"It is a typical fish," puzzled the Professor when we had cut the body out of its usurped armor. "Cold blooded, adapted to the chill and pressure of the deeps. There are the gills I observed before ... yet it looks very human." It surely did. There were the jointed arms, and the rudimentary hands. Its forehead was domed; and the brain, when dissected, proved much larger than the brain of a true fish. Also its bones were not those of a mammal, but the cartilagenous bones of a fish. It was not quite six feet long; just fitted the horny shell. "But its intelligence!" fretted the Professor, glorying in his inability to classify this marvelous specimen. "No fish could ever attain such mental development. Evolution working backward from human to reptile and then fish--or a new freak of evolution whereby a fish on a short cut toward becoming human?" He sighed and gave it up. But more reams of notes were written. "Why do you take them?" I asked. "No one but yourself will ever see them." * * * * * He looked at me with professorial absent-mindedness. "I take them for the fun of it, principally. But perhaps, sometime, we may figure out a way of getting them up. My God! Wouldn't my learned brother scientists be set in an uproar!" He bent to his observations and dissections again, cursing now and then at the distortion suffered by the specimens when they were released from the deep sea pressure and swelled and burst in the atmospheric pressure in the cave. Stanley was engrossed in a different way. Since the moment he laid eyes on her, he had belonged to the stately woman who had first nursed him back to consciousness. Mayis was her name. From shepherding the three of us around Zyobor and explaining its marvels to us, she had taken to exclusive tutorship of Stanley. And Stanley fairly ate it up. "You, the notorious woman hater," I taunted him one time, "the wary bachelor--to fall at last. And for a woman of another world--almost of another planet! I'm amazed!" "I don't know why you should be amazed," said he stiffly. "You've been telling me ever since I was a kid that women were all useless, all alike--" "I find I was mistaken," he interrupted. "They aren't all alike. There's only one Mayis. She is--different." "What do you talk about all the time? You're with her constantly." "I'm not with her any more than you're with the Queen," he shot back at me. "What do you find to talk about?" That shut me up. He went to look for Mayis; and I wandered to the royal apartments in search of Aga. * * * * * In the first days of our friendship I had several times surprised in Aga's eyes a curious expression, one that seemed compounded of despair, horror and resignation.