He felt as though he were being compressed; not as a whole, but atom by atom. He was being twisted--cork-screwed in a monstrously obscure fashion which permitted him neither to move from his place nor to remain where he was. He hung there, poised, for hours--or was it for a thousandth of a second? At the same time he felt a painless, but revolting transformation progress in a series of waves throughout his entire body; a rearrangement, a writhing, crawling distortion, an incomprehensibly impossible extrusion of each ultimate corpuscle of his substance in an unknowable and non-existent direction! As slowly--or as rapidly--as the transformation had waxed, it waned. He was again free to move. As far as he could tell, everything was almost as before. The _Dauntless_ was about the same; so was the almost-invisible ship attached to her so closely. There was, however, a difference. The air seemed thick--familiar objects were seen blurrily, dimly--distorted--outside the ship there was nothing except a vague blur of grayness--no stars, no constellations. A wave of thought came beating into his brain. He had to leave the _Dauntless_. It was most vitally important to go into that dimly-seen companion vessel without an instant's delay! And even as his mind instinctively reared a barrier, blocking out the intruding thought, he recognized it for what it was--the summons of the Overlords! But how about the thought-screens, he thought in a semidaze, then reason resumed accustomed sway. He was no longer in space--at least, not in the space he knew. That new, indescribable sensation had been one of _acceleration_--when they attained constant velocity it stopped. Acceleration--velocity--in what? To what? He did not know. Out of space as he knew it, certainly. Time was distorted, unrecognizable. Matter did not necessarily obey the familiar laws. Thought? QX--thought, lying in the subether, probably was unaffected. Thought-screen generators, however, being material might not--in fact, did not--work. Worsel, Van Buskirk, and he did not need them, but those other poor devils-- He looked at them. The men--all of them, officers and all--had thrown off their armor, thrown away their weapons, and were again rushing toward the lock. With a smothered curse Kinnison followed them, as did the Velantian and the giant Dutch-Valerian. Into the lock. Through it, into the almost invisible spacetube, which, he noticed, was floored with a much denser-appearing substance. The air felt heavy; dense, like water, or even more like metallic mercury. It breathed, however, QX. Into the Boskonian ship, along corridors, into a room which was precisely such a torture chamber as Kinnison had described. There they were, ten of them; ten of the dragonlike, reptilian Overlords of Delgon! * * * * *