an apartment house, floated slowly downward in the laboratory-planet's light gravity.

The tiny alien spaceship touched the ground just as he did. The rocket flare flickered and died.

The ship sat on its fins, about thirty feet—Vegan feet—away. In its shining side, a few Vegan inches above the still smoking rocket tubes, was a small black hole.

"Master, look!" Gop thought. "Their ship is damaged ... perhaps that's why they landed!" And he started to extend a tentative extra-sensory probe through the hole.

Pud lashed out with a probe of his own, knocking Gop's aside before it could enter the hole. "Nincompoop! ... don't go esprobing until we know if they're sensitive to it or not! Can't you remember the regulations on Contact for just one minute?"

The tiny spaceship sat silently, while its occupants evidently studied the lay of the land. Small turrets halfway up its sides twitched this way and that, pointing popgun armament.

Pud inspected the weapons extra-sensorily, and thought an amused snort: the things tossed a simple hydrogen-helium pellet for a short distance.

Gop, nursing a walloping headache as a result of Pud's rough counterprobe, thought sourly to himself: "I try to save the yim ... that's wrong. He forgets to deactivate the thig ... that's all right. I esprobe ... that's wrong. He esprobes ... that's all right."

At last: "They're getting out," Gop observed.

A tiny airlock had opened in the side of the ship. A metal ladder poked out, swung down, settled against the ground.

The aliens—two of them—appeared; looked down, looked up, looked to the right and to the left. Then they came warily down the ladder.

For a few minutes the giant Vegans watched the creatures wander about. One of them approached one of Pud's tails. Irritatedly Pud lifted it out of the way. The little creature snooped on, unaware that twenty tons of invisible silicoid flesh hung over its head. Pud curled the tail close to him, and did likewise with all his other tails.

"You'd better do the same," he advised Gop, his thought-tone peevish.

Silently, Gop drew in his tails. One unwise move, he knew, and the Senior Scientist would start thinking in roars.

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