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'relanding, Master."
Pud looked up from the tiny thig-field he had been shaping in histentacles. "Of course they are," he thought-snapped. "You practicallyinvited them down, didn't you? If you'd only kept a few eyes on theDetector, instead of day-dreaming—"
"I'm sorry," Gop said unhappily. "I wasn't day-dreaming, I wasobserving the magnificent skill and finesse with which you shaped thethig. After all, this system is so isolated. No one ever came alongbefore.... I just supposed no one ever would—"
"A Scientist isn't supposed to suppose! Until he's proven wrong, he'ssupposed to know!" Thirty of Pud's eyes glowered upward at the tinyalien spaceship, only ninety or so miles above the surface of thelaboratory-planet and lowering rapidly. The rest of Pud's eyes—morethan a hundred of them, set haphazardously in his various-sized headslike gurf-seeds on rolls—scoured every inch of the planet's visiblesurface, to make certain that no sign of the Vegans' presence on theplanet, from the tiniest experiment to the gigantic servo-mechanicaleating pits, was left operating or visible.
Irritatedly he squelched out of existence a yim-field thathad taken three weeks of laborious psycho-induction to develop.His psycho-kineticut stripped it of cohesion, and its faintwhine-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 untilthe creatures landed, Master ... perhaps their auditory apparatus wouldnot have been sufficient to reveal its presence to them, in which casethe field would not have had to be—"
"All right, all right," Pud grunted. "I appreciate your point ... but,dripping mouthfuls, you know that any risk of detection is too great.You know the regulations on Contact!"
"Yes, Master."
"Speaking of which, part of your seventh head is showing."
The Junior Scientist included the head in the personal invisibilityfield which he himself was broadcasting.
"Of all the suns in this sector," Pud thought, eying the littlespaceship, "and of all the planets around this particular sun, theyhave to choose this one to land on. Chew!"
Gop flushed. A member of the Transverse Colon Revivalists, he foundPud's constant atheistic swearing very disturbing. He sighed inwardly.Usually at least one of Pud's heads could manage to keep its sense ofhumor, but right now all of them were like proton-storms. The SeniorScientist was on the verge of one of his totalitantrums.
"They must have sighted flashes from our experiments," Pud went on,"before you decided you could spare just one set of eyes for theDetector!"
Though both Vegans were invisible to other eyes, they remained visibleto each other because their eyes were adjusted to the wavelength oftheir invisibility fields. By the same token, they could see all theirinvisible e