"No, thanks--that is, not if you are sure that you can handle him alone." "Handle him! This pitiful weakling?" The Overlord snorted contemptuously. "I could handle seven like him. He is on the verge of fainting already. Observe, please, his reaction to the fungus-culture injections." Four times the Delgonian rammed the needle home; and, true to prediction, Kinnison's body went limp in its shackles. "Ah, yes; a weak race, physically--very weak," Eichmil observed, as he left the room; and the Overlord, alone with his victim, cast off the chains in order to stretch the Lensman out upon one of the sinister machines so close at hand. * * * * * But Kinnison had not fainted. He had not allowed himself to feel the hurt of the knife, of the needle, nor of the injected fluid. Never before had he been more coldly, intently alert than in this, the climactic minute of his life. The full of his powers he did not have, perhaps, yet even now he was better equipped, mentally and physically, than the Kinnison of even a short year ago, able to establish a nerve block that would permit full and unshaken concentration on every move of offense and defense he might make, whatever frightful toll of pain and injury the inhumanly powerful, semireptilian Delgonian might inflict in the struggle that the Lensman now proposed. Thus, upon the first instant of opportunity, he exploded into action with a violence which took even the trigger-nerved Overlord entirely by surprise. In practically one motion he rolled, ducked, gathered himself together and launched a kick behind which there was the driving force of every ounce of his powerful body and the concentrated urge of every cell of his brain. It struck its mark squarely--the hard toe of the Lensman's heavy boot crashed squarely against the Overlord's plated neck at the exact base of the skull. That kick would have pulped any human or near-human head--it would have slain a horse--it staggered momentarily even the reptilianly armored monstrosity which was the Delgonian. Kinnison went leaping across the room toward a rack of implements and weapons, only to be buried in mid-course beneath a hurtling avalanche of fury. For a moment man and monster stood poised, almost en tableau, then they crashed to the floor together--talons and fingers clawing, gouging at eyes; wings, feet, hard-gnarled hands, scimitared tail, balled fist, boots and teeth wreaking every ultimate possibility of damage. Against the frightfully armed and naturally armored body of the Delgonian, human physical weapons and human strength were near useless; but, insulated against the agony of snapping bones and bludgeon blows of the mighty tail by that hard-held nerve block, the Lensman's furiously active mind had a goal--a vaguely understood goal--toward which he directed the deadly struggle he could not control or hope to win--