Shuddering with aversion, Peter Hubbard was glad his mask spared him the effluvium of the cavernous death surrounding him. The redolence would strike at a man like a dynamite explosion.

The scientist scanned the cave impatiently. Only a few of the roaches showed any movement, a wiggling antennae here and there, an isolated flurry of wire legs in an insect’s weak throes. Hubbard knelt in a splashing of roach bodies to examine the centric mass. With one gloved hand directing his flashlight, his fingers swept aside the confusion of gassed insects shielding the omphalos.

And there it was!

The “brain” existed precisely as Peter Hubbard had imagined it would be! Incredibly and fantastically, in its own way it was awesomely and wonderfully there before his eyes. The integument covering the mound protectively was partially transparent, so he could mark the gross anatomy of the structure before even making his planned incision.

The rise itself was three full feet at the center, and it was five or six feet in diameter. The covering was, Hubbard noted, morphologically like the dura mater between the human brain and the bone of the skull. Beneath the membrane lay the brain cells, and he saw at once that they were very different from the huge roaches with which they had been dealing outside. These were very small insects, smaller than the usual house roach, not more than a quarter of an inch long.

Not unexpected! The human brain has billions of cells. The roach’s brain cells could not be the size of the rest of the colony or there would be no room for anything, including itself. These thoughts flashed through Hubbard’s mind as he pierced the membrane to take a sample of the liquid within. Stoppering the test tube, he bet himself that the clear liquid would contain some form of acetylcholine—the chemical, localized in little sacs at the ends of neurons, that conducted impulses across the synaptic cleft in vertebrate systems.

Hubbard had trouble steadying his hands in his uncontainable excitement as he painstakingly cut away a full section of the dome roaches—the “roach cerebrum,” he thought elatedly. He could predict what his later dissection and analysis of the unprecedented body would show. He would find that these tiny roaches were actually adapted in two separate ways to receive and discharge nervous impulses. Some of the bodies, he was sure, would be acting as postsynaptic receptor cells, structured to receive chemical-­electrical impulses across the synapse, while other of the roach bodies would be presynaptic—the transmitters. Microscopic examination would show these to have the spherical vessels that discharged the transmission chemical initiating action. The latest work in this field was being done in San Francisco, and he would rush some of his bizarre specimens there.