But something else was happening down there. The crowd had become silent, not even a murmuring. They all seemed to be looking in the same direction, away from the dais where the Earthman was fastened. Then a path opened up. A procession of the large Proktols came through, with something on a movable platform in the midst of them. Again V'Naric's voice: "I suppose the _Lahk-tzor_ is entering now. Or the Brain as you would undoubtedly call it." "Good Lord, yes," Janus murmured at last, staring. "That's what I'd call it, for that's what it is!" * * * * * The Brain was huge, five feet or more across, convoluted and pale but red-streaked. A dome of glass enclosed it. Beneath the bulging, pale-pink mass was something that might have been two tiny eyes and the veriest excuse of a chin, but from their distance the Earthmen could not be sure. V'Naric's voice droned on, beating through their numbed consciousness: "You are wondering about the Brain. Long ago one of our race, one far ahead of his time, created it. In a period of six months he advanced evolution from a single cell through all its stages to what you see now. The _Lahk-tzor_--pardon me--the Brain down there is the most advanced evolutionary product yet to exist in this solar system. It slew its creator, but seemed to exhaust all its energy in so doing. For a long, long time it lay dormant. Such scientists as there were at the time tried to activate it, for they knew it wasn't dead; but their efforts were clumsy and futile. "Then one day it began to pulse and think again, feebly. Do you know when, and why? I think you could guess, Commander Janus. It was the day the Shining Stone came flashing to land here. That event caused a tremendous religious hysteria among the savages, and it wasn't hard to connect that with the Brain's revival; the Brain was absorbing the accumulative mental flow that was impacting against it! Of course it has long been proven that thought is material just as light is material." Of the three, Janus alone was beginning to show a gleam of interest as he listened to the toneless words. "I think I see the whole system now," he said bitterly. "Periodically you pull this Ritual business and get those little savages down there religiously worked up, in order to--" The idea was so ghastly he choked on the words and couldn't go on.