The cast was grinding its way through the seventh stop of an eight-world tour. The play was a spectacularly bad one, selected by an overpaid InterPlanet researcher to appeal to the widest variety of alien species.

"Helga, you'd better get out here!" The director's chubby face pushed through the opaque curtainfield, disturbing the cottony silence of the theater company manager's tech-support bubble.

What now? Helga Glunk wondered. It had been going so damned well. There was even a stable frequency for the holographic proscenium arch this time — the entwined vines looked like real vines, not like flatulent snakes.

The director glanced back over his shoulder. "The audience is acting really weird. Liaison thinks there's trouble."

"Trouble? Ha!" scoffed Glunk. "That walking junkyard always thinks here's trouble." Inwardly, she cursed the mindless bureaucrat who had assigned the android linguistic specialist as their intercultural advisor. Rumor had it that androids were going to replace company managers next. "We should have marooned that bolt-nosed bastard three planets back. What do you mean by weird, Stanley?"

"They're out of their seats or racks or whatever, and rolling in the aisles."

"But it's not a comedy!"

"You don't understand, Helga. They're really rolling around out there! Liaison says they could be praying."

The manager heaved her chubby figure out of the cramped special effects cockpit. Once past the bubble's curtainfield, she peered into the dim auditorium. Scores of M'Hoi were indeed flailing about on the floor between their crib-like benches.

"Christ Almighty, Stanley! Is it something we did?"

"Who knows? I think we should stop the play."

"Oh, damn! All right." She reached back into the cockpit and killed the master power feed. The proscenium arch vanished; scenery winked out all over the stage. House lights flared, illuminating the twitching M'Hoi.

The cast stood there open-mouthed, looking somewhat more ridiculous than usual.

Liaison loped his androidal jerk-walk up the center aisle, hopping over what appeared to be quivering bundles of cheap cloth and announcing in a grating monotone: "Alert! Alert! Eighty-nine percent probability of adverse intercultural incident!"

"Stop whining, you useless sack of muons," growled Helga. "Tell me something useful — do we get to keep the gate?"

"The play was fifty-three point seven percent complete, mistress. According to the League of Planets Cultural Protocol, we are entitled to..."

"Yeah, yeah. I know. We got the gate. Most of it, anyway. Go back to the stage. Tell those idiots we're pulling out. Signal the Banjo we'll need the big landing transport down here on the pad in thirty minutes, and then..."

Liaison flapped its cranial infrasensors, a sure clue its intellecutron was clicking into overdrive, and started to interrupt.

Helga just wasn't in the mood. "Look, ratchet-brain! Screw your orbital mechanics lecture. Tell 'em they'll have to expend extra fuel or they may not get us back at all!"

The android put on the dreamy look it wore when its neutrino comms were powering up. But it didn't last long. "Alert! Alert! Communications with support ship have been jammed. Alert! Alert!"

Helga Glunk groaned. Maybe the android was right about an intercultural incident. Alien races could react with violence to intercultural incidents, popularly known as aye-ayes; at least one other theater troupe had disappeared entirely. "Quiet, stupid! You said something about an aye-aye. What the hell did you mean?"

"There is a high probability that the M'Hoi are responding to something that occurred onstage, mistress. Judging from their extreme reactions, the stimulus must have been significant. Not unlike the effect of a float-lamp on the adolescents of..."

"What occured on stage? Check that beanbag memory bank of yours. Correlate M'hoi response with the specific events of the play. Hurry up, knob nose — looks like the M'Hoi are starting to act almost normally."

A half-dozen of the audience were picking themselves up and limping away, dragging their rat tails behind them.