"Crystal-clear," he said, with bitter humor. For that was the answer. The fur-faces were colloidal, the raccoon/pangolins were crystalloid. Whatever fluid lay within the bellies of the animals, it was a super-saturate, needing but the right chemical additive before coming out of its liquid state to form the right crystals. In each jar, almost instantly after shaking, bright crystals had begun to form within the liquid. Within but a few moments, the jars were being uncapped and the medics, with neat little tongs, were lifting the crystals from the solutions and placing them within the abdominal cavity of their anesthetized patient. The flap was fastened down into place with a gadget that seemed to work on the principle of a soldering iron. As it slid along the angled edges of the incision the sides met and fused, leaving only a tiny ridge to attest to the fact of the operation. One of the medics nodded to the bare-to-the-waist creature still standing by. The man shoved over a wheeled cart, slipped the patient onto it and wheeled him out of the room through an archway barely within Jerry's field of vision. Jerry's main concern, however, was for the fate of the crystalloid creature, lying so still upon the table. One of the medics undid the straps across the body, lifted it by a hind leg and shoved it through a hinged metal flap against the wall, then stabbed a button.... A red flare went off beyond the still oscillating metal flap, and Jerry had all the information he needed. A nice little incinerator, for hollowed-out corpses. "I wonder," Jerry thought dismally, "how long my forty minutes will take in _this_ Contact!" His headache was growing worse, and it wasn't just from the lights. At that moment, a sudden lurch sent him crashing against the wall of the cage. A clamor of alarm bells began throughout the vessel. One of the medics yelled something, and threw a switch against the wall opposite that housing the anesthetizing machine. A panel slid away, revealing a large mosaic of close-packed little spheroids. As the medic twisted a dial at the base of this arrangement, some of the spheroids began to flicker whitely, while others remained dark. Then Jerry recognized it for what it was. A form of television screen, composed of individual lights instead of phosphorescing dots activated by magnetically guided electrons from a cathode. The effect was the same. A picture, sharply etched by the alternation and varying intensities of the bulbs, appeared on the mosaic-screen. Across the dream-like surging of the black-gray-and-white heavy seas in the foreground, Jerry made out an armada of strange-looking vessels coming across the ocean toward wherever the pickup camera lay. Unlike Earth-vessels, they tapered _inward_ as the sides of the vessels rose from the waters, then were abruptly truncated near what would have been a peak by a railinged area that was the deck.