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“What are they like?” asked Correy. “Will they put up a fight? Are they dangerous?”

“O

“Snapped up?” asked Correy impatiently. “By whom? Or what?”

“By spiders!” replied Inverness, his eyes shining with the fanatical gleam of a scientist who scents something strange. “Great spiders—perhaps not true spiders, but akin to them, from the descriptions we have—of what is known on Earth as the trap-door variety, but possessed of a high degree of intelligence, the power of communication, and definitely organized.”

“Organized,” put in Tipene, “in the sense that they work together instead of individually; that there are those to command and those to obey.”

“You say they are large,” I commented. “How large?”

“Large enough,” said Inverness grimly, “to enable one of them to instantly overpower a strong man.”

I saw Correy glance forward, where our largest disintegrator-ray tubes were located, and his eyes lit up with the thought of battle.

“If there’s anything I hate,” he gritted, “it’s a spider. The hairy, crawling beasts! I’ll man one of the tubes myself, just for the fun of seeing them dissolve into nice brown dust, and—”