loud scrapingnoise—"

"It seemed to come from right behind me," Johnny Gorman said. "Damnnear scared me off the planet ... I thought it was a rockslide. Orthe biggest critter in creation, sneaking up on me. I couldn't seeanything, though ... could you?"

"No."

Johnny stood there, blaster in hand, looking around, eyes sharpbehind his faceplate. He saw nothing but flat, grayish-red ground,a scattering of stone outcroppings large and small; nothing but thestar-clouded black of space above the near horizon, and the small sunof the system riding a low hillock like a beacon.

"Blue light," he said thoughtfully. "Green light. Red and purplelights. And a mess of crazy colors we never saw before. Whatever thoseflashes were, honey, they looked artificial to me...."

Helen frowned. "We were pretty far off-world when we saw them, Johnny.Maybe they were aurorae—or reflections from mineral pockets. Ormagnetic phenomena of some kind ... that could be why the ship didn'thandle right during landing—"

Johnny studied the upside-down dials on the protruding chest-board ofhis spacesuit.

"No neon in the atmosphere," he said. "Darned little argon, or anyother inert gas. The only large mineral deposits within fifty miles arestraight down. And this clod's about as magnetic as an onion." He gavethe surrounding bleak terrain another narrow-eyed scrutiny. "I supposeitcould have been some kind of aurora, though ... it's gone now, andthere isn't a sign of anything that could have produced such a rumpus."He looked around again, then sighed and finally holstered his blaster."Guess I'm the worrying type, hon. Nothing alive around here."

"I wonder what that sound was."

"Probably a rock falling. This area's been undisturbed for God knowshow many million years ... the jolt of our landing just shook things upa little." He grinned, a little sheepishly. "As for the landing ... Iwas so scared after that meteor hit us, it's a wonder I didn't nail theship halfway into the planet, instead of just jolting us up."

Helen looked up at the three-foot hole in the side of the ship.

Johnny followed her gaze, and grunted. "We'd better get to work."He turned to the ladder that led up to the airlock. "I'll rig thecompressor to charge the spare oxy-tanks ... we'll have to delouse thisair of ammonia, but otherwise it's fine. Look, honey, I won't need anyhelp; why don't you get busy on a PC?"

Helen nodded, still staring up at the meteor-hole. "You know," she saidslowly, "it wouldn't happen again this way in a million years, Johnny.Thank God, this clod was here ... we ought to name it Lifesaver."

"Yeah, sure," Johnny said ironically. "It'll save our lives. Only thingis, it got us into this mess in the first place!"

He started up the ladder, using only his arms, legs trailing.

Helen got down on hands and knees and began poking around for the twodozen or so samples needed for Standard Planetary Classification. Bitsof rock, air, vegetable growth, dust—the dust was very important. Allwent into vac-containers at her belt.

Then suddenly she said, "O-o-o-oof!" and reared back on her knees andclapped both hands to her helmet. Her eyes squeezed shut behind herfaceplate, then opened wide and frightened.

By the time her hands reached her helmet, Johnny had his blaster outand was floating toward the ground, looking around for something toshoot at. His boots touched, and two long light-gravity steps broughthim to her side.

Pud had been leaning over the tiny spaceship, one of his faces onlyfeet above the little creatures.

Gop's thought came: "What are they?"

"Fanged if I know. Bipeds ... never saw such little ones." Pud adjustedseveral eyes to a certain wavelength and studied the creatures throughtheir spacesuits. He gave Gop a thought-nod: "Mammals. Bi-sexual.They're probably mates."

"It's a miracle they didn't land right in the middle of one of ourexperiments."

That brought back Pud's ill-temper. "Miracle! Didn't you see me givethis cosmic kiddycar of theirs a couple of psychokineticlouts so they'dland where they did?" The Senior Scientist glared around at theirthousand-and-one experiments, and then down at the little spaceship,smaller than the smallest of them, squatting on toy fins. He curled atentacle, as if wishing he could swat it.

Gop knew, however, that despite Pud's irritation at having hiswork interrupted, he was just a little intrigued by the aliens. Nomatter how insignificant they were they were animate life of someintelligence, and Pud must be wondering about them.

Gop thought it might be a good idea to dwell on that, in order to keepPud from getting his heads in an uproar again.

"Can you get into their thoughts?" he inquired.

"I haven't tried. I don't think I could keep my potential down to theirlevel."

"Wonder where they're from."

"Who cares?" Pud snorted. "I just wish they'd go away."

Gop noted, though, that Pud's heads were lowering closer over thecreatures.

"They're nowhere near acceptable Contact level, are they?" Gop said,after a moment.

"From their appearance, I'd say they're even beneath classification.Reaction motor in their ship. Primitive weapons. Protectivegarments ... they can't even adjust physically to hostileenvironments!"

A minute passed.

Pud said, "Mm. Well. I think Iwill see what I can read ... just tohave something to talk about at the Scientists' Club."

He sent out a tentative probe ... a little one ... just enough toregister in one of his brains the total conscious content of one ofthe little creature's minds. He was afraid to go deeper, after thesubconscious, though actually that was far more important. But deepprobing would probably be felt for what it was, while conscious probingwas just a little painful.

The creature popped erect in its squatting position, and clapped itsupper extremities to its head.

The other one, which had been scrambling up the ladder to the ship'sairlock, drew its popgun and joined the first.

"They're from someplace called Earth," Pud said. "In the V-LM-12XvaSector of this Galaxy, as nearly as I can make out. They're anExploration Team, sent out by their planet to gather data on the natureof the physical universe." He paused to consult the third memorybank of his fifth brain, where he had impressed the content of thecreature's mind. "They've had space travel for about two hundred oftheir years. I translate that as about eleven of ours." He consultedagain. "Highly materialistic. Externally focused. Very limitedsensorium. An infant race, chasing everything that moves, round andround through their little three-dimensional universe. They've a longway to go."

"What are they doing here?"

"Hm." Pud consulted again. "A routine exploration flight brought themto this system ... and an almost unbelievable coincidence has servedto delay them here. They dropped their meteor-screens for just amoment—at just the wrong moment. A large meteor came along, enteredthe ship, and destroyed both their atmosphere-manufacturing equipmentand the large pressure tank of atmosphere which they kept as reservein case the equipment should fail." He paused. "Mixture of hydrogenand oxygen ... they can't live without it. At any rate, the ship wasevacuated, and they barely had time to get into the ... mm, spacesuits,they call them ... which they now wear. The accident left them withno atmosphere whatever, except the small amount in the tanks of thosesuits. That will be exhausted in a short time ... I gather that if thisplanet hadn't been here, they'd have been goners. As it stands, theyplan to charge their spare suit-tanks, which weren't harmed, with theair of this planet, and then return to their Earth, subsisting on thetanked air, by hyperspatial drive...." Again Pud paused. "Hm. Well,now! I'd overlooked that. So they have hyperspatial drive, atleast ... and after only two hundred years of space travel! Hm. Perhapstheyare worth a closer look...."

Pud lowered his heads over the two little aliens, who were movingwarily, popguns drawn, away from the ship.

"Pud," Gop said nervously.

"What?"

"One of them is crawling toward the time-warp."

"Well, don't tellme about it ... lift the warp out of the way!"

Gop extended a tentacle, first reconstituting it on the seventh atomicsublevel so he wouldn't get it blown off, and gently picked up thetime-warp. It looked like a blue-violet frozen haze in his grasp. Heset it down on the other side of the spaceship, anchoring it again tonow so it wouldn't go flapping off along the time-continuum.

"So theydidn't land because they saw flashes from our experiments,"he said a little triumphantly.

One of Pud's heads turned and gave the Junior Scientist an acid look,while the others continued to observe the aliens.

"They lowered their meteor-screens," he said nastily, "thus bringingabout this entire bother, because they wanted to get a better look atthe flashes."

Gop was silent, but he thought acidly: "That's what you say—you won'tletme esprobe, and when you do, you manage to prove it's all myfault."

Johnny Gorman had just said to Helen, "I want to chip a few samples offthat outcropping over there ... come on, hon."

He started toward the ridge of gray-black rock. Helen followed on hisheels.

"As-pir-in," she said, deliberately falsetto, and her helmet-valet fedher another pill with a sip of water.

"Then we'll go back and stick inside the ship until the tanks arecharged," Johnny went on, a little grimly. "I think we're just edgy.Planets don't give people headaches ... and there's nothing alivewithin in a million miles of this dustball." He hefted his blaster,which he had adjusted to Wide-Field. "But just in case...."

"Pud," Gop said, still more nervously.

"Yes, I see, you idiot! Lift thetharn-field out of their way ...I'll take care of the space-warp generator!"

The giant Vegans, for all their bulk, moved soundlessly and at greatspeed until they were between the aliens and the stone outcroppingtoward which they appeared to be heading. Gop extended a tentacle,curled it at an odd angle, and picked up the shimmeringtharn-field,which was the Vegans' reservoir of Basic Universal Energy. Set inany energy matrix,tharn became that energy; added to any existingenergy,tharn augmented it to any desired potential. Thus it wasextremely valuable to their experiments ... and very risky stuff tohandle, as well.

Gingerly, Gop set thetharn down beyond the outcropping. At thesame time he picked up several instruments that lay nearby—anelectron-wrench, asnurling-iron, aplotz-meter, severalpencil-rays. He placed them on the ground beside thetharn.

Pud had curled twelve tentacles around the space-warp generator—it wasas big as a city block, and heavy, even in light gravity. He puffed athought at Gop: "Give me a tentacle."

Gop helped his Master place the generator safely on the other side ofthe ridge.

Johnny Gorman banged off a handful of rock, and shoved it into thevac-container at his belt.

"Okay, hon," he said. "Let's go."

They stood once more moment atop the ridge, looking out over thebarren, rusty-gray plain that the ridge had until now concealed fromtheir gaze.

"Looks just as dead as the rest," Johnny observed. "I guess we werejust jumpy over nothing." He turned to start down the slope. "Come on."

In three long light-gravity steps he had reached the bottom, and turnedto steady Helen.

She wasn't there.

She had tripped and tumbled off the other side of the ridge. He couldhear her screaming.

"Putrefied proteins!" Pud roared. "Help me get it out of thetharn!"

The two Vegans leaned over the ridge. While Gop forced the writhingfolds of thetharn-field apart with two reconstituted tentacles, Pudreached in, plucked the little alien out and set it upright.

It immediately scrabbled up the side of the ridge as fast as it couldand joined its mate, which had bounded up the other side.

"Now look at what you've done!" Pud raged. "What about the rules onContact! The Examiners will get this out of us when we report on ourProjects ... mountains of bites, we'verevealed ourselves!"

"Not really, Master," Gop said, rushing his thoughts. "All the creaturewill know is that it tumbled into the field, and then was somehowejected by it ... a trick of gravity, perhaps ... a magnetic vortex ...it won't know what really happened—"

"That—field—was—supposed—to—be—turned—off," Pud said, everyone of his faces green with rage.

"I—"

"You are a stupid, clumsy, few-headed piece of provender!"

Gop flushed clear down to his tails. "I'm sorry," he said. "I can'tthink of everything at once! I must have accidentally activated thetharn when I moved it. I'msorry!"

Pud clapped a tentacle to his prime forehead. "What next!" he moaned.

"Oh, Johnny, Johnny," Helen sobbed. "I tripped when I started to turnaround, and fell down the other side, and all of a sudden ... it washorrible ... I thought I was goingcrazy—"

Johnny Gorman had his arms tight around her. Behind her back, hisblaster was pointed straight down the far slope of the ridge, ready toatomize anything that moved.

"What, honey?" he said. "What happened? I didn't see anything nearyou ... what happened?"

"It was like I was in a hurricane ... I couldn't see anything, butsomething seemed to be whirling around me, something as big as theuniverse ... and it seemed to be whirlinginside me too! I felt—itfelt like ... Johnny, I wascrossed!"

"Crossed?" He shook her gently. "What do you mean, you were crossed?"

"It felt like my right side was my left side, and, my heart was beatingbackwards, and my eyes were looking at each other, and I was justtwisted all downside up outside and inside out upside, and ... Johnny,"she wailed, "Iam going crazy!"

"Oh, no, you're not," he said grimly. "You're going back to the ship!I don't know what gives with this creepy clod, but I know we're notmoving an inch outside the ship until we blast off!Come on!"

"They're crawling back toward their ship, Pud ...look out, they'reheading for the dimensional-warp!"

Pud extended a tentacle ninety feet and slapped the dimensional-warpout of the path of the scurrying creatures.

The warp bounced silently on the rocky ground, caromed like afire-ball from boulder to boulder, encountered stray radiation fromthetharn-field that still glowed invisibly on the other side ofthe ridge, and became activated; it emitted concentric spheres ofnameless-colored energy, and a vast snapping and crackling.

"There," Gop thought triumphantly at Pud. "That's just whatI didwith thetharn-field.... I guess nobody is above accidents, eh?"

Pud thought pure vitamins at his Junior Scientist. "You idiot, I didn'taccidentally turn on the warp! You left thetharn on, andittriggered the warp!Why didn't you deactivate the tharn?"

"Why didn'tyou?" Gop shot back. "You were there too!"

Pud lashed a tentacle over the outcropping, and thetharn-fieldbecame inactive. Then he looked around, and every eye in his prime headpopped. "Look out, the dimensional-warp is spreading ... it's lost itscohesion ... oh, digestion, they're inthat now!"

Johnny and Helen Gorman were in a universe of blazing stars and nebulaethat whirled like cosmic carousels; of gas clouds that seethed in giantturbulence ... it was the universe of creation, or a universe in itsdeath-throes....

"Johnny...."

"Helen...."

The boiling universe exploded away from them in soundless radiation, inall directions ... infive directions, their subconscious minds toldthem ... it vanished into nothingness, a nothingness that surroundedthem like white blindness, and then suddenly it was restored again,roiling, churning, flashing with the bright eyes of novae, shotwith the sinuous streamers of rushing gas clouds, pulsing with theheartbeats of winking variables ...

And suddenly they were tumbling head over heels along the rocky groundof the little planetoid again.

"Johnny...."

"Helen...."

"At least we got them out ofthat," Pud puffed. "The sub-temporalfield, Gop ... help me lift it ... hurry!"

"Master,all our experiments are activated! Thetharn radiatedenough to activateeverything!"

"Help me lift the sub-temporal field!"

"Master, it's too late ... they'rein it!"

A million miles above their heads was the vast sweep of All Time, likea rushing, glassy, upside-down river ... they tumbled through a chaoswhere Time, twice in each beat of their hearts, bounced back and forthbetween creation and entropy, and took them with it.... Time was atorrent beneath whose surface they were yanked back and forth fromBeyond the End to Before the Beginning like guppies on a deepsea line;a torrent whose banks were dark eternity, and whose waters were theslippery substance of years....

"Johnny...."

"Helen...."

Pud deactivated the sub-temporal field with a lash of a tentacle, andthe two little aliens rolled from it like dice from a cup, gasping andwailing. Immediately they started running again toward their ship,dodging between the faint flickers of red, blue, green, scarlet andnameless-colored light that marked the location of those experimentswhich, now activated and releasing their fantastic energies, defiedeven the invisibility fields that still surrounded them.

The aliens brushed against another experimental field, and ittwisted itself in one millionth of a second into a fifth-dimensionaltopological monstrosity that would take weeks to untangle—if it didn'texplode first, for it bulged dangerously at the seams.

Pud hastily back-tentacled the field into an interdimensional-vortex,where, if it did explode, it would disrupt an uninhabited universe sofar down on the scale of subspaces that nobody would get hurt.

Then the Senior Scientist gathered ten tons of machinery in atentacle and hoisted it while the creatures ran beneath. Gop waspsychokineticarrying five energy-fields toward the sidelines, withanother dozen or so wrapped in his tentacles. Pud silently dumped hisload of machinery and reached for something else in the creatures' path.

But the creatures scurried erratically, stopping, dashing off in thisdirection, skidding to a halt as they saw something else to terrifythem, and then dashing off inthat direction just as the Vegans haddealt with an obstacle to their progress inthis direction.

"Pud! ... one of them fell through the intraspatial-doorway to theother side of the planet!"

"Well, for the love of swallowing, reach through andget it! If thosebeasts see it, they'll tear it to pieces!"

Helen Gorman faced something that was a cross between a tomcat and aneggplant on stilts. It looked hungry. It bounded toward her in fortyfoot lopes.

"Johnny ...Johnny, where are you...."

Helen fainted.

Several other garage-sized beasts converged on her, all looking ashungry as the first. In reality, they weren't hungry—their foodconsisted of stone, primarily, while they also drew sustenance fromcosmic radiation. But they liked to tear things to pieces. They werenative to the planetoid; the Vegan Scientists had gathered them upand shoved them through the intraspatial-doorway to this side of theplanet, where they wouldn't be underfoot all the time. It was a one-waydoorway, through which Pud or Gop would occasionally reach to pluck oneof the beasts back for use in experimentation.

Now, just as the beasts reached Helen Gorman, one of Gop's tentaclescame through the doorway, followed by one of his smaller heads. TheJunior Scientist picked up Helen, and hastily extruded another tentaclefrom the first to bat aside one of the beasts that leaped after her.

The part of the tentacle bearing Helen Gorman swished back through thedoorway. The head and the rest of the tentacle followed.

The beasts commenced fighting among themselves, which was what they didmost of the time anyway.

Gop, however, in his haste, had forgotten to repolarize the moleculesof his body while retreating through the doorway ... and the momenthe cleared the doorway on the other side of the planet, the doorwayreversed—still one-way, but now theother way.

And eventually one of the beasts, attracted by all the flickering andflashing and frantic scrabbling visible through the doorway, abandonedthe fun of the fight and leaped, like a ten-ton gopher, through theopening.

The others followed, naturally. They always chased and tore apart thefirst one to cut and run.

Gop had just set Helen Gorman on the ground, and Johnny Gorman,seeing her apparently materialize from thin air and float downward,had just started to stagger toward her, when the ten-ton gopher beganto vivisect one of Pud's tails. The animal hadn't seen the tail,of course—it was invisible. But it had stumbled over it, and beenintrigued.

Pud leaped ninety feet into the air, roaring. Roaring out loud, notthought-roaring. And roaring with a dozen gigantic throats. The soundthundered and rolled and crashed and echoed from the low hills around.

The beast fell off Pud's tail, bounced, looked around, and made forJohnny Gorman as the only visible moving object.

Johnny's eyes were still bugging from the gargantuan roar he had justheard. He saw the beast and dodged frantically, just as Gop's invisibletentacle shot out to bowl the beast over.

In dodging, Johnny tumbled into another energy-field.

... He stood on his own face, saw before his eyes the hairy mole onthe back of his neck, and threw a gray-and-red insideout hand beforehis eyes in complete terror. Then Pud nudged him gently out of thefield, and before Johnny's eyes, in an instantaneous and unfathomableconvolution, the hand became normal again.

About that time the rest of the beasts emerged from theintraspatial-doorway. While some of them continued the fight that hadbegun on the other side of the planet, others started for Johnny Gormanand for Helen, who was now sitting up weakly and shaking her head.

A beast resembling a steam-shovel on spider's legs rammed full-tiltinto a force-field. The field bounced fifty feet and merged withanother field in silent but cataclysmic embrace, producing a sub-fieldwhich converted one tenth of one percent of all water within a hundredfoot radius to alcohol.

The effect on Johnny and Helen was instantaneous ... they becamedrunk as hoot-owls. Their eyes bleared and refused to focus. Theirjaws sagged. Johnny stumbled, and sat down hard. He and Helen stareddolefully at each other through their faceplates.

Pud gave up every last hope of avoiding Contact.

He picked up Johnny with one tentacle and Helen with another and setthem down on top of their spaceship, where there was just enoughreasonably flat surface on the snip's snub nose to hold them.

The beasts were chasing one another around and around through thewreckage of the laboratory. They romped and trampled over delicatemachines, sent heavier equipment spinning to smash against boulders;they ran head-on into sizzling energy-fields and, head-off, keptrunning.

Pud grabbed up an armful of beasts, raced to the doorway, reversed itand poured them through. He grabbed up more beasts, threw them after.Gop was busily engaged in the same task. Some of the beasts beganfighting among themselves even as the Vegans held them—Gop jumpedas one tore six cubic yards of flesh from a tentacle. He healed thetentacle immediately, then hardened it and all his other tentacles tothe consistency of pig iron. He held back that particular beast fromthe lot. When the others had been tossed through, he hauled back histentacle, wound up, and pegged the offending beast with all his might.It streaked through the doorway like a projectile, legs and eyestalksrigid.

Pud plucked a machine from the two-foot claws of the very last beast,and tossed the beast through. Then he examined the machine—it wasbeyond repair. He slammed that through the doorway too.

In ten seconds, the two Vegan Scientists had slapped and mauled alltheir rioting experiments into inaction.

Silence descended over the battle-ground. Silence, morenerve-shattering than the noise had been.

Pud looked around at the remains of the laboratory, every faceforest-green with rage.

Machines lay broken, tilted, flickering, whining, wheezing, like thebodies of the wounded. Delicate instruments were smashed to bits. Theinvoluted field that Pud had flung through the vortex had evidentlyburst, as he had feared—for the vortex had vanished. So, probably,had the universe the field had burst in. The two fields that hadinterlocked were ruined, each having contaminated the other beyonduse. Other energy-fields, having absorbed an excess of energy from thetharn, were bloated monstrosities or burned-out husks.

It would take weeks to get the place straightened up ... even longer toreplace the smashed equipment and restore the ruined fields.

Many experiments in which time had been a factor would take months—andin some cases years—to duplicate.

All that was bad enough.

But worst of all ... the little aliens had been Contacted.

Like it or not, the aliens knew that something was very much up on thisplanetoid.

Like it or not, they'd report that, and more of their kind would comescurrying back to investigate.

Pud groaned, and studied the little creatures, who sat huddled togetheron the nose of the ship.

"Well," he thought sourly to Gop, "here we are."

"I—yes, Master."

"Do you think that from now on you'll watch the Detector?"

"Oh, yes, Master—I will."

"And do you think it matters a Chew now if you do or not? Now thatwe'verevealed ourselves?"

"I—I—"

"We have a choice," Pud said acidly. "We can destroy these littlealiens, so they can't report what they've seen. That's out, of course.Or we can move our laboratory to another system ... a formidable job,and Food knows whether we'd ever find another planet so suited to ourneeds. And even if wedid do that, and they found nothing when theyreturned here, they'd still know we were around somewhere."

"They wouldn't know thatwe're around, Master."

"They'd knowsomething is around ... don't mince words with me,you idiot. You know that they've seen enough to draw the veryconclusions we don't want them to draw. You know how vital it is thatno race under Contact-level status know of the existence of otherintelligent races ... particularly races far in advance of it. Suchknowledge can alter the entire course of their development."

"Yes, Master."

"So what are we to do, eh? Here we are. And there—" Pud motioned witha tentacle at the little aliens—"they are. As you can see, we mustreveal ourselves to still a greater extent ... they can't even get intotheir ship to leave the planet without our help!"

Gop was silent.

"Also—" Pud sent a brief extra-sensory probe at the aliens, and bothof them clutched at their helmeted heads—"their problem of air supplyis critical. There is very little left in their suit-tanks, and thetime required for their machines to refine air from this planet'satmosphere has been wasted in—in—theentertainment so recentlyconcluded. At this moment they are resigned to death. Naturally, wemust help them." He paused. "Well, my brilliant, capable, young JuniorNincompoop? Any ideas on how we can help them, and still keep ourScientists' status when the Examiners get the story of this mess out ofus?"

"Yes, Master."

"I thought not." Pud continued his frowning scrutiny of the aliens fora moment. Then he looked up, his faces blank. "Eh? You do?"

"Yes, Master."

"Well, great gobs of gulosity,what?"

"Master, do you recall the time experiment that you wanted to try a fewyears ago? Do you recall that the idea appealed to you very much, butthat you wanted an intelligent subject for it, so we could determineresults by observing rational reactions?"

"I recall it, all right. My brave young Junior Scientist declined to bethe subject ... though Food knows you're hardly intelligent enough toqualify anyway. Yes, I remember ... but what's that got to do with—"

Pud paused. The jaws of his secondary heads, which were more given toemotion, dropped. Then slowly his faces brightened, and his many eyesbegan to glow.

"Ah," he thought softly.

"You see, Master?"

"I do indeed."

"If it works, we'll have no more problem. The Examiners will be pleasedat our ingenuity. The aliens will no longer—"

"I see, Isee ... all right, let's try it!"

Pud reached down and picked one of the aliens off the nose of the ship.It slumped in his grasp immediately. The other alien began firing itspopgun frantically at the seemingly empty air through which its matemysteriously rose.

The thermonuclear bolts tickled Pud's hide. He sighed and relaxed hispersonal invisibility field and became visible. That didn't matter now.

The alien stared upward. Its face whitened. It dropped its popgun andfell over backward, slid gently off the ship's nose and started a slowlight-gravity fall toward the ground.

Pud caught it, and said, "I thought that might happen. Evidently theylose consciousness rather easily at unaccustomed sights. A provincialtrait."

He slid the aliens gently into the airlock of their ship.

The Vegans waited for the aliens to regain consciousness.

Eventually one did. Immediately, it dragged the other back from thelock, into the body of the ship. A moment later the lock closed.

"Now hold the ship," Pud told Gop, "while I form the field."

Flame flickered from the ship's lower end. It rose a few inches off theground. Gop placed a tentacle on its nose and forced it down again. Hewaited, while the ship throbbed and wobbled beneath the tentacle.

Now, for the first time, Gop himself esprobed the aliens. He sent agentle probe into one of their minds—and blinked at the turmoil ofterror and helplessness he found there.

Faced with death at the hands of "giant monsters," the aliens preferredto take off and "die cleanly" in space from asphyxiation, or even by amutual self-destruction pact that would provide less discomfort.

Gop withdrew his probe, wondering that any intelligent creature couldbecome sufficiently panicky to overlook the fact that if the "monsters"had wanted to kill them, they would be a dozen times dead already.

Pud had shaped a time-field of the type necessary to do the job. It wasa pale-green haze in his tentacles.

He released the field and, under his direction, it leaped to surroundthe spaceship, clinging to it like a soft cloak. As the Vegans watched,it seemed to melt into the metal and become a part of it—the wholeship glowed a soft, luminescent green.

"Let it go," Pud said.

Gop removed his tentacle.

The ship rose on its flicker of flame—rose past the Vegans' enormouslegs and tails, past their gigantic be-tentacled bodies, past theirmany necks and faces, rose over their heads.

Gop sneezed as the flame brushed a face.

And Pud began shaping a psychokinetic bolt in his prime brain. For thispurpose he marshaled the resources of all his other brains as well,and every head except his prime one assumed an idiot stare.

He said, "Now!" and loosed the bolt as a tight-beam, aimed at theship and invested with ninety-two separate and carefully calculatedphase-motions.

The ship froze, fifty miles over their heads. The flicker from itsrocket tubes became a steady, motionless glow.

Pud said, "Now," again, and altered a number of the phase-motions once,twice, three times, in an intricate pattern.

The ship vanished.

As one, the many heads of the Vegan Scientists turned to stare at thepoint in the sky where they had first sighted the ship.

There it was, coasting past the laboratory-planet, tubes lifeless;coasting on the velocity that had brought it from the last star it hadvisited.

There it was, just as it had been before the tiny aliens had sightedthe flickerings that had caused them to relax their meteor-screens.

There it was, sent back in time to before all the day's frantichappenings had happened.

Pud and Gop esprobed the distant aliens ... and then looked at eachother in complete satisfaction.

"Fine!" Pud said. "They don't remember a thing ... not a singlealimentary thing!" He looked around them, at the shambles of thelaboratory. "It's a pity the experiment couldn't repair all this aswell ... is everything turned off?"

"Everything, Master."

"No experiments operating, you nincompoop? No flashes?"

"None, Master."

"Then they should have no reason to land, you idiot.

"You know," Pud said, "in a way it was rather a fortunate thing thatthey landed. It enabled me to perform a very interesting experiment. Wehave demonstrated that a creature returned through time along the thirdflud-subcontinuum will not retain memory of the process, or of whattranspired between a particular point in time and one's circular returnto it. I'm glad you stimulated me to think of it. Best idea I ever had."

Pud turned his attention to the ruins of the laboratory. He movedoff, half his heads agonizing over the destruction caused by today'sencounter, the other half glowing at its satisfactory conclusion.

Gop sighed, and esprobed the little aliens for the last time ... afinal check, to make certain that they remembered nothing.

"Johnny, how about that little planet down there ... to the left?"

"Let's drop the meteor-screens for a better look."

Hastily, Gop reached out and tapped the meteor aside.

"Heck, that planet looks like a dud, all right ... but it's two daysto the next one ... and I've got a terrific headache!"

"Funny ... I've got one too."

"Well, what say we land and stretch our—"

By that time Gop had hastily withdrawn his headache-causing probe. Hestared anxiously upward.

After a moment, he said, "They're landing, Master."