circular hall or room inside. Their crocodilian
guide turned to them.

"The hall of the Martian Master," he hissed.

They passed inside with him. The great hall seemed to extend upward to
the giant cone's tip, thin light coming down from an opening there.
Upon the dull metal of its looming walls were running friezes of
lighter metal, grotesque representations of reptilian shapes that they
could but vaguely glimpse. Around the walls stood rank after rank of
guards.

At the hall's center was a low dias, and in a semicircle around and
behind it stood a half-hundred great crocodilian shapes. Randall
guessed even at the moment that they were the council of which their
conductor had named himself a member. But like Milton and Lanier, he
had eyes in that first moment only for the dais itself. For on it
was--the Martian Master.

Randall heard Milton and Lanier choke with the horror that shook his
own heart and brain as he gazed. It was not simply another great
crocodilian shape that sat upon that dais. It was a monstrous thing
formed by the joining of three of the great reptilian bodies! Three
distinct crocodile-like bodies sitting close together upon a metal
seat, that had but a single great head. A great, grotesque crocodilian
head that bulged backward and to either side, and that rested on the
three thick short necks that rose from the triple body! And that head,
that triple-bodied thing, was living, its unwinking eyes gazing at the
three men!

* * * * *

The Martian Master! Randall felt his brain reel as he gazed at that
mind-shattering thing. The Martian Master--this great head with three
bodies! Reason told Randall, even as he strove for sanity, that the
thing was but logical, that even on earth biologists had formed
multiple-headed creatures by surgery, and that the Martians had done
so to combine in one great head, one great brain, the brains of three
bodies. Reason told him that the great triple brain inside that
bulging head needed the bloodstreams of all three bodies to nourish
it, must be a giant intellect indeed, one fitted to be the supreme
Martian Master. But reason could not overcome the horror that choked
him as he gazed at the awful thing.

A hissing voice sounding before him made him aware that the Martian
Master was speaking.

"You are the Earth-beings with whom we communicated, and whom we
instructed to build a matter-transmitter and receiver on earth?" the
slow v