ith that, since Snap and I had just seen one.

"They've got it here," Grantline was saying. "They've tried to make it
talk. They can't but they're going to try again."

He jumped to his feet and went to the door. "They're bringing it in."
Upon his face was a look of awed horror.

We stood crowding the small door-oval. It gave onto a darkened balcony
of the conclave hall. The girders of the city roof were over us. There
were a few official spectators sitting up here in the dark on the
balcony, but none noticed us.

The lower floor of the hall was lighted. Around the polished oblong
tables perhaps a hundred scientists and high governmental officials of
the three worlds were seated. Near the center of the hall was a small
dais-platform. On a table there, someone had just placed a circular
black box, similar to the one we had seen previously.

The hall was hushed and tense. On the dais stood a group of Earth
officials. One of them spoke. "Here it is, gentlemen. And this time,
by God, we'll make it speak."

Grantline whispered, "That's the War Secretary from Greater London."

I recognized him: Brayley, Commander in Chief of the land, air, water
and space armies of the United States of the World. He was gigantic in
stature, with a great shock of gray-white hair. A commanding figure,
if there ever was one.

Beside him, Nippor, the Japanese representative in Greater New York,
seemed a pigmy. The acoustics of the silent hall carried his soft
voice up to us. "I would be afraid of drugs. Will we use force? It is
vital."

"Yes, by God! Anything."

It seemed that everyone in the hall must be shuddering: I could feel
it like an aura pounding up at me. Brayley lifted the box-lid, reached
in and raised the horrible thing. He held it up, a two-foot ball of
palpitating gray-white membrane. Another living brain.

"Now, damn you, you're going to talk to us! Understand that? We're
going to make you talk. Get that box out of the way."

They flung the box to the floor, and Brayley placed the brain on the
table.

A glare of light, focussed on it, showed beneath the stretched taut
membrane the convolutions of the brain, like tangled purple worms. The
blood-vessels seemed distended almost to bursting now. The gruesome
face, with popping eyes and that gaping mouth, showed a horrible
travesty of terror. From where its ears should have been, a crooked
little arm of flabby, gray-white flesh came down, one on each side and
braced the