light had disappeared.

The Captain shouted for Spencer to come back but there was no answer.

"I'll find Spencer," Grimes pleaded. "Please, sir." With that he kicked the Captain's wrist and escaped. Sitting up, the Captain watched Grimes' light vanish into the depths. After a moment of hesitation he followed. He wanted to go back, to get another gun, to stop and think this thing out, but he kept on walking, part of his brain reassuring him that he was doing the right thing, searching for his men, doing his duty. But he knew that wasn't right. He was being pushed.

When the ramp levelled off he managed to stop again, sitting down determinedly on the stones. He slapped his face and shook his head, but when he arose he shuffled forward again until his light cast a dark shadow on the floor. Happy for an excuse to stop, he dropped on his knees beside it. A toy? A tiny monstrosity with a sausage-shaped thorax, six webbed feet beneath, nearly a dozen hands or feelers on top, some of them specialized pincers or hooks, others as generalized as the hands of a man, all of them semi-retractable. It had a rubbery feel. What bothered him was the head. There really wasn't any, only a mount for two froglike eyes, no space for a brain. Where the neck should have been clung a small blob of waste. But he had difficulty in pulling it off, and when he did he saw it was part of the design, an auxiliary creature bloated like a woodtick, a bladder and a fang-ringed mouth, nothing more than a toy parasite.

Repressing a shudder he fitted the toy back together and dropped it in his pocket. Then his feet hurried him down the ramp. It was plunging again, steeper and steeper until he tripped and rolled, cradling his flashlight, and banged against something hard and vibrant. All around him in the darkness, water-choked voices sang: "Go on, go on, go on," until he flashed his light about and his eyes assured his ears that the voices were only the sounds arising from tall, glass cylinders of rhythmically perking mercury.

Abruptly he realized that the mercury columns operated the tall black machine in the center and that this was a hydraulic press which in turn fed the humming electric motor beside it. Piezoelectricity on a practical scale, electricity produced from the compression-expansion of rock crystals in the press, power for the press produced from the expansion of mercury vapor, the heat for expansion drawn from the core of the planet, the whole set-up was as immortal as machinery could be. It might have been running for thousands of years.

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