I checked my advance and tried to get my wits; to master the frenzy that was upon me. It was a moment of horrible chaos; I knew that my life or death in that second hung in the balance. With hands at my sides I stood irresolute as the weird little creatures spread out and surrounded me. Little creatures? Still my brain would barely encompass the amazing fact that these were not individual little beings but merely the detached parts of one great Individual--one almost Omniscient Mentality. As though they were just arms and legs with a remote giant central Being to guide them in what they were doing now. As I stood panting, waiting, with my heart pounding, for an instant it seemed that I would be seized, with the tentacle arms of the box-like little things pulling at me, like poor Blair's young wife, with arms and legs pulled until she came apart.... It was a breathless, horrible moment of suspense. All the humans here in the pallid turret stood breathlessly silent, tense, as helplessly we waited to see what the Supreme One would decide to do. By what weird method of nature were swift communications passing between these little things and their main Being so distant? Our human mind doubtless will never yield an answer to that. Yet perhaps it was no different in its essence from the swift orders which our own brain gives to our distant hands and feet. Ours is a transmission through nerves; this other a transmission through the ether. Each of these little parts had its subsidiary eye, to see these local happenings; a little subsidiary brain to record them, to amplify them with reasoning and to fling the result out to the Supreme One for decision. Thoughts themselves are instant things. I stood with a flood of such thoughts as the Physicals surged at me. Their little eyes, in the middle of each box-like body, were balefully glaring. A few of the tentacles gripped me. The touch was cold, slimy, yet from it I could feel a current tingling, like a mild electric shock. Then the gripping fingers in unison relaxed. One of the little hollow voices muttered: "Tom Ralston, I will punish you later." As though suddenly the incident were closed, in unison all the Physicals turned, and with their hurried little precision steps marched back to the wall where they lined themselves up, motionless, silent, with only their eyes alert. And from the bench where still his arm encircled the shuddering Dora, the giant Torkine was grinning at me with a leer of triumph.