They were looking into a circular room, walled off by the cylinder of clear glass.  The ceiling was a circle of white light that flooded the space with an icy glow.

From various devices fixed in this bright ceiling were suspended a bewildering array of instruments and cables, branching limbs of metal, flexible tubes of some clear material through which liquids of various hues flowed.  Together they formed a complex interlace as they ran together at a central point.

And there, enmeshed in the tangled net, like an immense spider in its web, was hung suspended the figure of a man.

It was difficult at first for Bres and Ruadan to even recognize that the thing before them was a man.  It hung in a prone position, arms and legs spreadeagled.  It was very like a spider.  The body was encased in an armorlike shell, shaped like the insect's bloated body.  The protruding limbs were spindly, knobbily jointed bones covered with a mottled, grey-white skin.  The many devices suspended about the form all seemed attached to it by cables and the clear tubes.  Some even penetrated the flesh of the wasted limbs, like the suckers of some mechanical parasite.  Only the movement of the liquid within the tubes showed that it was entering his body, not being drained out.

The head of the being was suspended in a soft mesh cradle.  It appeared to be little more than a skull, long, narrow, and high-domed.  The flesh beneath the surface of stretched, dry skin was melted away, leaving the slender nose, long chin, and high cheekbones to jut up sharply, painfully, as if they would tear through.

Where the eyes should have been there were sunken pits, black depressions surrounded by crinkled folds of scar tissue.  From these caverns into the depths of the skull, objects like some kind of tuberous plant seemed to grow.  They filled the deep sockets, bulging outward beyond the bony ridges of the hairless brow, then tapered down to thin, stalklike cables that coiled upward to holes in the white ceiling.

To Bres and Ruadan, it seemed impossible that this was a living thing.  But once again Balor's hand moved upon the panel.  This time a light appeared in a device beside the awful head, and a low chime sounded from inside the cylinder.

The head shifted.  With an enormous effort it rolled toward them.  As it did, a device suspended beside it rotated, too, and a small circle of light set in one end, glowing greenly like a cat's eye in the dark, fixed on them.

Immediately, a square panel filling half the outer wall beyond the glass cylinder came to life.  What had been darkness now filled with a hazy light, like mist before the sun.  It brightened, and then it began to fill with shadadows.  They took on color and firmer shape, grew clearer, but still uneven, like the images reflected in a wind-rippled pool.  At times a greater disturbance washed through it, but still the figures that finally appeared in the lighted square were recognizable.

They were a black giant with a slit of blazing eye and two men, pale faced, expressions frozen with amazement.

"Why, that's us!" Bres gasped.

"That is what he sees," Balor explained, "with the help of our old devices and his powers.  It is reflected there, along with the images created within his own mind."

"You can see his thoughts?" Bres asked in wonder.

"Only if he wishes it."

The image steadied further now, as if the being were coming to a fuller consciousness.  Then the lipless slit of mouth parted, moved back from the blackened stumps of teeth, and there came to them, hollowly, as if amplified within the cylinder, a horrible whisper.

"So, Balor, you have finally brought Bres to me," it said.

Bres looked at the black giant.  "Who is this being?  How does he know me?"

"I am Mathgen!" came the rasping, horrible reply.

Bres's head jerked back to that wasted face.  "Mathgen!" he cried in astonishment.  "But you are dead!  You must be dead!"

"I am alive.  Alive if you call this living nightmare that entraps me life."