as
any power of voluntary movement was concerned.

He twisted his head stiffly to one side, and saw that Helen was standing
there beside him. Just beyond her was the motionless figure of Gil
Mapes. Both the gangster and the girl were in the grip of the same
strange paralysis. Like Blake, they were standing there rigidly
motionless, facing the gold-flecked barrier wall just in front of them.

A moment's painful scrutiny of their position showed Blake that the
posts forming the wall of the enclosure at the end toward the cone had
been brought in nearly a hundred yards toward them while they slept. The
shimmering barrier sheet was now scarcely a yard from their faces, yet
they still stood near the thicket where they had battled the headless
horrors. Blake saw his coat half-buried in the blue-gray dust near his
feet where Helen had discarded the garment to minister to Mapes.

Their unseen captor had obviously made definite preparations for
whatever his next purpose with them was to be, for a long wheeled
platform had been brought to a position opposite them just outside the
shimmering gold-flecked sheet. Blake noted the shattered remains of
Mapes' pistol on the ground at one side of the platform. It had
apparently been fished from the enclosure and rendered harmless after
their captor had seen the weapon's efficient use against the headless
ape-things.

Clustered upon the wheeled platform was an assemblage of intricately
winding coils, glowing tubes, and other apparatus that conveyed no more
meaning to Blake's bewildered gaze than a sight of the interior of a
metropolitan power-house would to a Congo savage.

* * * * *

There was only one piece of the apparatus regarding whose probable
function Blake could even guess. This was a pair of long slender arms
that projected through the shimmering walls into the enclosure,
supporting at their end a large thin metal plate located just over the
heads of the three Earthlings. Blake was willing to wager that it was
this overhead plate that was responsible for the odd paralysis that held
them helpless.

Then a figure came slowly into view from where it had been concealed by
the apparatus, and Blake forgot all thought of the strange mechanisms as
he watched the monstrous thing clamber stiffly from the platform and
halt squarely in front of the captives to stare at them through the
transparency of the intervening force sheet.

The thing was a cu