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 Life-saver.”
“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.”
Gap 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 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!”<
br />
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 one 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 fireball 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 deep-sea 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 inter-dimensional-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 Alien MEGAPACK® Page 6