These were the mole-men, the crab-men, the creatures built for specific purposes as tools are built. Each _thing_ bore on his back a bale of goods, or a bar of metal, a burden sizeable enough for two ordinary men. They were strong, and they were silent and smooth-moving as machines. I realized they _were_ machines--made out of flesh. "Are these slaves, or what?" I asked Carna. "These were once the slaves, or workmen of the race of Zervs. They now serve the Schrees, for they are mindless, in a way. They are not important. It is those who guard and guide them I wait to see. I have not yet seen a Schree, but only heard the Zervs describe them." The nightmare procession went on for minutes, long minutes that were to me a nightmare. Yet I realized that if I had been raised to the idea of humankind made into machines, it would not be revolting--not after they had been hereditarily moulded for centuries into what they were. Yet what a crime it was, what they might have been if left to develop as nature intended, rather than as man cruelly mal-intended. They must have been once specially selected for strength as well as beauty, for about them was a sad and terrible grace, a remainder of noble chiseling of brow and nostril, distorted as by a fiend into the horror that it was--these had once been a noble race! "Do you feel the terrible horror of this sight?" I asked Carna. "Always I have felt the horror that was done to them in the past. It is _still_ done to man. Look, there are the three who came with you, and fell into the hands _of the priests_. They are the thing that the Zervs _really fear_, yet they live with it, and have done so for centuries. They can despise the Schrees, but they are as bad themselves--look!" I followed with my eye her pointing finger. Yes, that figure _was_ hulking Barto, and I almost yelled "Jake, snap out of it!" before I remembered my own peril. Then he came into the full light, and passed not twenty feet away. I leaned against the railing of stone, sick as a dog and retching. They had made him over, with some unknown aborted science of an evil world! Jake was clubfooted, lumbering, with his jaws grown into great jowls of bone, his arms elongated and ending in hooks. Two of the fingers, or the thumb and finger had been enlarged or grafted into a bone-like semblance of a crab's claw. What he was going to be when they got through, I didn't know, but neither did Jake. He didn't know anything! He clumped along, his crossed eyes unmoving, his back bent with a weight heavy for even his broad shoulders--a man no longer, but a mindless zombie. A cross-eyed zombie! I cursed silently, tearing my hands against the stone as I resisted the impulse to fire and fire again upon those hopping, thin, white things that came after. "Just _what_ are those hopping things?"