"What?"
"One of them is crawling toward the time-warp."
"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."