The irreducible time-extent of Contact was its primary hazard. When the Contact helmet had been developed, it had been found that approximately forty minutes--forty-point-oh-three minutes, to be exact--had to be spent in the creature's mind. No amount of redesigning, fiddling or tinkering could change that time. The Zoologist could spend neither more nor less than that amount in a creature's mind. Since all creatures have natural enemies, Contact called for more than simply curling up and relaxing inside the alien mind. The zoologist's host-alien might have a metabolism which called for it to drink a pint of water every fifteen minutes or shrivel. In which case the zoologist would shrivel with it, his punishment for not sufficiently Learning his host. This, then, was the reason those irreducible forty minutes were a hazard. Should the creature being Contacted die, the zoologist died with it. There was no avoiding death if it came to the inhabited creature. A good zoologist Learned fast, or perished. Which is why there is no such thing as a bad Space Zoologist. You're either a good one or a dead one. Peters' voice came to a halt and he closed the plastic folder over the briefing-sheet. "That's about the size of it, sir," he said. "We've focused the Contact-beams toward the indicated areas and made a final check of all the wiring, tubes and power-sources." Jerry sighed contentedly and shut his eyes. "Whenever you're ready, then, Captain," he whispered, and relaxed his body in preparation for his first Contact. His mind and imagination toyed a moment with brief fancies about his forthcoming existences in swamp, desert and sea, then he pushed the thoughts away and let his mind go empty. Faintly, he heard Peters calling an order to the technician within the spaceship-- Then silent lightning flashed across his consciousness. II He opened his eyes. Six eyes. In two rows of three eyes each. He did not, however, see six images. The widespread belief in the multitudinous images seen by the faceted eyes of a housefly had been debunked the first time a helmeted biochemist had intruded upon that insect's puny brain. As with human eyes, the images were fused into a whole when they reached the mind. Save for the disconcerting sensation of possessing a horizontal and vertical peripheral vision of approximately three hundred degrees sight was comfortably normal. Jerry looked over his surroundings and noted one slightly annoying side-effect of his hexafocal outlook. As a human will see--as when looking at the tip of a pencil pointed at the face--two images at the far end of any object looked upon, so Jerry, while able to zero in anywhere he chose, could see six ghost-images corresponding in their angle of perspective to the positions of his six eyes. Had he a pencil-tip to stare at, it would have appeared, beyond the tip, to be vaguely like a badminton bird seen head on, with images of the pencil-body comprising the "feathers."