The walls hemming him in were perhaps fifteen feet above his head. The metal monster halted on the rim. A strange light blinked on in the nose of that creature, or mechanism. It probed down at him, spotlighting him. A giant foreleg, ending in a formidable pair of forceps, reached down along the light beam for him. The focussing light, swinging along the opposite wall before steadying on Hammond, had revealed to the desperate research chemist a transverse fissure, barely wide enough to admit him. Hammond took the chance. The giant claw was but a foot above his head when he twisted, sprang away from the wall. The forcep jerked, swung after him. Hammond beat it to the fissure by a foot. He didn't stop. He kept running, looking back over his shoulder to see if the monster was following. He didn't notice the fissure ended abruptly in space. Not until he suddenly felt himself treading empty air. Then he began to fall, turning slowly, like a slow motion diver in the newsreels. * * * * * He fell a long way. In terms of feet, as he judged it, the drop was incredible. Below him a huge mass loomed out of a brown, heaving sea. Above him--he saw it, once, as he faced upward in his turning fall--he glimpsed what was a gigantic span of maroon earth, hundreds of feet thick, that was supported by the huge, maroon cliffs at either side. It was from that span he had fallen! A strange, numbing thought came to him, then, so incredible in its implication he discarded it. But it persisted, kept tapping at the back of his mind-- He was still in the _Crawfish_! The thought was fantastic. Yet it was less incredible than if it were not true. The turreted tube, evidently, had sprayed an invisible ray that had so changed him in size that the antlike things he had been about to examine now loomed like colossi over him. The ridges and gullies and fumaroles were brush marks and paint bubbles in the maroon paint of the seat, and the towering cliffs were the boat sides. The high span from which he was falling must be nothing less than the boat seat! And the huge, elliptical land mass toward which he was falling must be-- He landed then. The substance beneath his feet was soft, spongy. It broke his fall. Around him was a momentary red glow, as of the sun shining through a filter that blocked out all waves above the red band. He passed through slimy pools within the huge mass, and momentary revulsion gripped him. Then he emerged out into brief daylight, riding a huge disc to the brown, heaving sea. He hit with a splash. Fathoms deep to him, he went directly to the bottom, as if he were composed of a substance many times heavier than lead. And he remained on the bottom. Not even his instinctive attempt to swim upward could lift him to the surface.