platform; whether one or many
he could not tell until an interchange of thoughts reached him to show
there was at least more than one.

"A presence!" some unseen thing was thinking. "I sense a strange mental
force!"

* * * * *

A moment of panic gripped Chet at the threat of discovery. Then he
forced himself to relax; he tried to make his mind a blank; or if not
that, to think of anything but himself--of the jungle, the ape-men, of
the two comrades who had been captured.

"Patience!" another thinker was counseling. "It is the captives; they
draw near." And across the great room, from the same passage where he
had entered, Chet heard again the sound of bare, scuffing feet.

He could see them at last; he dared, to stop and peer along the floor.
Bare feet--black, hairy legs, and then came sounds of clumping leather
that brought Chet's heart into his throat, until, directly before the
altar that made his shelter, he saw the stained shoes and torn leggings
of Walt Harkness, and beside them, the little boots and jungle-stained
stockings that encased the slender legs of Mademoiselle Diane.

They were there before him, Walt and Diane; he would see them if he but
dared to look. And, from somewhere above, a confusion of thought
messages poured in upon him like the unintelligible medley of many
voices. Out of them came one, clearer, more commanding:

"Silence! Be still, all! Your Master speaks. I shall question the
captives."

And there came to Chet, crouched beneath the altar, hardly breathing,
listening, tense, a battering of questioning thoughts. He heard no
answer from Harkness and Diane, but he knew that their minds were open
pages to the one from whom those thought-waves issued.

"Where are you from?--what part of this globe?... Another world?
Impossible! This is our own world, Rajj. It is alone. There is no nearby
star."

And after a moment, when Harkness had silently answered, came other
thoughts:

"Strange! Strange! This creature of an inferior race says that our world
has joined hands with his; that his is greater; that our own world,
Rajj, is now a satellite of his world that he calls by the strange name
of 'Earth.'"

* * * * *

To Chet it seemed that this one mysterious thinker, this "Master" of an
unknown realm, was explaining his findings to other mysterious beings.
There followed a babel of released thoughts from which Chet got only a
co