throat. Instantly the wasp swooped over me, its abdomen descending. For an awful instant I could see only a blurred shapelessness hovering over me.

Then a white-hot shaft of pain lanced through me and the blur receded. But I was unable to get up. I was unable to move or think clearly. My limbs seemed weighted. I couldn't get up or help Joan or even roll over.

My head was bursting and my spine was a board. I must have tried to summon help, for I seem to remember Dawson sobbing: "I'm paralyzed too, sir," just before my senses left me and I slumped unconscious on the dais.

How long I remained in blackness I had no way of knowing. But when I opened my eyes again I was no longer on the dais. I was up under the ceiling of the pilot chamber, staring down at the corrugated floor through what looked like a glimmering, whitish haze.

Something white and translucent wavered between my vision and the floor, obscuring the outlines of the great wasps standing there.

There were five wasps standing directly beneath me in the center of the pilot chamber, their wings a luminous blur in the cube-light.

My perceptions were surprisingly acute. I wasn't confused mentally, although my mouth felt parched and there was a dull, throbbing ache in my temples.

The position in which I found myself and the whitish haze bewildered me for only an instant. I knew that the "haze" was a web the instant I studied its texture. And when I tried to move and couldn't the truth dawned in all its horror.

I was suspended beneath the ceiling of the chamber in a translucent, hammock-like web. I was lying on my stomach, my limbs bound by fibrous strands as resistant as whipcords.

Minutes which seemed like eternities passed as I lay there with fear clutching at my heart. I could only gaze downward. The crewmen had vanished and the wasps were standing like grim sentinels in front of the control panel.

I was almost sure that Joan and the crewmen were suspended in similar webs close to me. I thought I knew what the wasps had done to us.

I had talked to Joan about life evolving along parallel lines throughout the Solar System, but I hadn't expected to encounter life as strange and frightening as this—insectlike, and yet composed of some radiant substance that could penetrate solid metal and flow at will 

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