sunken
dark-rimmed eyes, discolored fangs and loose, leathery lips. There had
been no hair on this death's head; it had long been bald, and now,
washed, clean for the first time in months or even years, it was to
hold the brain of Dr. Ralph Swanson, Earth's one-time leader in the
science of psychology.

On the fourth table lay a giant's body--but a hollow giant, a giant
made thin and pitiful by the ravages of his destroyer, isuan. A
roistering, free-booting space-ship sailor, this man may once have
been, but, from the drug, the mighty arms had been twisted and
shrivelled, the strong legs wasted away. One ear had been torn from
the skull in an old brawl, and what was left was naked and ugly to the
eye. Behind that bitter, drug-coarsened face would be the new home of
the brain of Sir Charles Esme Norman, wizard of mathematics and once a
polished, charming Englishman.

On the fifth table lay a dwarf. Its ridiculous body was not over four
and a half feet long, though the head was larger than that of a normal
man. In the old dark ages on Earth this body would have served for the
jester of a lord, the comic butt of a king; in more recent times as
the prize of a circus side-show. The huge, weighty head with its ugly
brooding mask of a face, the child's body below--this was for the
brain of Professor Erich Geinst, the solitary German who had stood
preeminent on Earth in astronomy.

* * * * *

These creatures were the result of Hawk Carse's desperate search. They
had composed, with one other, the band of isuanacs that had been
rooting in the swamp at the end of the lake when the asteroid had
first arrived. The Hawk had remembered them, and had quickly seen that
they were the only answer to the problem. And so, with Ban Wilson, he
had gone out for them, his mind steeled to the ghastly thought of the
great scientists' brains in such bodies. In space-suits they had swept
down on them. There had been no time for considerate measures: the
four isuanacs had been abruptly knocked out by the impact of the great
suits swooping against them, and carried back to the laboratory.

Eliot Leithgow had been shocked at the idea of a scientist's brain in
the head of the robot-coolie; how much greater, then, was his horror
when confronted by the need of using these appalling remnants of men!
But he could not protest. What else was there? Ku Sui, under the V-27,
had spoken the truth: the operations would be imp