Part 2

"_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."