Is That You Xeluchli?

Orena and Xeluchli meant well. But had they obeyed the rules, had they remained bodiless observers, they would have saved BUP, that .O2F star, a hellaceous catastrophe.
It was a perfectly conventional tour, once around the Milky Way with stops at several of the major stars. It was supposed to take about eighty-eight million years so they planned to be back for supper.
In the beginning the students had remained in a fairly close knot around mundo Karftahiti, their instructor, but as the tour progressed some of the more venturesome strayed further and further from the rest of the class.
Dro Orena and Dro Xeluchli had wandered a greater distance than usual from the crowd and were jamming experimental thought webs into a large space vortex when Xeluchli signalled to Orena to tune her mind off the lecture frequency. It was against the rules, of course, but then Orena supposed Xeluchli would take the blame for her if they were caught, so she switched over to the conversational band.
Want to have some fun? asked Xeluchli.
Orena continued to stare into the space vortex. How? she asked.
Xeluchli waved a visible thought fragment in a circle about him. The stars, he said. Let's explore a little on our own. They never hit the really good spots on these tours.
Orena had been thinking for a long time of doing that very thing so she hardly argued at all before letting Xeluchli convince her.
We'll be gone only a little while and they'll never miss us, said Xeluchli as they headed for a nearby star-cluster.
Everything would have been all right if they had obeyed the rules. Hands off the planets, the rules said, and that was really a reasonable and intelligent demand. In all fairness to them, it must be admitted that Orena and Xeluchli had no intention of breaking that rule when they strayed away from the rest of the crowd.
They found this little planet which was listed in the textbook as BuP ; an .02F star with nine planets. By a lucky chance they were just in time to see a transient little civilization spring into being on its third planet. This was too wonderful a chance to miss so they decided to stay a few hundred thousand years and see how it would end. They would catch up with the rest of the tour afterward.