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searching eye, but he had the sensation of being scrutinized calculatingly, as an entomologist might examine an insect while deciding whether it would do for a vacant pin in a collection. He tightened his finger on the trigger.
    He never quite perceived where the weapon came from. One of the creature’s numerous arms moved with incredible speed, and a short tube was leveling on him.
    He dove to the floor as he fired. There was a sickening crackle, a whiff of ozone, a scream of pain. The weapon thumped onto the polished floor and rolled. Darzek kicked at it, missed, twisted away as the second creature leaped toward him. He shot another weapon from a hand of the third and tried to get to his feet.
    The second pounced upon him. The multiple arms whipped around him like ropes. As they constricted they forced his hand upward, and he pulled the trigger again and shot his assailant through the head. The arms lashed once and went limp. Darzek pulled free, leaving the creature lying in a thickening, gelatinous ooze.
    He turned quickly and saw Miss Schlupe coolly impale the first creature with a knitting needle. It collapsed with a soft, squishy moan. The third creature, one arm dangling uselessly, had pursued one of the rolling weapons. Miss Schlupe was there before it, trailing strands of yarn. She planted her foot on the tube and brandished her needles. Darzek pointed his automatic.
    The creature hesitated. Suddenly a jerky tremor seized its body. Without uttering a sound it collapsed in an ungainly pile of segments that shook violently for a moment and then subsided.
    Darzek bent over it warily. “Schluppy,” he announced, “you are a terror. You’ve frightened it to death.”
    “Serves it right,” she said indignantly, pulling her half-finished scarf from a puddle of ooze. “They’ve ruined my knitting.”
    Darzek was examining a hole high up on the wall. “If that had hit me, you’d have had to knit me a new shirt. See if it goes through the opposite bedroom wall. If our neighbors are going to be complaining, we might as well be forewarned.”
    She returned shaking her head. “There’s just a pinprick up by the ceiling. What is it?”
    “Some kind of a ray gun. What do we do now—ask Room Service to clean up the mess?”
    “We pack up and get out of here before their friends arrive.”
    “There’s nothing to pack except your knitting.”
    “I’m not packing that!”
    “You’d better,” Darzek said. “I don’t know how efficient their police are, but let’s not go out of our way to leave clues. Wash it off and wrap it in something. I’ll watch the transmitter.”
    She hurried away, pulling the knitting along the floor.
    Darzek pocketed the spent cartridges and took up a position in the shelter of a bedroom door. He could survive only by learning quickly, and the first lesson was not to be sitting within plain sight and easy reach when a group of enemies came through a transmitter.
    Miss Schlupe reappeared, her wet knitting enfolded in handkerchiefs. “I’m ready.”
    Darzek walked over to contemplate the transmitter’s enormously complicated destination board. “I just remembered. We can’t leave. We don’t know how to operate this thing.”

Chapter 6
    Miss Schlupe said bitterly, “If Smith were here, I’d turn his nose right-side-out and tweak it. Why didn’t he explain this?”
    “Either he had so much to teach us that he forgot, or he left transmitters for Biag-n to explain. What are you mumbling about?”
    “I was counting. There are just seventy-one possibilities. If we had a couple of days, we might figure the thing out.”
    “You’re thinking of trying one slide at a time,” Darzek said. “They probably work in combination, too, which would make thousands of possibilities. Or maybe they’re used successively, like on a dial telephone. Our problem isn’t the number of destinations, but the fact that we have only one choice. Wherever we end up, we’re stuck there because we don’t