Part 1

Produced by Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

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.