"These are the high-class Schrees, they are very like the Zervs in appearance. The other classes of the Schrees at sometime in the past were changed by medical treatments into a different appearance. It was a way of fixing the caste system permanently--understand?" She answered me swiftly, in a whisper, and the woman on the throne frowned as she noticed our conversation. Her eyes fixed ours as she said, with a curiously excited inflection, no longer bored with us: "Take these two to the place of questioning. I will supervise the proceeding. I must know what these two intended here, whether others of this man's people understand us." "We're in for it!" said Carna, and I knew what she meant. Jerked to our feet, we were hurried from the big throne room, down a corridor, through a great open door which closed behind us. That place! It was a laboratory out of Mr. Hyde's nightmares. Up until now I had accepted the many divergencies and peculiarities of the Zervs, the priestly insect-men, the monstrous workers--all the variance of this colony from space--as only to be expected of another planet's races. I had consciously tried to resist the impact of horror on my mind, had tried to put it aside as a natural reaction and one which did not necessarily mean that this expedition from space was a horrible threat to men. I had tried to accept their ways as not necessarily monstrous, but as a different way of life that _could_ be as good a way as our own if I once understood it. There were attractive points about the Zervs and even about these Schrees' rulers which bore out this impulse toward tolerance in me. But in this laboratory--or _abattoir_--some nameless, ominous aura or smell or electric force--what it was I know not--struck at my already staggering understanding with a final blow.