teeth hard beneath it. Very cautiously he slid his right hand up his cheek and back over the short hair on his neck until his fingers touched the thing's shrinking tissue. It slid his hand away and quivered in gentle admonition.

"Please," his voice whispered, "it will feel so good." And his hand tried again, like a gentle lover.

Across the room Spencer's eyes glistened wide in the gathering dusk. Templar moaned softly in his sleep. The faucet dripped loudly. And the Captain's fingers closed about something smooth and yielding, yet plump with blood, a tick ripe for the bursting.

With a great brassy shout he drove his fingers through it. As his nails gouged through writhing jelly, the agonies of the thing's short-circuiting nervous system became hammer blows upon the base of his skull. Frantically, with numbing fingers, he tore at the connecting nerve links. He was a Siamese twin whose partner was death.

The floor spun by. A blazing nova, then galaxies of stars burned out his optic nerve and darkness struck. For an instant infinity equalled zero.

Then his good eye opened and puzzled at the mountain so close its wrinkled gray surface was a blur. As he raised his cheek from the floor the mountain became Hogan's trouser leg. The Captain felt his throat constrict. Painfully word-pictures forced themselves upon him. Hogan, Grimes, Hogan, Grimes, they whirled in a tightening circle of hysteria.

"Captain," Spencer's quiet voice broke the chain of self-recrimination. "Can you hear me, Captain?"

The Captain leaped erect and brushed a nasty mess of skin and jelly from his shoulder.

Think about it later; let the court of inquiry think about it, he told himself. You're their Captain, man. Act like one.

Swiftly he untied Spencer. Then, kneeling beside each of the three unconscious men, he carefully extracted the thing's progeny from their necks, twisting and bullying the tiny parasites until they drew in their nerve extensions and came loose in his hands.

In the icebox between the celery and the beer cans they resembled three over-ripe avocados as their frantic pulsations died away and the cold made wrinkles in their skins.

"When are you going to kill them?"

"The trans-galactic biology teams will want them alive. We will keep them in suspended 

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