ps can be worked to me."

A period of feverish activity followed while the men went to work.
Layroh also was busy. Through several narrow ventilating slits high in
the cavern wall they heard the hum of machinery.

The first of the men finished knotting their ropes together. With
weighted ends muffled to deaden their fall upon the rock floor, they
began casting to get contact with their neighbors.

Success came slowly. There were often scores of blind casts made before
a weighted end came into an adjoining pit. But the time finally came
when Foster had a twenty-five-foot length of rope strong enough to bear
his weight. He already had a single strand making contact with Garrigan
in the next pit. Garrigan drew the heavier rope in to him, then acted as
an anchor while Foster climbed to the floor above.

* * * * *

His downstretched hand pulled Garrigan to freedom. Getting the other men
up to the floor was the work of but a few moments. They were a
weird-looking crew in the torn fragments of clothing that remained to
them. Foster stationed them beside the locked cavern door so that they
would be hidden behind it when it opened.

"Wait till Layroh is safely inside," he ordered, "then rush him. Get
that black ray thing out of commission first. Without that, we should be
more than a match for him. In the meantime you come with me, Garrigan.
Maybe we can get a look into the cavern."

By climbing on Garrigan's broad shoulders Foster found that he had a
clear view through one of the narrow ventilating slits. Layroh had made
efficient use of the time since he had left the pit room. Suspended from
softly glowing wires in the large central glass case was a circular
group of ten of the Shining Ones.

Foster's eyes widened in horror as he saw the object in which the
trailing tendrils of the luminous slugs were sunk. It was the naked body
of Carter. As those sucking tendrils drew out the substance of his
skeleton, Carter's body was changing slowly, horribly, sinking into a
flabby mass of puttylike flesh.

The dormant bodies of the great slugs glowed perceptibly brighter as
they fed, and the pulsations of opalescence quickened. The Shining Ones
were beginning to awaken. Faint but unmistakable there came to Foster's
ears a low singing drone from the group.

He shuddered. He knew now why Jeff Peters' shadow had seemed so
grotesquely _boneless_. That droning buzzing sound he had heard from the
blac