before a start.

My heart was hammering and I'm not ashamed to confess that I was horribly afraid. Whatever It was that was in Main Physics, It wasn't anything a man had ever faced before. And if we failed—

Carew gave me no more time to think of that. He swung the heavy door open, we dashed through, and it slammed behind us. We ran down the corridor to Main Physics, and a wild elation soared in me, for aside from a tingling sensation all through me, I didn't feel anything unusual.

"The Thing isn't attacking us!" Burris shouted, muffledly. "We'll make it!"

Whether it was his shout or the fact that we burst into Main Physics lab at that moment that did it, I don't know. I don't, in fact, remember much of the next few minutes. I do recall that as we burst into the lab, Mathers and Andersen were working in the same dazed, mechanical way with the canyon controls.

And I recall that they had arranged the lead trays that contained chunks or heaps of the glowing transuranic elements in a curious circular pattern around the conveyor-rack on which the tray of radiant Element One-forty-four still rested. And that between the One-forty-four and the other elements, the shimmering radiation of Its nerves pulsed and throbbed.

"One-forty-four is the brain—switch it back first!" Zarias shouted as we plunged into the lab.

And then it hit us. It wasn't the groping fingers of radiation that had fumbled with our brains the first time. They were stronger now, those intangible fingers, and they weren't groping.

They grabbed our minds and held them. I was still conscious, I was still Frank Drummond, but I didn't have a body any more. It held my brain and body. I felt the impact of Its mind. And there was no hate or fear or passion in it. There was only—wonder.

It had picked up us three men, had picked us up by our brains just as a child might pick up puppies by their necks and wonderingly examine them. And there was a strange and alien cleanness about that intangible grasp on my brain. It was as clean and strange as starlight.

I knew we had failed, and the part of me that was still Frank Drummond agonized in the knowledge. Then came the crash.

Burris had pitched forward so madly into the lab that he caromed into the blank-faced Mathers, even after It gripped 

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