The underground room at the Lake Victoria minesite was chilled. Angus had rigged heavy-duty motor cooling coils along the wall and the humidity in the air dripped from them and made dark pools along the floor.
The metal and mineral analysis machine hummed; its screen cast an eerie green light on everything around it. Five tense faces were turned to that screen: Doctor MacKendrick’s, Angus’s, Sir Robert’s, Dunneldeen’s and Jonnie’s.
Massive, more than eighteen inches in diameter, the ugly head of the Psychlo corpse lay on the machine’s plate. Such a head was mostly bone. It bore considerable resemblance to a human head and could be mistaken for one in bad light, but where a human had hair, eyebrows, fleshy lips, nose and ears, the Psychlo had bone whose shape was more or less the same as
