Consequently it wasn't at all surprising that Gerard stepped right into a regular hornet's nest of trouble. The little Doctor had been counting doors on his way down the corridor, more from scientific habit than anything else, and on the seventh door to his right, he noticed a very strange insignia. It was a weird diagrammatic inscription which immediately caught his interest. Emblazoned in the central panel in glowing outline was a triangle enclosing a huge multi-faceted eye. As Gerard stared at the weird orb in its geometrical figure he suddenly recalled that a similar figure had been used by ancient necromancers and later by hypnotists, as a symbol of their questionable accomplishments. Puzzledly he wondered whether its use here in this fantastic world of the past held any esoteric connection with its meaning in the far-distant future. Without stopping to consider potential consequences, he pushed the stud which opened the panel, and stepped inside. When his eyes finally became accustomed to the even deeper gloom, he saw that the room was filled with a number of coffin-like glass cabinets and an equal number of switchboards crowded with dials and levers. Slowly he edged toward one of the crystal cabinets and peered down into its dimly illumined interior. He saw a number of oval white objects resting on tiered trays, for all the world like eggs in an incubator. Then Gerard realized that was exactly what these instruments were. Incubators! But they were Kralon eggs, not chicken eggs. Furthermore, it was obvious that the elaborate instruments which adjoined the incubators had a far more involved function than merely maintaining the eggs at incubation temperature. Doctor Gerard's grizzled eyebrows lifted in interest as he turned back to examine the dials. Both the design of the controls and the hieroglyphics engraved upon them were entirely incomprehensible to him. He shrugged his shoulders, then began to turn every triangular control on the panel to its extreme limit. Nothing untoward happened during the alteration of the first two settings, but when Gerard threw over the third, all hell broke loose in that dim crypt! Violet light danced between the poles of circuit breakers and ate away the metal like butter. Great gongs dinned a cacophony of sound through the lurking dusk of the room, then were suddenly silent as brilliant lights flashed on. * * * * * Meanwhile, Gordon Malherne had also engineered something for which his text books had provided no solution. After leaving his four companions, he had started down the corridor furthest to the right. "Always go right," he told himself whimsically as he crept noiselessly down the dim hallway. "And you'll never go wrong." However, this must have been the exception which proved the rule, for Malherne hadn't gone a dozen yards when things started to happen.