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"There was a horrible kind of screeching hissing noise from the information coming in, and then there was a big whoop—I guess that was the Stairway To Heaven?"

"Right. The Stairway To Heaven is a limpware program that uses the Tessellation Equation to force the quasicrystaline structure of a moldie's imipolex up and up through a series of higher and higher dimensionalities. Once you start the Stairway To Heaven ru

"I see," said Terri. "Sort of. And then Blaster-Quuz sent the same message down to the spaceport over and over to make sure all the moldies down there got it—and then the spaceport moldies fused together and split open the spaceport dome and a lot of people got killed." She rubbed herself hard with the washrag, trying to erase the memory of the blood-foamed corpses.

"What was Quuz like?" asked Willy.

"He seemed—stupid? You'd think something from a star would be more advanced than us. I think Quuz was only the soul of a sunspot—not of the whole Sun. He thought about patterns of fire and light. He was greedy. 'Sun want eat Earth.' That's how he talked. Like a baby who wants to grab things and put them in his mouth.

Not so much evil as—" Just then Terri noticed three pairs of eyes staring at her over the back of the sofa. "What's that! What do you have in here with us, Willy?"

"Oh, I have three Silly Putters—sort of like pet moldies. They're a little smarter than animals. Come on out, guys. Terri won't hurt you. Line up so she can take a look at you. Front and center! Now, Terri, I hope you're not offended by the way Elvira looks. I'm—I guess some people would say I'm—"

"Just hand me the towel, okay?"

Willy gave Terri the towel. She quickly dried herself and pulled on the T-shirt and the shorts, eyeing the Silly Putters all the while. From smallest to largest, they resembled a tiny voluptuous woman clad only in boots and gloves, a winged green dragon with a long scaly tail, and an apple-cheeked gnome with a full white beard cropped short and tidy.

"These are Elvira, Fafnir, and Doc," said Willy. "They're not able to talk, but they can obey lots of commands. Show Terri how you water the plants, Fafnir.

Fafnir, water plants!"

Fafnir waddled forward and sucked a deep draught from the water of the pool—the constant refiltering had already removed the soap and dirt from Terri's bath.

Flapping his leathery wings in an awkward, comical blur, Fafnir rose up like a hummingbird and began spewing small dabs of water into each of the hanging plants.

"Do you have any injuries, Terri?" continued Willy. "Your knee looks kind of banged up. Doc's got a complete set of healer tools, and he knows how to use them, right, Doc?" Willy pointed to Terri's knee, which was indeed dark with a spreading bruise, and commanded, "Doc, heal!" The gnome stepped forward, gri

"I guess I don't have to ask what Elvira is for," said Terri. Hearing her name, Elvira started up a spirited little dance, flinging her arms from side to side in a showy, abandoned way that Terri found intensely a

"Elvira cheers me up," said Willy evasively. "She's what they call a femlin.

Are you hungry? Elvira or Doc can get you something."

"What kind of food do you have? Do you have vegetables or fruit? I've had nothing but moldie juice for over a week. But I'd rather help myself. I certainly wouldn't want to eat anything that's been touched by your disgusting sexist jack-off toy."

"If that's the way you feel," said Willy stiffly.

"It's the way any woman would feel. You've been living alone too long, Willy.

For God's sake, tell that thing to stop dancing. I don't have to put up with this."

"Oh, whatever. Elvira, hide!" The femlin went back behind the couch. Willy sat down in the easy chair and gestured toward the food pantry. "So eat something.

You're hungry and cranky. I got fresh fruits and veggies delivered from the greenhouse today."

Terri found herself a banana and a bunch of strawberries. She ate them with wheat germ and ru

"Can I uvvy my husband now?" asked Terri after she'd finished. "He must be worried sick."

"Um, yeah," said Willy, coming back from wherever he'd been. "I've got an extra uvvy that you can use. I invented the uvvy, you know. I'm not just some crazy weirdo, Terri."

"I know that, Willy. I guess maybe I was a little short-tempered just now."

"Well, I'm glad to have you here," said Willy and handed Terri a green uvvy.

Do

Hundreds of voices were talking at once, but via some multiplex uvvy magic, Terri could follow the threads of the conversations.

The two main questions being discussed were (a) how to prevent Wendy-Quuz from triggering another catastrophe and (b) what to do with the new Gurdle Decryption technology. Most of the moldies were for sending a smart bomb to a

"It's safer than you realize," Gurdle-7 was uvvying to the Nest moldies as Terri tuned in.

"Quuz killed my husband at the dome this morning," responded an angry red moldie who resembled a crab.

"Not all of the personalities we Decrypt will be like Quuz," insisted Gurdle-7.

"Most of them will be intelligent and full of useful information."

"Useful like 'Sun want eat Moon'?" hooted another voice.

"Just listen for a minute," said Gurdle-7. "This morning before the Wendy experiment, we did a test on some Silly Putters. Frangipane sent the Stairway To Heaven program to infect twelve of the Silly Putters in Corey Rhizome's isopod."

"You're crazy, Gurdle-7!" raged the red moldie. "The infection's going to spread! We ought to kill you!"

"The infection, it is not spreading," volunteered Frangipane. "And I will recount why. It is that Rhizome's Silly Putters have Decrypted into some aliens who are mature, evolved beings. They are very glad to be able to Decrypt here.

They speak of our Earth-Sun system as a 'new node' and they are concerned with finding a way to 'ensure the integrity of this new node.' They are not clumsy babies from the Sun like Quuz. They are elegant old minds from deep in the space."

"What's to stop them from uvvying Einstein and ru

"That's not what they want," said Gurdle-7. "As a matter of fact, they destroyed Corey Rhizome's uvvy. In the spirit of frankness, I suppose I should a

"I didn't know that," said Willy across the hubbub. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"I'm telling you now," said Gurdle-7. "Corey's had two calls since the infection, and I monitored both of them. First he called Darla Starr, and then after the aliens took his uvvy away, Corey used a regular old vizzy phone to accept a call from Darla. During the second call, I had the opportunity to notice that the aliens were very interested in the fact that two of Corey's Silly Putters had turned out to be immune to the Stairway To Heaven infection.