Irritatedly he squelched out of existence a yim-field that had taken three weeks of laborious psycho-induction to develop. His psycho-kineticut stripped it of cohesion, and its faint whine-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 until the creatures landed, Master ... perhaps their auditory apparatus would not have been sufficient to reveal its presence to them, in which case the 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 invisibility field which he himself was broadcasting.
"Of all the suns in this sector," Pud thought, eying the little spaceship, "and of all the planets around this particular sun, they have to choose this one to land on. Chew!"
Gop flushed. A member of the Transverse Colon Revivalists, he found Pud's constant atheistic swearing very disturbing. He sighed inwardly. Usually at least one of Pud's heads could manage to keep its sense of humor, but right now all of them were like proton-storms. The Senior Scientist was on the verge of one of his totalitantrums.