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'Light the Bomb!' Look, see how I worked a shattering stadium into the corner of the picture?" They'd stopped walking, and Corey was standing there, happily studying his art. "And your picture's over there, Darla." He pointed to an oversized velvet painting that showed the mirror-clad figures of Stahn and Darla at the mouth of the Nest. "See the stars in the reflections? And the little Earths?"

"That seems like so long ago," said Darla. "It's been a while since I did anything heroic. Wouldn't it be nice to be heroic again, Whitey?"

"I hear you," said Whitey, and they started walking again.

"I'm the one who's going to be the hero for this year," said Gurdle-7 smugly.

"Isn't it amazing to have the aliens here? Just think of all the advances that they'll bring us. And think of how many more aliens there are for us to Decrypt—cosmic personality waves are flying past us all the time."

"I think getting vaccinated against the Stairway To Heaven is a very good idea," said Frangipane quietly.

"Yeah," said Ormolu. "I'm freakin'. What if the aliens start getting greedy to do lots and lots of Gurdle Decryptions? What if some Decrypted lobster-thing gets real eager to fab with another lobster-thing from the same planet and starts doing thousands of Decryptions, waiting for the right one? Who decides how much of our imipolex the aliens are allowed to use? What if they want to use up all of the resources in the whole solar system?"

"They cleaned out my stash of flickercladding without even asking," said Corey.

"They beefed themselves up to seventy kilograms each. That's a lot of bucks."

"And what if another Quuz-type alien gets Decrypted and kills even more of us?" said Je

"You're too cautious," snapped GurdIe-7. "You sound like a filthy Heritagist.

Are you so frightened of transcendence?"

"Here's my limpware studio," said Corey, opening a door. He tossed the rath and the Jubjub bird in and let them start ru

The room held some fairly sophisticated design tools. There was a large industrial-looking machine in one corner, a couple of workbenches with things that looked more or less like power tools, and shelves along the walls laden with cans, bottles, tubes, and boxes.

Darla closed the door behind her and leaned against it. She noticed that Whitey was having trouble holding both the needler and the O.J. ugly stick. "Let me look at that needler, Whitey," she said. "I've never seen one that big."

Whitey handed it to her and wrapped his hands firmly around the ugly stick.

"I want to download my info onto an S-cube before we do anything else," said Gurdle-7. "We don't want to take any chances with my information about the Stairway To Heaven."

"No," said Whitey. "We don't." And then he turned on the ugly stick and cut Gurdle-7 into pieces, moving the whispering stream of magnetically launched metal darts with practiced accuracy and speed. A few of the flechettes pinged off the stone walls of the room.

"Don't you dare call for help," said Darla, pointing the needler at the three remaining moldies. "If I push the button, you stinkers go up in flames.

Je

Start faking Gurdle-7's uvvy signal, in case that nosy Shimmer checks on us.

Frangipane and Ormolu! Mask your real thoughts and make your uvvy signals look like you're watching Corey make an S-cube copy of Gurdle-7."

"Yaar," said Whitey, training the muzzle of the O.J. ugly stick on the moldies.

The air was thick with the astonishing stench of the shredded Gurdle-7. The frightened rath and Jubjub bird had disappeared behind the big machine in the corner.

"We're all riding the same wave, aren't we, guys?" said Corey. "The aliens have to die."

"For sure," said Darla. "Unless we want the human and the moldie races to end up selling souvenirs and ru

"Um… too true!" said Je

"But poor Gurdle-7. We never thought it would turn out this way. He was so smart and so dumb."

"I am agree," said Frangipane. "The aliens are a big mistake."

"I'm with you too," said Ormolu. "I've been liking my life just the way it is.

I don't want this kind of cataclysmic change. But how do we kill the aliens?

There's twelve of them."

"I'll set them on fire with this heavy-duty needler," said Darla. "When I needled Rags this morning, he caught fire almost right away."

"Almost right away," said Whitey. "But by the time you got two or three of the aliens lit, the others would be all over you. Don't you have any more weapons, Corey? It would be stuzzadelic if all six of us were armed."

"All I've got is water guns," said Corey apologetically. "I'm a Dadaist artist.

The whoopee cushion is mightier than the sword."

"I can spit things out really hard from any part of my body," said Ormolu, stretching out his hand and ejecting something that struck against the room's far wall with a resounding splat,

"What was that?" asked Darla.

"Camote truffle."

"That's not going to kill anyone."

"We could point our ion jets at them," said Je

"What about the equipment in this studio, Corey?" said Whitey. "Tell us what it all is and maybe we'll think of something."

"Okay," said Corey. "That old-timey machine in the corner is an injection molder. I use it to cast my Silly Putters into certain shapes. The workbench on the right is where I carve the models I use to make the molds. That tool that looks like an electric drill is a piezomorpher, it's very good for carving imipolex. It uses ultrasound. Not much of a weapon, though, because you have to be right on top of the material to piezomorph it. It's more like a dentist's drill than like a bazooka. Now this bench over here is where I paint my Silly Putters. To some extent they can control their colors, but they need a basis to start from. You have to get the right pigments and metal oxides into their flesh for them to work with. This particular tool is something like an old-fashioned airbrush. Slightly higher-tech than an airbrush, because it shoots the color particles right into the plastic up to a depth of four centimeters. A

volume-filling brush, in other words. It's a good tool but, again, not particularly lethal."

While Corey talked, the three moldies grazed their way across the floor, quietly absorbing the pieces of imipolex that had been Gurdle-7. The rath and the Jubjub bird came creeping out of hiding to snuffle up the smaller crumbs.

"I hope none of you moldies is ending up with the intact Stairway To Heaven information?" said Darla, fingering her needler.

"Not to worry," said Frangipane, now about 30 percent larger than before. "I have already reprogram all the imipolex I just ate." She sprouted two new petals, hiccuped, and spit out some triangular flat ugly-stick darts as if they were watermelon seeds. "Excusez moi."

"No problem here either, Darla," said Ormolu, who was staring down at his body with evident satisfaction. "I turned all of my Gurdle-7 share into muscle."

He flexed his legs and made taut ridges spring out along them.

"I didn't save any of Gurdle-7's science information," said Je

And we loved each other." For a giant carrot, she looked quite humanly miserable.

"How about those cans and bottles on the shelves?" Whitey asked Corey.

"What's in them?"

"Chemicals. Like resins and polymers for doctoring the imipolex. And paints and solvents for coloring the Putters."