Too late he realized his mistake. His puny blocks were unable to hold up against the continuous, non-chemically produced stream of electricity from the generator. More and more impulse flowed into his body, more and more _inflexible_ impulse, which he could not twist into his cannibal's thought-pattern, torrents of perfectly stable electricity, slowly influencing his own pattern as he had expected to influence the impulse, influencing his into a frozen, stable, inflexible pattern of continuous hunger-satisfaction. His crystalloid jaws spread wide, Rahll floated in the black void of space, motionless, unable to move, unable to twist into new thought-patterns, and therefore unable to think. The inflexible current of electricity poured steadily into his body.... * * * * * Slowly the effects of the morphine wore off, and the haze lifted from Brenner's mind. As his power to think returned, he began to realize that his plan had worked, and that the alien had been overcome; and he was glad of this only because it removed him, Brenner, from danger. He no longer cared that the creature might have absorbed the impulses of every living being in existence; the thing was frozen, and he was safe from it--that was all that mattered to him. Of course he could not see, or feel, or hear the motionless crystalloid pattern outside. But he knew it was there. He could _sense_ it. He could _sense_ it because his heretofore unmethodical hub-impulse pattern, in its close association with Rahll's, had been slowly twisted and molded into a form very much like the alien's, giving him Rahll's powers of sightless observation of other impulses and objects. Brenner no longer had any need for his lost powers of sight, hearing, taste, smell and touch. He groped his way back to the nose seat, sensing his way as he could not feel it. He would find Base--he would be able to sense the way back to it as soon as it was close enough. He would go back to Base, because, naturally, his _basic_ thought-form had also been molded into the shape of Rahll's; and Brenner was hungry, and he knew he could find food at Base. Food. He pictured Hale, and the other men at the station. Food. His jagged cannibal's pattern contracted in ecstacy at the thought of it. He activated the atomic generator and whirled the ship around. THE END