The young physicist's clean-cut dark face was taut with eager emotion, his black eyes burning with excitement, as his pencil swiftly recorded that cryptic code. Beside the table loomed a grotesque, octopuslike metal machine, nearly completed. And Ned Marlin was tonight receiving the final instructions for its completion - from teachers unthinkably distant from earth...

"My fears are not baseless!" Doctor Francis Faylor said passionately. "I tell you, as I told you before, that this communication with Them, the alien creatures of another star and world, may lead to undreamed of disaster! They're too damned eager to get in touch with us.

"That's why I begged you to break off the communication that we established with Them," Faylor continued. "That's why I didn't want to go any farther with this machine They were teaching us to build. As I told you then, I'm afraid of Them, afraid of whatever hidden motive They have in establishing this communication with Earth..."

"Francis Faylor... is one of my colleagues in the physics department here. About a year ago, he and I started research together on one of the most puzzling phenomena in the field of cosmic radiation. We set out to discover the secret of the mysterious 'cosmic hiss'."

(Alien device from 'Cosmic Hiss' by Edmond Hamilton)

Biff Jones watched with wide, wondering eyes as the young physicist eagerly started work, fitting last pieces of copper and platinum into the mechanism, making connections, fastening bolts. When at last he straightened, the machine seemed complete in aрpearance, except that an oblong cavity yawned in the steel central "head" of it.

"Now just one more thing," Ned Marlin said tensely. He disconnected the short-wave radio receiver and placed it down inside the big, hollow "head." He quickly made connection with wires inside the octopus-machine, and then stepped back.

"It's done," he muttered tensely.

"But why put the radio receiver in it?" Jones asked.

"I haven't any idea why," the young physicist confessed. "As I told you, I'm working completely in the dark on this thing. I know that They instructed me to put in batteries, I suppose to operate the receiver. Damn' queer batteries they were, too."

"It must be some kind of television set, just as I figured," Biff Jones declared...

The octopus-machine was stirring! Moving its tentacular, flexible metal limbs. As they watched in frozen awe, they saw the machine reach up a tentacle and tighten a bolt that Marlin had forgot. "Good God, the thing's alive!" Biff Jones exclaimed hoarsely, his blue eyes bulging.

The machine had begun to move about the laboratory. Softly it glided here and there around the room on its eight tentacular limbs, examining everything in the room, touching, probing. They could hear a thin humming sound from inside it. It was horribly like a metal octopus come to life.

"It's a robot!" breathed Ned Marlin, staring almost wildly at his own creation. "A robot controlled by Them, from across the universe, by means of short-wave radio impulses."

"The thing gives me the creeps!" Biff Jones declared shakenly.

The robot, ignoring the two staring men, was silently and efficiently assembling pieces of metal and wire and chemicals from the mass of materials in the laboratory. It started to work with these materials, its eight tentacles flashing bewilderingly yet unerringly amid the litter of heterogeneous objects. It was beginning to assemble а round metal framework.