But this was not to be. No sooner did he feel the floor beneath him, than the force which had beaten him down partially withdrew. Jim staggered to his feet, weak and a little dazed. Now something else was happening behind that glassite-encased well. The green pillar of light was lowering, coalescing upon itself with a slowly swirling motion. And then, as the tower of light lessened, Jim saw what rode atop it. He saw a shape, huge, iridescent and apparently weightless. It seemed at first simply a larger area of greenish light, but for a single second he glimpsed more. He saw the massive core of it. He felt his stomach turning over in a prodigious yawn, and his brain churned in chaotic horror. The thing he saw was a roughly globular, quasi-amorphous shape that was in a state of constant fluxion. It was partly tentacular, it writhed and pulsed, it seemed to project itself at will. Darkish tendrils came uncurling from it as if it were reaching for something not quite attainable. Simultaneously it spun slowly atop its pillar of light which seemed also a part of itself, somehow. _It was alive, a thinking, intelligent entity._ That much Jim knew. It would even have been an entity of beauty, with its whirling greenish effulgence, were it not for one thing. _It was evil._ Terribly, undeniably so. Jim could feel the impact of it almost physically. Almost he felt that here was the essence of all the evil of another universe, compressed into that one horribly writhing mass that was now trying to expend itself but could not. And he had the feeling that although it could be moved to terrible, devastating anger, it was now for some reason gleeful. It came riding down, light as a feather atop its light, until it hovered just a few feet above Jim's head. Jim knew that he was being examined microscopically, perhaps even fourth-dimensionally. He shivered a little. He tried to take a step back but could not. There came a sudden chuckling within his own brain, and then mentally he heard the entity speak. "Yes, Earthman, you were right in your estimate of me. I am 'evil' to such as you. At least that is what Bhruulo tells me, and I have come to believe Bhruulo." Jim crouched before the thing, staring up at it. He still felt its probing mental fingers in his mind, and the fingers were ... _unclean_. He spoke aloud at last, in a voice he hardly recognized as his own. "What--_what in heaven's name are you_?" * * * * * There came that chuckling note again, as the thing spoke. "Whatever I am, Earthman, it is not in heaven's name. I do not exactly know myself what I am. I personally have no conception or remembrance of how I came here. I only know what Bhruulo has told me. It pleases me to tell you."