be to so captivate him. She asked him, but he only grinned.

"There! Over there!" He pointed suddenly in joyful excitement. A great dead-black globe loomed ahead. The stunted foliage of the flat, sandy plain ceased abruptly in a circle around it, as though afraid to approach. Something, some intangible feeling that radiated from the huge ball, made Margaret shiver with a strangely apprehensive exhilaration.

Wor brought the ship down in a sickening vertical drop, and as it touched the sand he half-dragged her from the cushions. She had to run to match his long-legged stride as he approached the base of the globe.

"Come on, woman. Great Sasso waits!" he barked, hustling her through a portal where the globe touched the footprint-tracked sand. His eyes were blazing with hungry madness.

The globe was hollow, and inside space itself was different and alien. The exhilaration was overpowering now, yet terrifying, with its undertones of ancient and unnamable evil.

"Great Sasso is near!" Wor spoke in a hoarse whisper.

He pointed upward. "The Gateway of Sasso!"

Hanging overhead in the center of the sphere, not suspended in any way she could see, was an area of glowing greenish-yellow luminescence that hurt her eyes. She lowered them to the shimmering, scarcely visible transparent platform beneath it. Sin stood there almost as though floating, enveloped in a voluminous black robe from neck to heels. Her lips, parted in an anticipatory smile, looked black in the greenish light.

Beside and just below the platform stood a huge cylindrical vat, also made of transparent material but plainly visible because it was filled to the brim with some pale lavender fluid. Beside the vat rose a long-boomed hoist, the hook on the end of its chain now hanging empty, and attached to the wall of the vat was a complex mechanism of distorted tubes, warped helical coils and irregularly shaped boxes studded with knobs and handles. An elevated chair was provided beside the controls.

A network of glittering woven cables, branching and rebranching, lying in loops, littered the bowl-shaped floor in seeming disorder. But all led to the machine on the Vat. One cable, as thick through as a large man's arm, curved upward unsupported and vanished into the glow of the Gateway.

Several hundred people turned in silent expectancy 

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