"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."

Gop 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 in 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!"

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 

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