But everything was swept from his mind by the overpowering vision of a round red door with a handle shaped like the letter S, and his body hurried across the room, down another passageway, around a curve and there was the door, with Grimes and Spencer struggling to turn the handle.

They didn't bother to look up until he shoved them aside. Seizing Grimes' rifle, he jammed the barrel into the S and levered the handle, oblivious of the fact that he was smashing the front sight. Slowly the door opened from its center, widening like Spencer's camera's eye.

"Stay back, that's an order," he heard his voice say. Then his body lunged through the aperture into freezing darkness. The cold room arched away in all directions, drawing his flashlight through metal grillwork into nothingness. The light caught something black and swollen up there, almost directly above his head. But the foul odor at his feet drew the light down onto black, ruptured sacks that had fallen from their perches in the grill and spoiled and smeared the floor with corruption. Unwillingly he knelt to touch one of them. Cold, and the floor was icy cold, throbbing gently beneath his feet, refrigerated.

Overhead something hissed, and his mind tried to break for the door. He saw himself doing it, rushing past the two faces in the doorway, fleeing up the ramp to the surface. But he was still there, almost devoutly kneeling when the thing rustled silkily and plopped upon his neck.

He gasped instinctively throwing up his arm to knock it off. But it froze his arm midway, and he knelt there, a statue, trying to make his arm obey. A sharp pain told him it was boring into his neck. Then he fell on his side, his legs kicking like a dying rabbit's. In a moment he couldn't even do that. By the time Spencer reached him he was completely paralyzed and voiceless. But his mind was clear again, clearer than it had been since he approached the great control dome on the surface, almost as though the thing had to devote its entire tele-force to the control of his body. There was none left for Spencer and Grimes. As they raised his head and chafed his hands and made ineffectual suggestions they seemed perfectly normal again. He realized that in the semi-darkness they had not noticed it on his back.

To his horror he felt the big muscles of his body moving one by one, experimentally. His hands clasped and unclasped of their own accord. His vocal cords emitted a frightened croak as his left hand closed about the barrel of the flashlight. Without other warning he clubbed 

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