through the walls of a ship.

Some radiant substance that had weight and substance and could touch human flesh without searing it. Nothing so ghastly strange and yet—indisputably the creatures were wasplike. And being wasplike their habit patterns were similar to those of so-called social wasps on Earth.

Social wasps sting caterpillars into insensibility, and deposit eggs in their paralyzed flesh. When the wasp-grubs hatch they become ghoulish parasites, gruesomely feasting until the caterpillars dwindle to repulsive, desiccated husks.

CHAPTER IV EDDINGTON'S OSCILLATIONS

Horror and sick revulsion came into me as I stared down at the great wasps, with their many-faceted eyes seeming to probe the Jovian mists through a solid metal bulkhead!

They thought we were Jovian caterpillars! Evidently there were flabby, white larva-shapes out in the mist as large as men—with the habit perhaps of rearing upright on stumpy legs like terrestrial measuring worms. We looked enough like Jovian caterpillars to deceive those Jovian wasps.

They had apparently seen us through the walls of the ship, and their egg-laying instincts had gone awry. They had plunged ovipositors into our flesh, spun webs about us and hung us up to dry out while their loathsome progeny feasted on our flesh.

The whitish substance exuding from the mouth-parts of one of the photographed wasps had evidently been mucilaginous web material.

There was no other possible explanation. And suddenly as I lay there with thudding temples something occurred which increased my horror ten-fold.

Zigzagging, luminous lines appeared on the ribbed metal wall opposite the quartz port and a wasp materialized amidst spectral bands of radiance which wavered and shimmered like heat waves in bright sunlight.

A coldness itched across my scalp. Dangling from the wasp's right fore-leg was the web-enmeshed form of the fuel unit control pilot. Young Darnel's hair was tousled, and his metacloth pilot tunic had been partly torn away, leaving his ribs exposed.

I had never seen anything quite so horrible. Embedded in Darnel's flesh was a huge, faintly luminous grub, its rudimentary mouth-parts obscurely visible beneath the drum-tight skin over his breastbone.

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