"Sure, I told him. Sterns told him, too, and the fool would be alive now if he'd taken precautions...."
The voices became inaudible then as the men passed on. Simms stood in his tracks undecidedly. Then a glimmer of flare lightning in the sodden sky illuminated that strange tower just ahead. Like a magnet it drew him forward with its power.
Crouching low, he reached its cylindrical sides. He was groping for the entrance when his hands touched something soft and yielding. Chilled, he waited for a second lightning flare.
It came, and it revealed the body of the third space-rat, Sterns. The man was dead. His eyes were bulging and streams of blood were issuing from either ear.
Bewildered, yet careful not to disturb the body, Simms completed his circle of the tower and found the entrance. Inside he felt rather than saw a spiral staircase leading upward. With the utmost caution he began to climb.
He was breathing hard when he reached the top. A door barred his way. Simms pushed it open and stood staring on the threshold.
A bluish radite lamp was suspended from the ceiling. Occupying a good half of the chamber was a huge parabolic horn, its small end converging on a platform upon which a circular disc slowly revolved. In the center of the disc was a rounded heap of yellow crystals.
The left wall was taken up by a switchboard, with a series of dials staggered across a corbite panel. At the right wall, facing the open end of the parabolic horn, was a large wire cage.
Simms strode forward. The crystals on the revolving disc were Deleon Salts. But what was the meaning of this other apparatus?
He peered inside the cage and stared, incredulously. Hudrites! The cage was filled with hundreds of the Venusian swamp insects.