es in the girder-crisscrossed ceiling overhead. There was a soft
hissing of sparks leaping between terminals and a steady glow from oddly
shaped tubes which indicated that the mechanisms were still functioning
in silent and efficient performance of their unknown tasks.

* * * * *

The piece of apparatus nearest the door was an upright skeleton
framework of slender pillars housing in their center a cluster of coils
set around a large drumlike diaphragm. Foster wondered if this were not
the signal device with which Layroh had tuned in his own portable
instrument. The principal piece of mechanism in the central space,
however--a great crystal-walled case filled with an intricate array of
rods and wires--was something at whose purpose Foster could not even
guess.

Layroh strode on past the central apparatus toward the back wall. The
men followed him. Then as they rounded the apparatus and saw for the
first time the incredible things lining that rear wall, tier upon tier,
they stopped short in utter stupefaction. Before them was Life, but Life
so hideously and abysmally alien that their brains reeled in horror.

Great shining slugs slumbered there by the hundreds in their boxlike
crystal cells, their gelatinous bodies glowing with pale and
ever-changing opalescence. The things were roughly pear-shaped, with
the large end upward. Deep within this globular portion glowed a large
nucleus spot of red. From the tapering lower part of each slug's body
there sprouted scores of long slender tendrils like the gelatinous
fringe of a jelly-fish.

The things measured nearly four feet in height. Each was suspended
upright in an individual glass-walled cell, its body supported by a loop
of wire that dropped from larger cables running between each row of
cells. There was steady and exhaustless power of some kind coursing
through those cables. Where they branched at the end of each cell-row
there was a small unit of glowing tubes and silver terminals whose tips
glowed with faint auras of leaping sparks.

* * * * *

The slugs were dormant now but the regular changes in the opalescent
sheen which coursed over their bodies like the slow breathing of a
sleeping animal, gave mute evidence that life was still in those
grotesque forms, waiting only to be awakened.

Fascinated by the tiers of glowing things, one of the men started slowly
forward with a hand outstretched as thoug