the quick darkness
never lifted--but for McGuire and his companion there was reprieve.

He was lying flat on a hard floor when remembrance crept slowly back
to his benumbed brain. An odor, sickish-sweet, was in his nostrils;
the breath of life was being forcibly pumped and withdrawn from
laboring lungs; a mask was tight against his face. He struggled to
throw it off, and someone bending over removed it.

Someone! His eyes stared wonderingly at the grotesque face like a
lingering phantasm of fevered dreams. There were others, he saw, and
they were working over a body not far away upon the floor. He
recognized the figure of Professor Sykes. Short, stocky, his clothes
disheveled--but Sykes, unmistakably, despite the mask upon his face.

He, too, revived as McGuire watched, and, like the flyer, he looked
wonderingly about him at his strange companions. The eyes of the two
met and held in wordless communication and astonishment.

* * * * *

The unreal creatures that hovered near withdrew to the far side of the
room. The walls beyond them were of metal, white and gleaming; there
were doorways. In another wall were portholes--round windows of thick
glass that framed circles of absolute night. It was dark out beyond
them with a blackness that was relieved only by sharp pin-points of
brilliance--stars in a night sky such as McGuire had never seen.

Past and present alike were hazy to the flyer; the spark of life had
been brought back to his body from a far distance; there was time
needed to part the unreal from the real in these new and strange
surroundings.

There were doorways in the ceiling, and others in the floor near where
he lay; ladders fastened to the wall gave access to these doors. A
grotesque figure appeared above the floor and, after a curious glance
at the two men, scrambled into the room and vanished through the
opening in the ceiling. It was some time before the significance of
this was plain to the wondering man--before he reasoned that he was in
the enemy ship, aimed outward from the earth, and the pull of
gravitation and the greater force of the vessel's constant
acceleration held its occupants to the rear walls of each room. That
lanky figure had been making its way forward toward the bow of the
ship. McGuire's mind was clearing; he turned his attention now to the
curious, waiting creatures, his captors.

There were five of them standing in the room, five shapes like me