e hooked talons, but none came. A body
thudded down upon him, then slid limply off again without making any
move to attack. Blake scrambled to his feet.

Writhing upon the ground all around him were ape-things in their death
agonies. On the ground beyond them, quivering and broken in the midst of
its dying guards, was a viscid mass of loathsome gray jelly. Blake's
shot had apparently struck home squarely in the center of that
vulnerable blob. Even as he watched, the gelatinous mass shuddered in a
last convulsion, then became quite still. At the same instant the last
sign of life vanished from the writhing ape-things on the ground.

A good half of the attacking creatures were included in the dead bodies.
The other half, Blake now saw, had retreated to cluster in wild panic
about the remaining blob of jelly. Realizing exultantly that his single
shot had slain one of the two weirdly disassociated organisms, Blake
with pistol in hand advanced toward the other, trying to get a clear
shot at the jelly through the furry bodies clustering around it.

* * * * *

The group promptly turned and fled in blind panic. Blake sent the
pistol's last shot crashing into the mass without any appreciable
effect. Then the things' stampede carried them hurtling on through one
of the gold-flecked side walls out into the swirling purple mists.

The gold-flecked sheet flowed together again so swiftly behind the
things that a fraction of a second later there was not even the
slightest indication in its shimmering unbroken surface to show that it
had ever been pierced.

For thirty yards the fleeing ape-things sped on into the purple vapors.
Then disaster struck them with bewildering swiftness. They stopped in
full flight, shuddered for a moment, then slumped to the ground with
their limbs writhing in agony. In their center the jelly ovoid quivered
madly in the same strange torture.

Tiny patches of vivid purple appeared at a hundred different points upon
the dying creatures. The patches spread and merged with lightning
rapidity until a solid sheet of livid purple covered the writhing mass.
Swiftly that mass lost both movement and shape as it melted down into a
pool of turgid purple slime. Then the slime vaporized into purple mists
that blended into the surrounding vapors, and all trace of the
ape-things and their jelly nucleus had vanished.

Stunned by the incredible speed of this general dissolution, Blake
r