No sign above the gate proclaimed, _Here Dwells Nightmare_, nor, _Through These Portals Pass the Most Incredible Life-Forms in the Known Universe_. There was no circus atmosphere. Just a nameless blending of sounds and smells and alien vibrations that stirred the imagination like evil flames licking at forgotten folk memories. On Venus, the term _unearthly_ has naturally lost meaning, but here was a hint of dreadful abysses beyond even the exotic fecundity of the cloud-veiled planet. Here were half-audible chords beyond all the known octaves. Here, in the troubled darkness one sensed symbols of instincts, minds and feelings that man was never meant to know or understand. Here was the final question mark of evolution--whence, and to what dreadful purpose? What incredible virtuosity of the Unknown Creator had brought these unthinkable beings into multiform existence? And why? What purpose did they serve in the plan of Creation? Or was there any purpose? Was there even a plan? Bat Ferris remembered such thoughts from his lonely, monastic youth on Mars, and during the schooling period on Earth. One had time for long unhappy thoughts in such a segregated childhood and some of them still reverberated deep inside him. The girl drew back to let them enter, flashing the beam of a hand radilume on each in turn. Her glance flicked each of them in examination sharp enough to draw blood. She received them in silence, for Teucrete's mind was not on the duties of a hostess to unexpected guests. "Wait here," she ordered crisply. Then she went among the tangled avenues between cages and spoke soothingly to the caged brutes. Her voice crackled, purred, coughed, roared, hissed. The bird people were the first to heed. Their bright, nervous chittering subsided into occasional geysers of chirping. Surly sand leopards from Mars paced their cages and vented sounds like needles caught in the grooves of antique disc recordings. Partially gaseous life forms from Saturn had no vocal apparatus, but showed their uneasy displeasures by flaring into sullen crimsons and bruised purples of luminosity. Ferris followed the girl closely on her rounds, his eyes staring in wonder at the caged monsters revealed when her light bathed the barred cubicles. Some cages were not cages in the ordinary sense at all. Behind barriers of streaming light crouched protoplasmic entities of no set form. Moondogs sported aimlessly in pools of ionized gas. Wireflies battered themselves against invisible net barriers. Complex mysteries of Plutonian life-forms floated in magnetic fields. Metallic crystals built themselves into coral-like colonies resembling miniature castles.