His throat stuck. For the shimmering plain had heaved up. As if hurled by an explosive blast, a cloud of little diamond blocks came flying toward the ship. They rained down upon the flat circular deck, outside the conning tower. And they fell in a very curious way.

Lundoon had seen that each one-inch cube was joined to eight of its fellows by tiny threads of incandescence that ran from corner to corner. And they didn’t fall at random on the deck, but piled themselves into a grotesque mockery of the human form.

It looked like something a child might have built, with a million nursery blocks.

It towered twenty feet tall. It was weirdly terrible.

One stride brought it to the observa- tion tower. The ship shuddered to its weight. A thin rope of bright yellow fire ran from it back over the rail to the hole it had left in the plain, joining these cubes to the others there.

The face of it was outside the ports.

The reporter stared at it with a sick fascination. Hard bright cubes, strung together with threads of fire, made a massive nose, bulging many-faceted eyes, the square travesty of a chin. The thing looked like the creation of a surrealist sculptor gone mad. And it was infinitely horrible.