So he helped her through, and I followed. We discovered a passage, and along the passage another doorway—and people. I do not remember our words when we found one another in the dark—only the gladness of it. There were about twenty of them—men, women and children. They had food and drink which they had collected before they fled to the cellar. Professor Newton was among them. He seemed acknowledged as their leader, and he proposed me as his second. He wanted the aid of an intelligent and educated man, he whispered, in fighting the weed. “We _must_ fight it,” he declared, tapping me on the arm with his finger, “but I don’t know how. I—don’t—know—how!—I can’t even guess what it is; still less what it is going to be. It may be mere vegetable life—a man-eating plant. It may be brute animal life—a _carnivorous_ animal! It may be intelligent—diabolical intelligence. Whatever it is, it will develop as it grows, develop new organs and new powers, new strength and new weaknesses. We must strike _there_. What weaknesses? Ah-h! I don’t know! It may outgrow itself and wither. It may perish from the little microbes of the earth, like the Martians in Wells’s romance. We thought that an idle fancy _then_. It may grow into an intelligent—devil! It may be one now and merely lack the organs to carry out fully its evil will. On the other hand, its malevolence may be purposeless—a blind restlessness that it will outgrow—after we have stifled in the darkness at its feet. We must fight it anyhow. To fight it we must understand it. To understand it we must study it. Will you risk your life with me?” “Yes,” I said. Viva cried softly when I told her I must go; but she did not try to keep me from my duty. The professor and I crawled up the stairs into the basement, and finding nothing there went up in the lift in the dark. We heard the weed moving about on the second landing. I jumped out, turned on the electric light, and jumped in again. The tendrils followed me and clutched at the steel curtain, but could not break it. We hacked with our pen-knives at those that crept through. The juice which ran out from them had an oily smell. They beat furiously on the curtain. The professor studied them calmly with a microscope. The bulges were the beginning of eyes, he thought. He pronounced some feathery sprays sprouting from them to be the rudiments of organs like hands. I do not know whether he was right, but he always maintained that they would develop organs of sense. Anyhow the character of the weed was clearly changing. It had grown harder and drier, but without losing its flexibility or strength. After a time the professor decided that I should return to the others. He went up again in the lift when he had lowered me. Viva was waiting for me in the dark just inside the door.