f perhaps twice my height, he was
hurried away.

Hendrick's voice called out my name from the _Ertak's_ exit, and I
shouted a warning:

"Hendrick! Go back! Close the emergency--" Then a gluey mass cut
across my mouth, and, as though carried on huge soft springs, I was
hurried away, with the sibilant, whispering sounds louder and closer
than ever. With me, as nearly as I could judge, went every man who had
not been on duty in the ship.

* * * * *

I ceased struggling, and immediately the rubbery network about me
loosened. It seemed to me that the whisperings about me were suddenly
approving. We were in the grip, then, of some sort of intelligent
beings, ghost-like and invisible though they were.

After a time, during which we were all, in a ragged group, being borne
swiftly towards the mountains, all at a common level from the ground,
I managed to turn my head so that I could see, against the star-lit
sky, something of the nature of the things that had made us captive.

As is not infrequently the case, in trying to describe things of an
utterly different world, I find myself at a loss for words. I think of
jellyfish, such as inhabit the seas of most of the inhabited planets,
and yet this is not a good description.

These creatures were pale, and almost completely transparent. What
their forms might be, I could not even guess. I could make out
writhing, tentacle-like arms, and wrinkled, flabby excrudescences and
that was all. That these creatures were huge, was evident from the
fact that they, apparently walking, from the irregular, undulating
motion, held us easily ten or a dozen feet from the ground.

With the release of the pressure about my body I was able to talk
again, and I called out to Correy, who was fighting his way along,
muttering, angrily, just ahead of me.

"Correy! No use fighting them. Save your strength, man!"

"Then? What are they, in God's name? What spawn of hell--"

"The Commander is right, Correy," interrupted Kincaide, who was not
far from my first officer. "Let's get our breaths and try to figure
out what's happened. I'm winded!" His voice gave plentiful evidence of
the struggle he had put up.

"I want to know where I'm going, and why!" growled Correy, ceasing his
struggling, nevertheless. "What have us? Are they fish or flesh or
fowl?"

"I think we shall know before very long, Correy," I replied. "Look
ahead!"

* * * *