aware of what we were up against. He couldn't see the grub. He didn't know that we were—caterpillars.

He was in torment, and I was powerless to help him. I was glad he didn't know, despite my certain knowledge that I was about to share his fate. I whispered hoarsely: "Can you see Joan, lad. Is she—"

"She's lying in the web next to you, sir. Dawson and Stillmen have been out."

"Taken out."

"There are two empty webs, sir. Oh, God, the pain—I can't stand it."

The great wasp was moving now. It was moving slowly across the chamber toward the quartz port, between its motionless companions. Its wings were vibrating and it was raising Darnel up as though it were about to hurl him out through the inches-thick quartz into the mist.

Suddenly as I stared the utter strangeness of something that had already occurred smote me with the force of a physical blow. The wasp had carried Darnel right through the wall—from the pilot chamber to the chart room, and back again.

Apparently the great wasps could make us tenuous too! Close and prolonged contact with the energies pouring from them had made Darnel's body as permeable as gamma light. Horribly it was borne in on me that Darnel's anguish was caused by a pervasive glow which enveloped him from head to foot. It was fainter than the radiance which poured from the wasps and was almost invisible in the fluorescent cube-light, but I could see it now.

The wasp didn't hurl Darnel out. It simply vanished with him through the quartz port, its wings dwindling to a luminous blur which hovered for an instant before the inches-thick crystal before it dwindled into nothingness.

The same instant a voice beside me moaned. "Richard, I can't move."

"Joan," I gasped. "Oh, my dearest—"

"Richard, I can't move. I'm in a sort of web, Richard. It's—it's like a mist before my eyes."

I knew then that Joan was trussed up on her side, gazing through her web directly at me. I was glad that she couldn't see the wasps.

"Joan."

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