at one of the Spatio-Temporal Service's bases for his colleague Slane to arrive. His ship appears but fails to slow down and crashes to the ground narrowly missing Valérian. The hull bursts apart and great tentacles of vegetation spew forth. Valérian tries to clear them away with his laser cannon but the creature absorbs the energy and grows bigger. As the tentacles spread towards his ship Valérian takes off to escape being overwhelmed. Activating his spatio-temporal engines he jumps back in time a few hours in a bid to find what happened. Rendezvousing with Slane's ship he enters and finds Slane unconscious at the controls, the vegetable tentacles growing out of his stomach. Realizing he is too late, he returns to his ship and jumps back another few hours. This time Slane is conscious and Valérian relaxes thinking he has arrived in time. Then Slane starts complaining of a stomach ache – he ate a meal with the indigenous natives on the planet Malvis while he was there yesterday. Realizing that this must be the source of the problem, Valérian demands that Slane give him the co-ordinates of Malvis. Jumping back further in time again, Valérian arrives on Malvis just as Slane is landing. Before Valérian can explain what he is doing here, the natives arrive. Slane closes a trade deal with the natives and the two Terrans are invited to attend a festival in their honour. Gathered for the meal, the Malvisian chieftain offers them a bowl of their favourite dish, the living plant, fflumgluff. As Slane reaches to takes some, Valérian snatches it away – it is the same vegetation he saw earlier – and tells Slane not to eat it. Before he can explain, the Malvisians take offence at the refusal to eat the meal they have laid on and turn nasty. Valérian and Slane are forced to flee to their astroships. Meeting up again later at the base, Valérian has a lot of explaining to do to an enraged Slane. Tsirillitis the Asteroid (Tsirillitis l'Asteroide) First published in Super Pocket Pilote, Issue 5 (23 October 1969) Valérian's astroship is on a bizarre asteroid with strange cones the only interruption to the oddly smooth ground. Inside the ship, Valérian lies unconscious. Another astroship lands beside Valérian's and Laureline emerges. She rushes into Valérian's ship and forces him to drink the antidote she has brought. Valérian had been