On the second table lay a twisted, distorted thing, an apelike body with which fate had played grotesque pranks. It was hairy, of middle height, and its dark skin all over was wizened and coarse, almost like the bark of a tree. The legs were short and bowed, the hands stubby claws; the face, puckered even in unconsciousness, was that of a gargoyle in pain. The long matted hair had been shaved away; the large pate washed with antiseptics. Soon, were the operation successful, that head would hold the brain of Professor Edgar Estapp, world-famous chemist and bio-chemist. On the third table lay a shape skeletonlike in appearance, so emaciated was it, so closely did the bones press into the dry, fever-yellowed skin. Of one leg, only the stump was left; this creature had been forced to hop or crawl his way through the isuan swamps. The head, too, was no more than a skull, with great sunken dark-rimmed eyes, discolored fangs and loose, leathery lips. There had been no hair on this death's head; it had long been bald, and now, washed, clean for the first time in months or even years, it was to hold the brain of Dr. Ralph Swanson, Earth's one-time leader in the science of psychology. On the fourth table lay a giant's body--but a hollow giant, a giant made thin and pitiful by the ravages of his destroyer, isuan. A roistering, free-booting space-ship sailor, this man may once have been, but, from the drug, the mighty arms had been twisted and shrivelled, the strong legs wasted away. One ear had been torn from the skull in an old brawl, and what was left was naked and ugly to the eye. Behind that bitter, drug-coarsened face would be the new home of the brain of Sir Charles Esme Norman, wizard of mathematics and once a polished, charming Englishman. On the fifth table lay a dwarf. Its ridiculous body was not over four and a half feet long, though the head was larger than that of a normal man. In the old dark ages on Earth this body would have served for the jester of a lord, the comic butt of a king; in more recent times as the prize of a circus side-show. The huge, weighty head with its ugly brooding mask of a face, the child's body below--this was for the brain of Professor Erich Geinst, the solitary German who had stood preeminent on Earth in astronomy. * * * * *