“Good,” he told me heartily. “And I’m pretty sure I can play ball with any of your people who speak English fairly well. That sews up that: I’d hate to leave my stuff lying around in crates any longer than I have to. Dentface, throw a little extra juice into that beam so the kid here can get a big head start. And, once you get him out, quick-quick turn the dome back on fast, or we’ll have half the empty stomachs on Venus inside trying to work us into their ulcers.”
The robot called Dentface depressed a lever on the beam projector. Just as I had turned wistfully toward it in the hope that my meager mentality could somehow preserve an impression of the mechanism that would enable us to adapt it to our pressing needs, I was carried swiftly through a suddenly opened section of the dome and deposited halfway down the mountain. The opening, I observed as I got to my tentacles and rolled away from a creeper of sucking ivy, was actually an area of the dome that had temporarily ceased to exist.
I was unable to reflect further upon this matter because of the various lunges, snaps and grabs that were made at me from several directions. As I twisted and scudded down the tenth highest mountain, I deeply regretted Hogan Shlestertrap’s need of the robots for unpacking purposes.
This, my children, was the occasion on which I lost my circular tentacle. A tricephalops, it was—or possibly a large dodle.
Near the marsh, I observed that my remaining pursuer, a green shata, had been caught by a swarm of gridniks. Accordingly, I rested in the shadow of a giant fern.
A scrabbling noise above me barely gave me time to stiffen my helical tentacle for a spring, when I recognized its source as the blap koreon. Peering from the lowest fan-leaf, he called softly: “The nzred shafalon has come from the dwelling of the human who was to give us many and mighty weapons, yet still I see him fleeing from empty bellies like the veriest morsel of a Plookh.”
“And soon you will see him mocking all the beasts of prey from the safety of a dome where he and his kind live in thoughtful comfort,” I replied with some importance. “I am to aid the human Shlestertrap of Hollywood California U.S.A. Earth in the making of a stereo for our race.”
The blap loosed his hold on the immense leaf and dropped to the ground beside me. “A stereo? Is it small or large? How many great spotted snakes can it destroy? Will we be able to make them ourselves?”
“We will be able to make them ourselves in time, but they will destroy no great spotted snakes for us. A stereo, my impatient wayfarer upon branches, is a cultural necessity without which, it seems, a race must wander forever in ignoble and fearful darkness. With stereos as models, we may progress irresistibly to that high control of our environment in which humanity exults on Earth. But enough of this munching the husk—our sex-chiefs must conduct Beauty Contests to select characters for the first Plookh stereo. Where is the blap blapp?”
“I saw him last leaping from bough to bough in the fifth widest forest with a lizard-bird just a talon’s length behind him. If he has not yet ascertained the justification of the Hope, any tkan should be able to guide you to his present lair. Meanwhile, I think I know where the flin flinn has most recently dug.”