g along it, he felt himself dragged out into another cavern.

This earth-walled cavity, though, seemed to extend farther than the
first, though of the same height as the first and with a few
radio-active illuminating patches. In it seethed and swarmed literally
hundreds on hundreds of the worm monsters, a sea of great crawling
bodies. Randall and Lanier saw that they were being carried and
dragged now toward the farther end of this larger cavity.

As they approached it, pushing through the swarming creatures who felt
them with inquisitive tentacles as their captors took them forward,
the two men saw that a great shape was looming up in the faint light
at the cave's far end. In moments they were close enough to discern
its nature, and a horror and awe filled them at sight of it more
intense than they had yet felt.

For the looming shape was a huge earthen image or statue of a worm! It
was shaped with a childish crudeness from the solid earth, a giant
earthen worm shape whose body looped across the cave's end, and whose
tentacled head or front end was reared upward to the cavity's roof.
Before this awful earthen shape was a section of the cave's floor
higher than the rest, and on it a great crudely shaped rectangular
earthen block.

"Lanier--that shape!" whispered Randall in his horror. "That earthen
image, made by these creatures--it's the worm god they've made for
themselves!"

"A worm god!" Lanier repeated, staring toward it as they were dragged
nearer. "Then that block...."

"Its altar!" Randall exclaimed. "These things have some dim spark of
intelligence or memory! They're brought us here to--"

* * * * *

Before he could finish, the clutching tentacles of the worm monsters
about them had dragged them up onto the raised floor beside the block,
beneath the looming earthen worm shape. There they glimpsed for the
first time in the faint light another who stood there held tightly by
the tentacles of two worm monsters. It was a Martian!

The big crocodilian shape was apparently a prisoner like themselves,
captured and brought down from above. His reptilian eyes surveyed
Lanier and Randall quickly as they were dragged up and held beside
him, but he took no other interest. To the two men, at the moment, it
seemed that his great crocodilian shape was human, almost, so much
more man-like was it than the grotesque worm monsters before them.

With a half-dozen of the creatures holding