nged by medical treatments into a different appearance. It was a
way of fixing the caste system permanently--understand?" She answered me
swiftly, in a whisper, and the woman on the throne frowned as she
noticed our conversation.

Her eyes fixed ours as she said, with a curiously excited inflection, no
longer bored with us: "Take these two to the place of questioning. I
will supervise the proceeding. I must know what these two intended here,
whether others of this man's people understand us."

"We're in for it!" said Carna, and I knew what she meant. Jerked to our
feet, we were hurried from the big throne room, down a corridor, through
a great open door which closed behind us.

That place! It was a laboratory out of Mr. Hyde's nightmares.

Up until now I had accepted the many divergencies and peculiarities of
the Zervs, the priestly insect-men, the monstrous workers--all the
variance of this colony from space--as only to be expected of another
planet's races. I had consciously tried to resist the impact of horror
on my mind, had tried to put it aside as a natural reaction and one
which did not necessarily mean that this expedition from space was a
horrible threat to men. I had tried to accept their ways as not
necessarily monstrous, but as a different way of life that _could_ be as
good a way as our own if I once understood it. There were attractive
points about the Zervs and even about these Schrees' rulers which bore
out this impulse toward tolerance in me.

But in this laboratory--or _abattoir_--some nameless, ominous aura or
smell or electric force--what it was I know not--struck at my already
staggering understanding with a final blow.

Now at last I met the real Schrees! I knew without asking. They seemed
to me to be an attempt by the peculiar insect-like "priests" to make
from normal men a creature more like themselves in appearance. Perhaps
it had been done from the natural urge to have about them beings more
like themselves than men ... and it was plain that the race of the
insect-like creatures and of men had become inextricably linked--become
a social unity in the past. It was also increasingly plain that the
four-limbed insect creatures had in the beginning been the cultured
race, been the fathers of the science and culture of this race, had
through the centuries lost their dominance to the Zervs and the Schree's
upper classes--had retained the "priest" role as their own place in
society. It was perhap