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.

 Prev. P 12/20 next