He picked up Johnny with one tentacle and Helen with another and set them down on top of their spaceship, where there was just enough reasonably flat surface on the snip's snub nose to hold them.
The beasts were chasing one another around and around through the wreckage of the laboratory. They romped and trampled over delicate machines, sent heavier equipment spinning to smash against boulders; they ran head-on into sizzling energy-fields and, head-off, kept running.
Pud grabbed up an armful of beasts, raced to the doorway, reversed it and poured them through. He grabbed up more beasts, threw them after. Gop was busily engaged in the same task. Some of the beasts began fighting among themselves even as the Vegans held them—Gop jumped as one tore six cubic yards of flesh from a tentacle. He healed the tentacle immediately, then hardened it and all his other tentacles to the consistency of pig iron. He held back that particular beast from the lot. When the others had been tossed through, he hauled back his tentacle, wound up, and pegged the offending beast with all his might. It streaked through the doorway like a projectile, legs and eyestalks rigid.
Pud plucked a machine from the two-foot claws of the very last beast, and tossed the beast through. Then he examined the machine—it was beyond repair. He slammed that through the doorway too.
In ten seconds, the two Vegan Scientists had slapped and mauled all their rioting experiments into inaction.
Silence descended over the battle-ground. Silence, more nerve-shattering than the noise had been.
Pud looked around at the remains of the laboratory, every face forest-green with rage.
Machines lay broken, tilted, flickering, whining, wheezing, like the bodies of the wounded. Delicate instruments were smashed to bits. The involuted field that Pud had flung through the vortex had evidently burst, as he had feared—for the vortex had vanished. So, probably, had the universe the field had burst in. The two fields that had interlocked were ruined, each having contaminated the other beyond use. Other energy-fields, having absorbed an excess of energy from the tharn, were bloated monstrosities or burned-out husks.