But now, with Lirld’s comment about one-way teleportation never having worked before, he found himself wondering whether the uncompleted tower, poking a ragged section of electronic superstructure at his bedroom window, had been partially responsible for this veritable puree-of-nightmare he’d been wading through.

  Had it provided a necessary extra link with Lirld’s machine, sort of an aerial connection or grounding wire or whatever? If only he knew a little physics! Eight years of higher education were inadequate to suggest the barest aye or nay.

  He gnashed his teeth, went too far and bit his tongue—and was forced to suspend mental operations until the pain died away and the tears dribbled out of his eyes.

  What if he knew for certain that the tower had played a potent, though passive, part in his removal through interstellar space? What if he knew the exact part it had played in terms of megavolts and amperages and so forth—would the knowledge be the slightest use to him in this impossible situation?

  No, he’d still be a hideous flateyed, non-intelligent monster plucked pretty much at random from the outer reaches of the Universe, surrounded by creatures to whose minds his substantial knowledge of the many literatures of astronomical unit 649-301-3 would probably come across, allowing even for the miracle of translation, as so much schizophrenic word-salad.

  In his despair, he plucked hopelessly at the material in which he’d been wrapped. Two small sections came away in his fingers.

  There wasn’t enough light to examine them, but the feel was unmistakable. Paper. He was wrapped in an oversized sheet of something very much like paper.

  It made sense, he thought, it made sense in its own weird way. Since the appendages of the flefnobes he had seen to date consisted of nothing more than slender tentacles ending in either eyes or tapered points, and since they seemed to need knoblike protuberances on the laboratory table in order to perch beside him, a cage of paper was pretty much escape-proof from their point of view. There was nothing for their tentacles to grip—and they evidently didn’t have the musculature to punch their way through.

  Well, he did. Athletically, he had never amounted to much, but he believed, given enough of an emergency, in his ability to fight his way out of a paper bag. It was a comforting thought, but, at the moment, only slightly more useful than the nugget about the tower in Murphy Field.

  If only there were some way of transmitting that bit of information to Lirld’s little group: Maybe they’d realize that the current flefnobe version of The Mindless Horror from Hyperspace had a few redeeming intellectual qualities, and maybe they could work out a method of sending him back. If they wanted to.

  Only he couldn’t transmit information. All he could do, for some reason peculiar to the widely separate evolutionary paths of man and flefnobe, was receive. So former Assistant Professor Clyde Manship sighed heavily, slumped his shoulders yet a further slump—and stolidly set himself to receive.

  HE ALSO straightened his pajamas about him tenderly, not so much from latent sartorial ambition as because of agonizing twinges of nostalgia: he had suddenly realized that the inexpensive green garment with its heavily standardized cut was the only artifact he retained of his own world. It was the single souvenir, so to speak, that he possessed of the civilization which had produced both Tamurlane and Terza Rima; the pajamas were, in fact, outside of his physical body, his last link with Earth.

  “So far as I’m concerned,” Glomg’s explorer son was commenting—it was obvious that the argument had been breezing right along and that the papery barrier didn’t affect Manship’s “hearing” in the slightest—“I can take these alien monsters or leave them alone. When they get as downright disgusting as this, of course, I’d rather leave them alone. But what I mean—I’m not afraid of tampering with the infinite, like Pop here, and on the other side, I can’t believe that what you’re doing, Professor Lirld, will ever lead to anything really important.”

  He paused, then went on. “I hope I haven’t hurt your feelings, sir, but that’s what I honestly think. I’m a practical flefnobe, and I believe in practical things.”

  “How can you say—nothing really important?” In spite of Rabd’s apology, the professor’s mental “voice” as it registered on Manship’s brain positively undulated with indignation. “Why, the greatest concern of flefnobe science at the moment is to achieve a voyage to some part of the outer Galaxy where the distances between stars are prodigious compared to their relative denseness here at the galactic center.

  “We can travel at will between the fifty-four planets of our system and we have recently achieved flight to several of our neighboring suns, but going so far as even the middle areas of the Galaxy, where this specimen originates, remains as visionary a project today as it was before the dawn of extra-atmospheric flight over two centuries ago.”

  “Right!” Rabd broke in sharply. “And why? Because we don’t have the ships capable of making the journey? Not on your sembleswol, Professor! Why, since the development of the Bulvonn Drive, any ship in the flefnobe navy or merchant marine, down to my little three-jet runabout, could scoot out to a place as far as astronomical unit 649-301-3—to name just one example—and back without even hotting up her engines. But we don’t. And for a very good reason.”

  Clyde Manship was now listening—or receiving—so hard that the two halves of his brain seemed to grind against each other. He was very much interested in astronomical unit 649-301-3 and anything that made travel to it easier or more difficult, however exotic the method of transportation employed might be by prevailing terrestrial standards.

  “And the reason, of course,” the young explorer went on, “is a practical one. Mental dwindle. Good old mental dwindle. In two hundred years of solving every problem connected with space travel, we haven’t so much as pmbffed the surface of that one. All we have to do is go a measly twenty light-years from the surface of our home planet and mental dwindle sets in with a bang. The brightest crews start acting like retarded children and, if they don’t turn back right away, their minds go out like so many lights: they’ve dwindled mentally smack down to zero.”

  IT FIGURED, Manship decided excitedly, it figured. A telepathic race like the flefnobes . . . why, of course! Accustomed since earliest infancy to having the mental aura of the entire species about them at all times, dependent completely on telepathy for communication since there had never been a need for developing any other method, what loneliness, what ultimate magnification of loneliness, must they not feel once their ships had reached a point too far from their world to maintain contact!

  And their education now—Manship could only guess at the educational system of a creature so different from himself, but surely it must be a kind of high-order and continual mental osmosis, a mutual mental osmosis. However it worked, their educational system probably accentuated the involvement of the individual with the group. Once the feeling of involvement became too tenuous, because of intervening barrier or overpowering stellar distance, the flefnobe’s psychological disintegration was inevitable.

  But all this was unimportant. There were interstellar spaceships in existence! There were vehicles that could take Clyde Manship back to Earth, back to Kelly University and the work-in-progress he hoped would eventually win him a full professorship in comparative literature: Style vs. Content in Fifteen Representative Corporation Reports to Minority Stockholders for the Period 1919-1931.

  For the first time, hope sprang within his breast. A moment later, it was lying on its back and massaging a twisted knee. Because assume, just assume for the sake of argument, his native intelligence told him, that he could somehow get out of this place and pick his way about what was, by every indication, a complete oddity of a world, until he found the spaceships Rabd had mentioned—could it ever be believed by any imagination no matter how wild or fevered, his native intelligence continued, that he, Clyde Manship, whose fingers were all thumbs and whose thumbs were all knuckles, whose mechanical abilities would have made Swanscombe Man sneer and Sinanthropus snicker, could it be ever believed, his native intelligence inquired sardonically, that he’d be capable of working out the various gadgets of advanced spaceship design, let alone the peculiarities that highly unusual creatures like the flefnobes would inevitably have incorporated into their vessels?

  Clyde Manship was forced to admit morosely that the entire project was somewhat less than possible. But he did tell his native intelligence to go straight to hell.

  RABD now, though. Rabd could pilot him back to Earth if (a) Rabd found it worth-while personally and if (b) Rabd could be communicated with. Well, what interested Rabd most? Evidently this Mental Dwindle ranked quite high.

  “If you’d come up with an answer to that, Professor,” he was expostulating at this point, “I would cheer so hard I’d unship my glrnk. That’s what’s kept us boxed up here at the center of the Galaxy for too many years. That’s the practical problem. But when you haul this Qrm-forsaken blob of protoplasm out of its hole halfway across the Universe and ask me what I think of it, I must tell you the whole business leaves me completely dry. This, to me, is not a practical experiment.”

  Manship caught the mental ripples of a nod from Rabd’s father. “I’m forced to agree with you, son. Impractical and dangerous. And I think I can get the rest of the council to see it my way. Far too much has been spent on this project already.”

  As the resonance of their thoughts decreased slightly in volume, Manship deduced they were leaving the laboratory.

  He heard the beginnings of a desperate, “But—but—” from Lirld. Then, off in the distance, Councilor Glomg, evidently having dismissed the scientist, asked his son a question, “And where is little Tekt? I thought she’d be with you.”

  “Oh, she’s out at the landing field,” Rabd answered, “supervising last-minute stuff going into the ship. After all, we begin our mating flight tonight.”

  “A wonderful female,” Glomg told him in a “voice” that was now barely audible. “You’re a very lucky flefnobe.”

  “I know that, Pop,” Rabd assured him. “Don’t think I don’t know that. The most plentiful bunch of eye-ended tentacles this side of Gansibokkle and they’re mine, all mine!”

  “Tekt is a warm and highly intelligent female flefnobe,” his father pointed out severely from a great distance. “She has many fine qualities. I don’t like you acting as if the mating process were a mere matter of the number of eye-ended tentacles possessed by the female.”

  “Oh, it isn’t, Pop,” Rabd assured him. “It isn’t at all. The mating process is a grave and—er, a serious matter to me. Full of responsibilities—er, serious responsibilities. Yes, sir. Highly serious. But the fact that Tekt has over a hundred and seventy-six slime-washed tentacles, each topped by a lovely, limpid eye, won’t do our relationship a bit of harm. Quite the contrary, Pop, quite the contrary.”

  “A superstitious old crank and a brash bumpkin,” Professor Lirld commented bitterly. “But between them, they can have my appropriation shut off, Srin. They can stop my work. Just when it’s showing positive results. We’ve got to prepare countermeasures!”

  MANSHIP was not interested in this all-too-familiar academic despair, however. He was straining desperately after the receding minds of Glomg and Rabd. Not that he was at all intrigued by the elder’s advice on How to Have a Sane and Happy Sex Life though Married.

  What had excited him prodigiously was a mental by-product of a much earlier comment. When Rabd had mentioned the last-minute loading of his ship, another part of the flefnobe’s mind had, as if stimulated by association, dwelt briefly on the construction of the small vessel, its maintenance and, most important, its operation.

  For just a few seconds, there had been a flash of a control panel with varicolored lights going on and off, and the beginnings of long-ago, often-repeated instruction: “To warm up the motors of the Bulvonn Drive, first gently rotate the uppermost three cylinders . . . Gently now!”

  It was the kind of subliminal thought-picture, Manship realized excitedly, that had emanated from Srin a short while ago, and had enabled him to guess that the shifting light-patterns on the sphere the laboratory assistant held were actually meter readings. Evidently, his sensitivity to the flefnobe brain went deeper than the mental statements that were consciously transmitted by it and penetrated, if not the unconscious mind, at least the less submerged areas of personal awareness and memory.

  But this meant—this meant—seated as he was, he still managed to stagger at the concept. A little practice, just a little acquired skill, and he could no doubt pick the brain of every flefnobe on the planet.

  He sat and glowed at the thought. An ego that had never been particularly robust had been taking an especially ferocious pounding in the past half-hour under the contemptuous scrutiny of a hundred turquoise eyes and dozens of telepathic gibes. A personality that had been power-starved most of its adult life abruptly discovered it might well hold the fate of an entire planet in the hollow of its cerebrum.

  Yes, this certainly made him feel a lot better. Every bit of information these flefnobes possessed was his for the taking. What, for example, did he feel like taking? For a starter, that is.

  Manship remembered. His euphoria dwindled like a spat-upon match. There was only one piece of information he desired, only one thing he wanted to know. How to get home!

  ONE of the few creatures on this planet, possibly the only one for all he knew, whose thoughts were of a type to make this possible, was on his way with his father to some flefnobe equivalent of Tony’s Bar and Grill. Rabd had, in fact, to judge from the silence reigning on the subject, just this moment passed out of effective telepathic range.

  With a hoarse, anguished, yearning cry, similar to that of a bull who—having got in a juicy lick with his horns and having been carried by the momentum of his rush the full length of the bull-ring—turns, only to see the attendants dragging the wounded matador out of the arena. With precisely that sort of thoroughly dismayed bellow, Clyde Manship reached up, tore the surrounding material apart with one mighty two-handed gesture, and leaped to his feet on the in-and-out curving table-top.

  “. . . And seven or eight charts in full color, representing the history of teleportation prior to this experiment,” Lirld was telling his assistant at that moment. “In fact, Srin, if you have time to make three-dimensional charts, the Council is even more likely to be impressed. We’re in a fight, Srin, and we’ve got to use every—”

  His thoughts broke off as an eye-stalk curled around and regarded Manship. A moment later his entire complement of eye-stalks as well as those of his assistant swished about and stopped, quivering, with their focus on the erect, emergent human.

  “Holy, concentrated Qrm,” the professor’s mind barely transmitted the quavering thought. “The flat-eyed monster. It’s broken loose!”

  “Out of a cage of solid paper!” Srin added in awe.

  Lirld came to a decision. “The blaster,” he ordered peremptorily. “Tentacle me the blaster, Srin. Appropriation or no appropriation, we don’t dare take chances with a creature like this. We’re in a crowded city. Once it got out on a rampage—” He shuddered the entire black suitcase length of him. He made a rapid adjustment in the curlicued instrument that Srin had given him. He pointed it at Manship.

  Having actually fought his way out of the paper bag, Manship had paused, irresolute, on the table-top. Far from being a man of action in any sense, he now found himself distinctly puzzled as to just which way to act. He had no idea of the direction taken by Glmg père and fils; furthermore he was at a loss as he looked around for anything that in any way resembled a door. He regretted very much not having noticed through which aperture Rabd had entered the room upon the occasion of the younger flefnobe’s joining their jolly little Circle.

  He had just about made up his mind to look into a series of zig-zag indentations in the opposite wall, when he observed Lirld pointing the blaster at him with determined if unprofessional tremulousness. His mind, which had been filing the recent conversation between professor and assistant in an uninterested back-portion, suddenly informed him that he was about to become the first, and probably unrecorded victim, in a War of Worlds.

  “Hey!” he yelped, entirely forgetting his meager powers of communication. “I just want to look up Rabd. I’m not going on any ramp—”

  Lirld did something to the curlicued instrument that seemed like winding a clock, but was probably more equivalent to the pressing of a trigger. He simultaneously shut all of his eyes—no mean feat in itself.

  THAT, Clyde Manship reflected later—when there was time and space to reflect—was the only thing which saved his life. That and the prodigious sideways broad-jump he made as millions of crackling red dots ripped out of the instrument toward him.

  The red dots sped past his pajama-tops and into one of the lower vaults that made up the ceiling. Without a sound, a hole some ten feet in circumference appeared in the masonry. The hole was deep enough—some three or four feet—to let the night sky of the planet show through. A heavy haze of white powder drifted down like the dust from a well-beaten rug.

  Staring at it, Manship felt the roll of tiny glaciers toward his heart. His stomach flattened out against its abdominal wall and tried to skulk quietly around his ribs. He had never felt so completely frightened in his life. “Hey-y-y—” he began.

  “A little too much power, Professor,” Sr in observed judiciously from where he rested easily with tentacles outspread against the wail. “A little too much power and not enough glrnk. Try a little more glrnk and see what happens.”

  “Thank you,” Lirld told him gratefully. “Like this, you mean?”

  He raised and pointed the instrument again.

  “Hey-y-y!” Manship continued in the same vein as before, not so much because he felt the results of such a statement would be particularly rewarding as because he lacked, at the moment, the creative faculties for another, more elaborate comment. “Hey-y-y-y!” he repeated between chattering teeth, staring at Lirld out of eyes no longer entirely flat.