ted directly on top of his head. This latter tentacle, instead of
absorbing _from_ him, visibly poured into him what resembled a
threadlike stream of violet light.

* * * * *

Facing the cowering audience with eyes staring glassily, still in the
grip of the unknowable, Professor Ralston did an unbelievable thing.
He resumed his lecture at the exact point of interruption! But he
spoke with the tonelessness of a machine, a machine that pulsed to the
will of a dictator, inhuman and inexorable!

"What you see before you," the Voice continued--the Voice that no
longer echoed the thoughts of the professor--"is what you would call
an amoeba, a giant amoeba. It is I--this amoeba, who am addressing
you--children of an alien universe. It is I, who through this captured
instrument of expression, whose queer language you can understand, am
explaining my presence on your planet. I pour my thoughts into this
specialised brain-box which I have previously drained of its meager
thought-content." (Here the "honorable colleagues" nudged each other
gleefully.) "I have so drained it for the purpose of analysis and that
the flow of my own ideas may pass from my mind to yours unimpeded by
any distortion that might otherwise be caused by their conflict with
the thoughts of this individual.

"First I absorbed the brain-content of this being whom you call Bill
Jones, but I found his mental instrument unavailable. It was
technically untrained in the use of your words that would best convey
my meaning. He possesses more of what you would call 'innate
intelligence,' but he has not perfected the mechanical brain through
whose operation this innate intelligence can be transmitted to others
and, applied for practical advantage.

* * * * *

"Now this creature that I am using is, as you might say, full of sound
without meaning. His brain is a lumber-room in which he has hoarded a
conglomeration of clever and appropriate word-forms with which to
disguise the paucity of his ideas, with which to express nothing! Yet
the very abundance of the material in his storeroom furnishes a
discriminating mind with excellent tools for the transportation of its
ideas into other minds.

"Know, then, that I am not here by accident. I am a Space Wanderer, an
explorer from a super-universe whose evolution has proceeded without
variation along the line of your amoeba. Your evolution, as I perceive
from a