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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59470 ***
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+                              LABORATORY
+
+                            BY JEROME BIXBY
+
+              _Trying to keep a supercolossal laboratory
+             invisible when two curious aliens are poking
+              around can be a trying affair for even the
+                     most brilliant of minds._...
+
+[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
+Worlds of If Science Fiction, December 1955.
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
+the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+Gop's thoughts had the bluish-purple tint of abject apology: "They're
+landing, Master."
+
+Pud looked up from the tiny _thig_-field he had been shaping in his
+tentacles. "Of course they are," he thought-snapped. "You practically
+invited them down, didn't you? If you'd only kept a few eyes on the
+Detector, instead of day-dreaming--"
+
+"I'm sorry," Gop said unhappily. "I wasn't day-dreaming, I was
+observing the magnificent skill and finesse with which you shaped the
+_thig_. After all, this system is so isolated. No one ever came along
+before.... I just supposed no one ever _would_--"
+
+"A Scientist isn't supposed to suppose! Until he's proven wrong, he's
+supposed to _know_!" Thirty of Pud's eyes glowered upward at the tiny
+alien spaceship, only ninety or so miles above the surface of the
+laboratory-planet and lowering rapidly. The rest of Pud's eyes--more
+than a hundred of them, set haphazardously in his various-sized heads
+like _gurf_-seeds on rolls--scoured every inch of the planet's visible
+surface, to make certain that no sign of the Vegans' presence on the
+planet, from the tiniest experiment to the gigantic servo-mechanical
+eating pits, was left operating or visible.
+
+Irritatedly he squelched out of existence a _yim_-field that
+had taken three weeks of laborious psycho-induction to develop.
+His psycho-kineticut stripped it of cohesion, and its faint
+whine-and-crackle vanished.
+
+"I told you to deactivate _all_ 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 the _yim_ might wait until
+the creatures landed, Master ... perhaps their auditory apparatus would
+not have been sufficient to reveal its presence to them, in which case
+the field would not have had to be--"
+
+"All right, all right," Pud grunted. "I appreciate your point ... but,
+dripping mouthfuls, you know that _any_ 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 invisibility
+field which he himself was broadcasting.
+
+"Of all the suns in this sector," Pud thought, eying the little
+spaceship, "and of all the planets around this particular sun, they
+have to choose this one to land on. Chew!"
+
+Gop flushed. A member of the Transverse Colon Revivalists, he found
+Pud's constant atheistic swearing very disturbing. He sighed inwardly.
+Usually at least one of Pud's heads could manage to keep its sense of
+humor, but right now all of them were like proton-storms. The Senior
+Scientist 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 just _one_ set of eyes for the
+Detector!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Though both Vegans were invisible to other eyes, they remained visible
+to each other because their eyes were adjusted to the wavelength of
+their invisibility fields. By the same token, they could see all their
+invisible experiments--a vast litter of gadgets, gismos, gargantuan
+gimmicks, shining tools, huge and infinitesimal instruments, stacks of
+supplies, and various types of energy fields, the latter all frozen in
+mid-activity like smudges on a pane of glass. The sandy ground was the
+floor of the Vegans' laboratory; small hills and outcroppings of rock
+were their chairs and work-benches. Like a spaceship junkyard, or an
+enormous open-air machinery warehouse, the laboratory stretched away
+from the two Scientists in every direction to the planetoid's near
+horizon.
+
+Pud intensified the general invisibility field to the last notch, and
+the invisible experiments became even more invisible.
+
+The _thig_-field was a nameless-colored whorl of energy in the Senior
+Scientist's tentacles. In his concern for the other experiments, he had
+forgotten 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 shimmering
+edge of it touched his body, which he had not insulated. Energy
+crackled. Pud jumped forty feet into the air, swearing, and slapped the
+field into non-existence between two tentacles.
+
+His body, big as an apartment house, floated slowly downward in the
+laboratory-planet's light gravity.
+
+The tiny alien spaceship touched the ground just as he did. The rocket
+flare flickered and died.
+
+The ship sat on its fins, about thirty feet--Vegan feet--away. In its
+shining 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's
+why they landed!" And he started to extend a tentative extra-sensory
+probe through the hole.
+
+Pud lashed out with a probe of his own, knocking Gop's aside before it
+could enter the hole. "Nincompoop! ... don't go esprobing until we know
+if they're sensitive to it or not! Can't you remember the regulations
+on Contact for just one _minute_?"
+
+The tiny spaceship sat silently, while its occupants evidently studied
+the lay of the land. Small turrets halfway up its sides twitched this
+way 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 rough
+counterprobe, thought sourly to himself: "I try to save the _yim_ ...
+that's wrong. He forgets to deactivate the _thig_ ... 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 poked
+out, swung down, settled against the ground.
+
+The aliens--two of them--appeared; looked down, looked up, looked to
+the 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 it
+out of the way. The little creature snooped on, unaware that twenty
+tons of invisible silicoid flesh hung over its head. Pud curled the
+tail 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 the
+Senior Scientist would start thinking in roars.
+
+One of Gop's tails scraped slightly against a huge boulder. The scales
+made a tractor-on-gravel sound.
+
+Pud thought in roars.
+
+The tiny creature had stopped and was turning its helmeted head this
+way and that, as if trying to see where the sound had come from. It
+had drawn a weapon of some sort from a holster at its belt--another
+thermonuclear popgun.
+
+The creature turned and came back toward the Vegans, heading for his
+ship. Pud lifted his tail again. The creature passed under it, reached
+the ship, joined its partner.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I heard it too, Johnny," Helen Gorman said nervously. "A loud scraping
+noise--"
+
+"It seemed to come from right behind me," Johnny Gorman said. "Damn
+near scared me off the planet ... I thought it was a rockslide. Or
+the biggest critter in creation, sneaking up on me. I couldn't see
+anything, though ... could you?"
+
+"No."
+
+Johnny stood there, blaster in hand, looking around, eyes sharp
+behind his faceplate. He saw nothing but flat, grayish-red ground,
+a scattering of stone outcroppings large and small; nothing but the
+star-clouded black of space above the near horizon, and the small sun
+of the system riding a low hillock like a beacon.
+
+"Blue light," he said thoughtfully. "Green light. Red and purple
+lights. And a mess of crazy colors we never saw before. Whatever those
+flashes 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. Or
+magnetic phenomena of some kind ... that could be why the ship didn't
+handle right during landing--"
+
+Johnny studied the upside-down dials on the protruding chest-board of
+his spacesuit.
+
+"No neon in the atmosphere," he said. "Darned little argon, or any
+other inert gas. The only large mineral deposits within fifty miles are
+straight down. And this clod's about as magnetic as an onion." He gave
+the surrounding bleak terrain another narrow-eyed scrutiny. "I suppose
+it _could_ have been some kind of aurora, though ... it's gone now, and
+there 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 knows
+how many million years ... the jolt of our landing just shook things up
+a little." He grinned, a little sheepishly. "As for the landing ... I
+was so scared after that meteor hit us, it's a wonder I didn't nail the
+ship 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 the
+compressor to charge the spare oxy-tanks ... we'll have to delouse this
+air of ammonia, but otherwise it's fine. Look, honey, I won't need any
+help; why don't you get busy on a PC?"
+
+Helen nodded, still staring up at the meteor-hole. "You know," she said
+slowly, "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 thing
+is, 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 two
+dozen or so samples needed for Standard Planetary Classification. Bits
+of rock, air, vegetable growth, dust--the dust was very important. All
+went into vac-containers at her belt.
+
+Then suddenly she said, "O-o-o-_oof_!" and reared back on her knees and
+clapped both hands to her helmet. Her eyes squeezed shut behind her
+faceplate, then opened wide and frightened.
+
+By the time her hands reached her helmet, Johnny had his blaster out
+and was floating toward the ground, looking around for something to
+shoot at. His boots touched, and two long light-gravity steps brought
+him to her side.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pud had been leaning over the tiny spaceship, one of his faces only
+feet above the little creatures.
+
+Gop's thought came: "What are they?"
+
+"Fanged if I know. Bipeds ... never saw such little ones." Pud adjusted
+several eyes to a certain wavelength and studied the creatures through
+their 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 our
+experiments."
+
+That brought back Pud's ill-temper. "Miracle! Didn't you see me give
+this cosmic kiddycar of theirs a couple of psychokineticlouts so they'd
+land where they did?" The Senior Scientist glared around at their
+thousand-and-one experiments, and then down at the little spaceship,
+smaller than the smallest of them, squatting on toy fins. He curled a
+tentacle, as if wishing he could swat it.
+
+Gop knew, however, that despite Pud's irritation at having his
+work interrupted, he was just a little intrigued by the aliens. No
+matter how insignificant they were they were animate life of some
+intelligence, and Pud must be wondering about them.
+
+Gop thought it might be a good idea to dwell on that, in order to keep
+Pud 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 their
+level."
+
+"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 the
+creatures.
+
+"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. Protective
+garments ... they can't even adjust physically to hostile
+environments!"
+
+A minute passed.
+
+Pud said, "Mm. Well. I think I _will_ see what I can read ... just to
+have something to talk about at the Scientists' Club."
+
+He sent out a tentative probe ... a little one ... just enough to
+register in one of his brains the total conscious content of one of
+the little creature's minds. He was afraid to go deeper, after the
+subconscious, though actually that was far more important. But deep
+probing would probably be felt for what it was, while conscious probing
+was just a little painful.
+
+The creature popped erect in its squatting position, and clapped its
+upper extremities to its head.
+
+The other one, which had been scrambling up the ladder to the ship's
+airlock, drew its popgun and joined the first.
+
+"They're from someplace called Earth," Pud said. "In the V-LM-12Xva
+Sector of this Galaxy, as nearly as I can make out. They're an
+Exploration Team, sent out by their planet to gather data on the nature
+of the physical universe." He paused to consult the third memory
+bank of his fifth brain, where he had impressed the content of the
+creature's mind. "They've had space travel for about two hundred of
+their years. I translate that as about eleven of ours." He consulted
+again. "Highly materialistic. Externally focused. Very limited
+sensorium. An infant race, chasing everything that moves, round and
+round through their little three-dimensional universe. They've a long
+way to go."
+
+"What are they doing here?"
+
+"Hm." Pud consulted again. "A routine exploration flight brought them
+to this system ... and an almost unbelievable coincidence has served
+to delay them here. They dropped their meteor-screens for just a
+moment--at just the wrong moment. A large meteor came along, entered
+the ship, and destroyed both their atmosphere-manufacturing equipment
+and the large pressure tank of atmosphere which they kept as reserve
+in case the equipment should fail." He paused. "Mixture of hydrogen
+and oxygen ... they can't live without it. At any rate, the ship was
+evacuated, and they barely had time to get into the ... mm, spacesuits,
+they call them ... which they now wear. The accident left them with
+no atmosphere whatever, except the small amount in the tanks of those
+suits. That will be exhausted in a short time ... I gather that if this
+planet hadn't been here, they'd have been goners. As it stands, they
+plan to charge their spare suit-tanks, which weren't harmed, with the
+air of this planet, and then return to their Earth, subsisting on the
+tanked air, by hyperspatial drive...." Again Pud paused. "Hm. Well,
+now! I'd overlooked that. So they have hyperspatial drive, at
+least ... and after only two hundred years of space travel! Hm. Perhaps
+they _are_ worth a closer look...."
+
+Pud lowered his heads over the two little aliens, who were moving
+warily, popguns drawn, away from the ship.
+
+"Pud," Gop said nervously.
+
+"What?"
+
+"One of them is crawling toward the time-warp."
+
+"Well, don't tell _me_ about it ... lift the warp out of the way!"
+
+Gop extended a tentacle, first reconstituting it on the seventh atomic
+sublevel so he wouldn't get it blown off, and gently picked up the
+time-warp. It looked like a blue-violet frozen haze in his grasp. He
+set it down on the other side of the spaceship, anchoring it again to
+_now_ so it wouldn't go flapping off along the time-continuum.
+
+"So they _didn'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 bringing
+about this entire bother, because they wanted to get a better look at
+the flashes."
+
+Gop was silent, but he thought acidly: "That's what you say--you won't
+let _me_ esprobe, and when you do, you manage to prove it's all my
+fault."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Johnny Gorman had just said to Helen, "I want to chip a few samples off
+that outcropping over there ... come on, hon."
+
+He started toward the ridge of gray-black rock. Helen followed on his
+heels.
+
+"As-pir-in," she said, deliberately falsetto, and her helmet-valet fed
+her another pill with a sip of water.
+
+"Then we'll go back and stick inside the ship until the tanks are
+charged," Johnny went on, a little grimly. "I think we're just edgy.
+Planets don't give people headaches ... and there's nothing alive
+within 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 the _tharn_-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 great
+speed until they were between the aliens and the stone outcropping
+toward which they appeared to be heading. Gop extended a tentacle,
+curled it at an odd angle, and picked up the shimmering _tharn_-field,
+which was the Vegans' reservoir of Basic Universal Energy. Set in
+any energy matrix, _tharn_ became that energy; added to any existing
+energy, _tharn_ augmented it to any desired potential. Thus it was
+extremely valuable to their experiments ... and very risky stuff to
+handle, as well.
+
+Gingerly, Gop set the _tharn_ down beyond the outcropping. At the
+same time he picked up several instruments that lay nearby--an
+electron-wrench, a _snurling_-iron, a _plotz_-meter, several
+pencil-rays. He placed them on the ground beside the _tharn_.
+
+Pud had curled twelve tentacles around the space-warp generator--it was
+as big as a city block, and heavy, even in light gravity. He puffed a
+thought at Gop: "Give me a tentacle."
+
+Gop helped his Master place the generator safely on the other side of
+the ridge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Johnny Gorman banged off a handful of rock, and shoved it into the
+vac-container at his belt.
+
+"Okay, hon," he said. "Let's go."
+
+They stood once more moment atop the ridge, looking out over the
+barren, rusty-gray plain that the ridge had until now concealed from
+their gaze.
+
+"Looks just as dead as the rest," Johnny observed. "I guess we were
+just jumpy over nothing." He turned to start down the slope. "Come on."
+
+In three long light-gravity steps he had reached the bottom, and turned
+to steady Helen.
+
+She wasn't there.
+
+She had tripped and tumbled off the other side of the ridge. He could
+hear her screaming.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"_Putrefied proteins!_" Pud roared. "Help me get it out of the _tharn_!"
+
+The two Vegans leaned over the ridge. While Gop forced the writhing
+folds of the _tharn_-field apart with two reconstituted tentacles, Pud
+reached in, plucked the little alien out and set it upright.
+
+It immediately scrabbled up the side of the ridge as fast as it could
+and joined its mate, which had bounded up the other side.
+
+"Now look at what you've done!" Pud raged. "What about the rules on
+Contact! The Examiners will get this out of us when we report on our
+Projects ... mountains of bites, we've _revealed_ ourselves!"
+
+"Not really, Master," Gop said, rushing his thoughts. "All the creature
+will know is that it tumbled into the field, and then was somehow
+ejected 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, every
+one 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't
+think of everything at once! I must have accidentally activated the
+_tharn_ when I moved it. I'm _sorry_!"
+
+Pud clapped a tentacle to his prime forehead. "What next!" he moaned.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Oh, Johnny, Johnny," Helen sobbed. "I tripped when I started to turn
+around, and fell down the other side, and all of a sudden ... it was
+horrible ... I thought I was going _crazy_--"
+
+Johnny Gorman had his arms tight around her. Behind her back, his
+blaster was pointed straight down the far slope of the ridge, ready to
+atomize anything that moved.
+
+"What, honey?" he said. "What happened? I didn't see anything near
+you ... what happened?"
+
+"It was like I was in a hurricane ... I couldn't see anything, but
+something seemed to be whirling around me, something as big as the
+universe ... and it seemed to be whirling _inside_ me too! I felt--it
+felt like ... Johnny, I was _crossed_!"
+
+"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 beating
+backwards, and my eyes were looking at each other, and I was just
+twisted all downside up outside and inside out upside, and ... Johnny,"
+she wailed, "I _am_ 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 not
+moving an inch outside the ship until we blast off! _Come on!_"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"They're crawling back toward their ship, Pud ... _look_ out, they're
+heading for the dimensional-warp!"
+
+Pud extended a tentacle ninety feet and slapped the dimensional-warp
+out of the path of the scurrying creatures.
+
+The warp bounced silently on the rocky ground, caromed like a
+fire-ball from boulder to boulder, encountered stray radiation from
+the _tharn_-field that still glowed invisibly on the other side of
+the ridge, and became activated; it emitted concentric spheres of
+nameless-colored energy, and a vast snapping and crackling.
+
+"_There_," Gop thought triumphantly at Pud. "That's just what _I_ did
+with the _tharn_-field.... I guess nobody is above accidents, eh?"
+
+Pud thought pure vitamins at his Junior Scientist. "You idiot, I didn't
+accidentally turn on the warp! You left the _tharn_ on, and _it_
+triggered the warp! _Why didn't you deactivate the_ tharn?"
+
+"Why didn't _you_?" Gop shot back. "You were there too!"
+
+Pud lashed a tentacle over the outcropping, and the _tharn_-field
+became inactive. Then he looked around, and every eye in his prime head
+popped. "Look out, the dimensional-warp is spreading ... it's lost its
+cohesion ... oh, digestion, they're in _that_ now!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Johnny and Helen Gorman were in a universe of blazing stars and nebulae
+that whirled like cosmic carousels; of gas clouds that seethed in giant
+turbulence ... it was the universe of creation, or a universe in its
+death-throes....
+
+"_Johnny_...."
+
+"_Helen_...."
+
+The boiling universe exploded away from them in soundless radiation, in
+all directions ... in _five_ directions, their subconscious minds told
+them ... it vanished into nothingness, a nothingness that surrounded
+them like white blindness, and then suddenly it was restored again,
+roiling, churning, flashing with the bright eyes of novae, shot
+with the sinuous streamers of rushing gas clouds, pulsing with the
+heartbeats of winking variables ...
+
+And suddenly they were tumbling head over heels along the rocky ground
+of the little planetoid again.
+
+"_Johnny_...."
+
+"_Helen_...."
+
+"At least we got them out of _that_," Pud puffed. "The sub-temporal
+field, Gop ... help me lift it ... hurry!"
+
+"Master, _all_ our experiments are activated! The _tharn_ radiated
+enough to activate _everything_!"
+
+"_Help me lift the sub-temporal field!_"
+
+"Master, it's too late ... they're _in_ it!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A million miles above their heads was the vast sweep of All Time, like
+a rushing, glassy, upside-down river ... they tumbled through a chaos
+where Time, twice in each beat of their hearts, bounced back and forth
+between creation and entropy, and took them with it.... Time was a
+torrent beneath whose surface they were yanked back and forth from
+Beyond the End to Before the Beginning like guppies on a deepsea line;
+a torrent whose banks were dark eternity, and whose waters were the
+slippery substance of years....
+
+"_Johnny_...."
+
+"_Helen_...."
+
+Pud deactivated the sub-temporal field with a lash of a tentacle, and
+the two little aliens rolled from it like dice from a cup, gasping and
+wailing. Immediately they started running again toward their ship,
+dodging between the faint flickers of red, blue, green, scarlet and
+nameless-colored light that marked the location of those experiments
+which, now activated and releasing their fantastic energies, defied
+even the invisibility fields that still surrounded them.
+
+The aliens brushed against another experimental field, and it
+twisted itself in one millionth of a second into a fifth-dimensional
+topological monstrosity that would take weeks to untangle--if it didn't
+explode 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 so
+far down on the scale of subspaces that nobody would get hurt.
+
+Then the Senior Scientist gathered ten tons of machinery in a
+tentacle and hoisted it while the creatures ran beneath. Gop was
+psychokineticarrying five energy-fields toward the sidelines, with
+another dozen or so wrapped in his tentacles. Pud silently dumped his
+load of machinery and reached for something else in the creatures' path.
+
+But the creatures scurried erratically, stopping, dashing off in this
+direction, skidding to a halt as they saw something else to terrify
+them, and then dashing off in _that_ direction just as the Vegans had
+dealt with an obstacle to their progress in _this_ direction.
+
+"Pud! ... one of them fell through the intraspatial-doorway to the
+other side of the planet!"
+
+"Well, for the love of swallowing, reach through and _get_ it! If those
+beasts see it, they'll tear it to pieces!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Helen Gorman faced something that was a cross between a tomcat and an
+eggplant on stilts. It looked hungry. It bounded toward her in forty
+foot lopes.
+
+"Johnny ... _Johnny, where are you_...."
+
+Helen fainted.
+
+Several other garage-sized beasts converged on her, all looking as
+hungry as the first. In reality, they weren't hungry--their food
+consisted of stone, primarily, while they also drew sustenance from
+cosmic radiation. But they liked to tear things to pieces. They were
+native to the planetoid; the Vegan Scientists had gathered them up
+and shoved them through the intraspatial-doorway to this side of the
+planet, where they wouldn't be underfoot all the time. It was a one-way
+doorway, through which Pud or Gop would occasionally reach to pluck one
+of the beasts back for use in experimentation.
+
+Now, just as the beasts reached Helen Gorman, one of Gop's tentacles
+came through the doorway, followed by one of his smaller heads. The
+Junior Scientist picked up Helen, and hastily extruded another tentacle
+from the first to bat aside one of the beasts that leaped after her.
+
+The part of the tentacle bearing Helen Gorman swished back through the
+doorway. The head and the rest of the tentacle followed.
+
+The beasts commenced fighting among themselves, which was what they did
+most of the time anyway.
+
+Gop, however, in his haste, had forgotten to repolarize the molecules
+of his body while retreating through the doorway ... and the moment
+he cleared the doorway on the other side of the planet, the doorway
+reversed--still one-way, but now the _other_ way.
+
+And eventually one of the beasts, attracted by all the flickering and
+flashing and frantic scrabbling visible through the doorway, abandoned
+the fun of the fight and leaped, like a ten-ton gopher, through the
+opening.
+
+The others followed, naturally. They always chased and tore apart the
+first 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 began
+to 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 been
+intrigued.
+
+Pud leaped ninety feet into the air, roaring. Roaring out loud, not
+thought-roaring. And roaring with a dozen gigantic throats. The sound
+thundered and rolled and crashed and echoed from the low hills around.
+
+The beast fell off Pud's tail, bounced, looked around, and made for
+Johnny Gorman as the only visible moving object.
+
+Johnny's eyes were still bugging from the gargantuan roar he had just
+heard. He saw the beast and dodged frantically, just as Gop's invisible
+tentacle 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 on
+the back of his neck, and threw a gray-and-red insideout hand before
+his eyes in complete terror. Then Pud nudged him gently out of the
+field, and before Johnny's eyes, in an instantaneous and unfathomable
+convolution, the hand became normal again.
+
+About that time the rest of the beasts emerged from the
+intraspatial-doorway. While some of them continued the fight that had
+begun on the other side of the planet, others started for Johnny Gorman
+and for Helen, who was now sitting up weakly and shaking her head.
+
+A beast resembling a steam-shovel on spider's legs rammed full-tilt
+into a force-field. The field bounced fifty feet and merged with
+another field in silent but cataclysmic embrace, producing a sub-field
+which converted one tenth of one percent of all water within a hundred
+foot radius to alcohol.
+
+The effect on Johnny and Helen was instantaneous ... they became
+drunk as hoot-owls. Their eyes bleared and refused to focus. Their
+jaws sagged. Johnny stumbled, and sat down hard. He and Helen stared
+dolefully 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 set
+them down on top of their spaceship, where there was just enough
+reasonably flat surface on the snip's snub nose to hold them.
+
+The beasts were chasing one another around and around through the
+wreckage of the laboratory. They romped and trampled over delicate
+machines, sent heavier equipment spinning to smash against boulders;
+they ran head-on into sizzling energy-fields and, head-off, kept
+running.
+
+Pud grabbed up an armful of beasts, raced to the doorway, reversed it
+and poured them through. He grabbed up more beasts, threw them after.
+Gop was busily engaged in the same task. Some of the beasts began
+fighting among themselves even as the Vegans held them--Gop jumped
+as one tore six cubic yards of flesh from a tentacle. He healed the
+tentacle immediately, then hardened it and all his other tentacles to
+the consistency of pig iron. He held back that particular beast from
+the lot. When the others had been tossed through, he hauled back his
+tentacle, wound up, and pegged the offending beast with all his might.
+It streaked through the doorway like a projectile, legs and eyestalks
+rigid.
+
+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 was
+beyond repair. He slammed that through the doorway too.
+
+In ten seconds, the two Vegan Scientists had slapped and mauled all
+their rioting experiments into inaction.
+
+Silence descended over the battle-ground. Silence, more
+nerve-shattering than the noise had been.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pud looked around at the remains of the laboratory, every face
+forest-green with rage.
+
+Machines lay broken, tilted, flickering, whining, wheezing, like the
+bodies of the wounded. Delicate instruments were smashed to bits. The
+involuted field that Pud had flung through the vortex had evidently
+burst, as he had feared--for the vortex had vanished. So, probably,
+had the universe the field had burst in. The two fields that had
+interlocked were ruined, each having contaminated the other beyond
+use. Other energy-fields, having absorbed an excess of energy from the
+_tharn_, were bloated monstrosities or burned-out husks.
+
+It would take weeks to get the place straightened up ... even longer to
+replace the smashed equipment and restore the ruined fields.
+
+Many experiments in which time had been a factor would take months--and
+in 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 this
+planetoid.
+
+Like it or not, they'd report that, and more of their kind would come
+scurrying back to investigate.
+
+Pud groaned, and studied the little creatures, who sat huddled together
+on 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 that
+we've _revealed_ ourselves?"
+
+"I--I--"
+
+"We have a choice," Pud said acidly. "We can destroy these little
+aliens, 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 our
+needs. And even if we _did_ do that, and they found nothing when they
+returned here, they'd still know we were around somewhere."
+
+"They wouldn't know that _we're_ around, Master."
+
+"They'd know _something_ is around ... don't mince words with me,
+you idiot. You know that they've seen enough to draw the very
+conclusions we don't want them to draw. You know how vital it is that
+no race under Contact-level status know of the existence of other
+intelligent races ... particularly races far in advance of it. Such
+knowledge can alter the entire course of their development."
+
+"Yes, Master."
+
+"So what are we to do, eh? Here we are. And there--" Pud motioned with
+a tentacle at the little aliens--"they are. As you can see, we must
+reveal ourselves to still a greater extent ... they can't even get into
+their ship to leave the planet without our help!"
+
+Gop was silent.
+
+"Also--" Pud sent a brief extra-sensory probe at the aliens, and both
+of them clutched at their helmeted heads--"their problem of air supply
+is critical. There is very little left in their suit-tanks, and the
+time required for their machines to refine air from this planet's
+atmosphere has been wasted in--in--the _entertainment_ so recently
+concluded. At this moment they are resigned to death. Naturally, we
+must help them." He paused. "Well, my brilliant, capable, young Junior
+Nincompoop? Any ideas on how we can help them, and still keep our
+Scientists' status when the Examiners get the story of this mess out of
+us?"
+
+"Yes, Master."
+
+"I thought not." Pud continued his frowning scrutiny of the aliens for
+a 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 few
+years ago? Do you recall that the idea appealed to you very much, but
+that you wanted an intelligent subject for it, so we could determine
+results by observing rational reactions?"
+
+"I recall it, all right. My brave young Junior Scientist declined to be
+the subject ... though Food knows you're hardly intelligent enough to
+qualify anyway. Yes, I remember ... but what's that got to do with--"
+
+Pud paused. The jaws of his secondary heads, which were more given to
+emotion, dropped. Then slowly his faces brightened, and his many eyes
+began 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 pleased
+at our ingenuity. The aliens will no longer--"
+
+"I see, I _see_ ... 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 its
+popgun frantically at the seemingly empty air through which its mate
+mysteriously rose.
+
+The thermonuclear bolts tickled Pud's hide. He sighed and relaxed his
+personal invisibility field and became visible. That didn't matter now.
+
+The alien stared upward. Its face whitened. It dropped its popgun and
+fell over backward, slid gently off the ship's nose and started a slow
+light-gravity fall toward the ground.
+
+Pud caught it, and said, "I thought that might happen. Evidently they
+lose consciousness rather easily at unaccustomed sights. A provincial
+trait."
+
+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 the
+lock, 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 the
+ground. Gop placed a tentacle on its nose and forced it down again. He
+waited, while the ship throbbed and wobbled beneath the tentacle.
+
+Now, for the first time, Gop himself esprobed the aliens. He sent a
+gentle probe into one of their minds--and blinked at the turmoil of
+terror and helplessness he found there.
+
+Faced with death at the hands of "giant monsters," the aliens preferred
+to take off and "die cleanly" in space from asphyxiation, or even by a
+mutual self-destruction pact that would provide less discomfort.
+
+Gop withdrew his probe, wondering that any intelligent creature could
+become 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 was
+a pale-green haze in his tentacles.
+
+He released the field and, under his direction, it leaped to surround
+the 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 whole
+ship 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' enormous
+legs and tails, past their gigantic be-tentacled bodies, past their
+many 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 this
+purpose 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 the
+ship and invested with ninety-two separate and carefully calculated
+phase-motions.
+
+The ship froze, fifty miles over their heads. The flicker from its
+rocket 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 the
+point 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 had
+visited.
+
+There it was, just as it had been before the tiny aliens had sighted
+the flickerings that had caused them to relax their meteor-screens.
+
+There it was, sent back in time to before all the day's frantic
+happenings had happened.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Pud and Gop esprobed the distant aliens ... and then looked at each
+other in complete satisfaction.
+
+"Fine!" Pud said. "They don't remember a thing ... not a single
+alimentary thing!" He looked around them, at the shambles of the
+laboratory. "It's a pity the experiment couldn't repair all this as
+well ... 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 that
+they landed. It enabled me to perform a very interesting experiment. We
+have demonstrated that a creature returned through time along the third
+_flud_-subcontinuum will not retain memory of the process, or of what
+transpired between a particular point in time and one's circular return
+to 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 moved
+off, half his heads agonizing over the destruction caused by today's
+encounter, the other half glowing at its satisfactory conclusion.
+
+Gop sighed, and esprobed the little aliens for the last time ... a
+final 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 days
+to 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. He
+stared anxiously upward.
+
+After a moment, he said, "They're landing, Master."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Laboratory, by Jerome Bixby
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59470 ***