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 ... 

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