d
disintegrated into nothingness. Jim sat suspended in the void, and
felt himself very slowly descending into the violet column.

Down into the vortex of that bubbling pool, which rimmed him on all
sides ... down into the central aperture out of which emerged the
leering face of Tode! And as he dropped Jim heard, thin, faint, and
very far away, the despairing cry of Lucille....

CHAPTER II

_Old Friends--and Foes_

Jim must have lapsed into unconsciousness, for when he opened his eyes
there was a gap in his consciousness of the passage of time, though
none in his memory. He opened his eyes, and instantly he remembered
everything.

Only a brief interval could have elapsed, for it was not quite dark.
The fog and the violet flame had cleared away. Overhead a few stars
twinkled. Jim was lying on his side, half-buried in the black, slimy
mud of the dried up pool.

There was nothing but the smooth, shelving mud basin, with the scrub
oak surrounding it. Tode and the machine had vanished.

Jim pulled himself with an effort out of the sucking mud, and, heavily
clogged with it, began to make his way toward the margin.

Stumbling, struggling through the viscid ooze, he shouted Lucille's
name despairingly. But no answer came, and his cries only made the
utter silence all about him seem more fearsome.

Exhausted by his efforts, he gained the edge of the pool at last, and
stopped, trying to orientate himself. As he did so, he saw a human
face peering at him out of a clump of scrub oak.

It was the face of an aged man, with a long white beard and rags of
clothes that were festooned about him. Jim took a step toward it,
shouting a challenge. Next moment it had hurled itself out of its
shelter toward him, and two skeletonlike arms were twined about his
shoulders, while the fingers worked upward toward his throat.

The face was that of a madman, crazed by fear. And Jim recognized it.
It was the face of Professor Parrish.

Parrish, the trim, immaculate, clean-shaven, urbane old man, whose
lectures, imbued with wit and scholarship, had always been the delight
of his classes--Parrish reduced to this gibbering maniac! And yet
Parrish himself, returned to the site of their experiments after five
years!

* * * * *

So fierce was the old man's onset, so desperate his clutch, that for a
half-minute or more Jim was reduced to fighting for his life. The
clawing fingers, armed with long nails, fur