Scarcely had he finished speaking when the _Skylark_ struck--or, rather, floated gently downward into the ground. For, slight as was the force of gravitation, and partially counteracted as well by the pull of the towing vessel, the arenak globe did not even pause as it encountered the apparently solid rock of the planet's surface. That rock billowed away upon all sides as the _Skylark_ sank into it and through it, to come to a halt only after her mass had driven a vertical, smooth-sided well some hundreds of feet in depth. Even though the Osnomian metal had been rendered much less dense than normal by its extrusion and expansion into the fourth dimension, yet it was still so much denser than the unknown material of the hyperplanet that it sank into that planet's rocky soil as a bullet sinks into thick jelly. "Well, that's that!" Seaton declared. "Thinness and tenuosity, as well as feebleness, seem to be characteristics of this hypermaterial. Now we'll camp here peacefully for a while. Before they succeed in digging us out--if they try it, which they probably will--we'll be gone." * * * * * Again, however, the venturesome and impetuous chemist was wrong. Feeble the hypermen were, and tenuous, but their curiosity was whetted even sharper than before. Derricks were rigged, and slings; but even before the task of hoisting the _Skylark_ to the surface of the planet was begun, two of the peculiar denizens of the hyperworld were swimming down through the atmosphere of the four-dimensional well at whose bottom the Earth vessel lay. Past the arenak wall of the cruiser they dropped, and into the control room they floated. "But I do not understand it at all, Dick," Crane had been arguing. "Postulating the existence of a three-dimensional object in four-dimensional space, a four-dimensional being could of course enter it at will, as your fingers entered that tobacco can. But since all objects here are in fact and of necessity four-dimensional, that condition alone should bar any such proceeding. Therefore, since you actually _did_ take the contents out of that can without opening it, and since our recent visitors actually _did_ enter and leave our vessel at will, I can only conclude that we must still be essentially three-dimensional in nature, even though constrained temporarily to occupy four-dimensional space."