he
frantic subjects could bear no more. White-faced and shaking, Clio
finally screamed wildly, hysterically, as she was being strapped down
upon a laboratory bench; and at the sound Costigan's nerves, already at
the breaking point, gave way in an outburst of berserk fury.

The man's struggles and the girl's shrieks were alike futile, but the
surprised Nevians, after a consultation, decided to give the specimens
a vacation. To that end they were installed, together with their Earthly
belongings, in a three-roomed structure of transparent metal, floating
in the large central lagoon of the city. There they were left
undisturbed for a time--undisturbed, that is, except by the continuous
gaze of the crowd of hundreds of amphibians which constantly surrounded
the floating cottage.

"First we're bugs under a microscope," Bradley growled, "then we're
goldfish in a bowl. I don't know that...."

He broke off as two of their jailers entered the room. Without a word
into the transformers they seized Bradley and Clio. As those tentacular
arms stretched out toward the girl, Costigan leaped. A vain attempt. In
midair the paralyzing beam of the Nevians touched him and he crashed
heavily to the crystal floor; and from that floor he looked on in
helpless, raging fury while his sweetheart and his captain were carried
out of their prison and into a waiting submarine.

CHAPTER 16

SUPER-SHIP IN ACTION

Doctor Frederick Rodebush sat at the control panel of Triplanetary's
newly reconstructed super-ship; one finger poised over a small black
button. Facing the unknown though the physicist was, yet he grinned
whimsically at his friend.

"Something, whatever it is, is about to occur. The _Boise_ is about to
take off. Ready, Cleve?"

"Shoot!" laconically. Cleveland also was constitutionally unable to
voice his deeper sentiments in time of stress.

Rodebush drove his finger down, and instantly over both men there came a
sensation akin to a tremendously intensified vertigo; but a vertigo as
far beyond the space-sickness of weightlessness as that horrible
sensation is beyond mere Earthly dizziness. The pilot reached weakly
toward the board, but his leaden hands refused utterly to obey the
dictates of his reeling mind. His brain was a writhing, convulsive mass
of torment indescribable; expanding, exploding, swelling out with an
unendurable pressure against its confining skull. Fiery spirals, laced
with streaming, darting lances of