LEPTOQUARKS AT DESY? At the HERA collider at the DESY lab in Hamburg, Germany, 820-GeV protons smash into 27.5-GeV electrons or positrons. At these very high energies, a positron essentially scatters not from the proton as a whole but from individual quarks inside the proton. Two important parameters help to characterize such interactions: x, the fraction of the proton's momentum carried by the struck quark, and Q², the square of the momentum transferred between proton and positron. The two large collaborations at HERA, the H1 and Zeus groups, have searched their three-year data inventory for a class of events at high x and high Q². Both groups report an excess of very-high-Q² events compared to predictions based on the standard model of particle physics. For Q² events above a value of 15,000 GeV², the H1 group found 12 events, against an expected background of 4.7 events. Meanwhile, the Zeus group observed that their data agreed with theory for Q² up to 15,000. Above that, however, agreement worsens; above a Q² of 35,000, where only one-tenth of an event would be expected, 2 events were recorded; one of them represents the highest Q² (46,000) value ever observed for a lepton-proton interaction. These surplus events at high Q² (if confirmed by more data--- the groups expect to double their data sample in the coming year) could be a sign of some new phenomenon beyond the standard model. In one scenario, the electron and quark fuse into a "leptoquark," a particle (with a mass around 200 GeV²) that would, among other things, help to facilitate proton decay. (Information on DESY website;US contacts for the Zeus group include Malcolm Derrick, Argonne, 630-252-6272, mxd@hep.anl.gov; Frank Sciulli, Columbia, x707fjs@nevisn.nevis.columbia.edu)