* * * * * "His voice rose warningly. 'It is as intelligent as we are, but it moves with glacial slowness. An inch in an hour--a foot in a day! When it dissolves Time it nourishes itself by drawing the energy-whirl into itself, and spinning it out again in another form, like an immense, living shuttlecock. A spider--' "He looked at me with a haggard intensity of appeal. 'It will try to hold you with the web--to hold you in complete helplessness until you become a hundred lads and a hundred men. You'll be an infant, a boy of five, a lad of twenty, and a man older than myself. But every time you split up in the folds of the web you'll lose a part of your substance. "'You'll cease to be a man with a past and a future. You'll become a mere hollow shell--no more substantial than I am, and I am little more than a wraith. You'll be drained, and you'll vanish like a puff of smoke. You'll be devoured and swallowed up!' "He was struggling for breath and the veins on his forehead had begun to swell. 'You've got to blast it down before the web dazzles and confuses you! You'll have to face it to blast, but if you fight it with your mind--' "Suddenly the helmet was back on his head and he was turning from me. He moved straight toward the lad and put a palsied hand on the shoulder of that younger me. "Then, slowly, they both turned to face me, and I could see their eyes inside their helmets, trained upon me in desperate appeal. At least--there was appeal in the eyes of the old one. The lad may have been merely terrified, and confused. "He couldn't have been more terrified than I was as the shadows lengthened about me, and a coldness crept into my bones. "I knew I'd have to come to grips with the web. I knew, too, that if it was behind me I'd be safer facing it. When there's something unspeakable at your back, you can die so many deaths just waiting for it to make its presence known that all the courage and decision goes out of you. "Panic smote me as I turned, hip and thigh like a flat sword. But all I could see for an instant was a faint, moving radiance blending with the shadows, a kind of nebulous flowing in the darkness on the far side of the cave. "My hand must have closed on my blaster, for I could feel the bite of cold metal against my palm. But there was something about the light that my will could not withstand. My arms seemed to freeze as I stared at it, and terrifying thoughts rushed into my brain. [Illustration: _My arms seemed to freeze!_] "At first I experienced only a feeling of almost unbearable oppression. Then something in the glow seemed to reach out toward me and there was no sound in the cave but the beating of my heart. "A ghastly something seemed to be watching me with a kind of fiendish triumph, as though the soul of a devil lurked in the depth of the light which could send out vampire tendrils, filmed with writhing menace.