tracks.

I felt again that clean, alien grip on my mind and knew I'd never get free of it. I saw Mathers and Anderson and Burris sweating over the canyon controls that kept building It bigger, and knew I'd be sweating with them till a plutonium bomb gave me release.

And then, unexpectedly, the grip of It on our minds incredibly relaxed. I felt Its mental grasp shift from wonder to interest to pure delight. Delight in the thing that Varez held, the box that was spurting an unseen kaleidoscope of rays in an ever-changing pattern! In that, for the moment, Its attention was wholly absorbed.

"Now!" yelled Zarias, and we two hurled ourselves forward across the lab.

My hand hit the switch of Chamber N's conveyor. There was a grind of gears, and the tray of Element One-forty-four started sliding swiftly back from its rack into the tube.

Wonder, delight, all the emotions of Its mind changed instantly to alarm! I felt Its thought, as a sudden wave of hurt fear. And then it was weakening, fading, as the element that was the brain-center of Its strange life slid back out of the pattern of its unearthly body, back to its distant, buried chamber.

"Blow it!" shrilled Varez, and Zarias' hand fumbled for another switch and closed it.

There was a dull, distant roar and the whole Station shook as the tonite explosive charge set under each chamber in case of emergencies blew Chamber N and the Element One-forty-four in it to fragments.

And then there was just a silence in the laboratory, in which I was conscious of Andersen and Burris lying senseless on the floor, and Mathers standing and looking down stupidly at his hands. The tingling force was gone, the impact of Its mind was gone, the shimmering glow of its radiation-nerves was gone. There was nothing here but a pattern of trays of transuranic elements, a pattern that had been a strange living body but that was now a dead one.

I felt the others crowding into the lab and helping me out of my armor. Marie was crying as she clung to me.

"How did you do it?" Cubbison was asking Varez over and over again.

Varez looked down at the little ray-projector. "This did it. To It, this was a delightful toy, a toy of radiation, calculated to catch the interest of a creature whose life was radiation, just as a kitten would catch a human child's 

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