"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.

 Prev. P 17/20 next