He frowned. He should have been able to make radio contact with Base long before this. Perhaps his trouble was in the radio.... Suddenly a strange odor touched his senses. Brenner frowned, sniffing. He'd never smelled anything like that before. It was rather metallic--almost like a short circuit. But not quite. And then, gradually, the odor became that of coffee. Hot Coffee, percolating somewhere in the ship. He had put some coffee on, hadn't he? He frowned, and then went back to his former thoughts of self-disparagement, accepting the odor as normal, as part of his natural environment, "forgetting" about it. The first block moved in. Brenner hardly noticed that he had lost his sense of smell. * * * * * Rahll exulted. This was the first impulse he had ever tasted--his jagged cannibal's pattern contracted itself in ecstacy as he twisted the absorbed impulse into his own thought-form. He was still hungry, yes--and that hunger was hardly on the way to being satisfied--but at least this was a beginning. It fired him on--he must have more impulse, more, until he could branch out and find even more.... The hunger rushed over him in waves, deep, welling up from the pit of his thought-pattern, almost overcoming his form with its intensity. Yes, he would have more. Taking the first impulse had been simple; as soon as this other being had accepted the bogus odor as being normal, his frequency had become harmonious with Rahll's, and Rahll had moved a block into the channels through which the impulse flowed and absorbed the impulse. Now the block remained in those odor-channels, preventing other impulses from travelling in them. Rahll turned his attention to the satisfaction of his hunger. * * * * * Brenner sniffed. That's funny--hadn't he smelled coffee a minute ago? Wait a minute--he couldn't have smelled coffee. There wasn't any coffee on. But there must have been, because he'd smelled it. He sniffed again. He couldn't smell anything now. Odd. He leaned back in his chair and listened as the atomic and electric generators hummed in the background.... The second block moved in. The sound of the generators disappeared. Brenner started. But he couldn't have heard the generators--they were off! He rose. All was silent in the ship. He banged on the control panel with his fist. He heard no sound. Panic set in. * * * * * Rahll's cannibal-pattern contracted and protracted in the black void. The faint blue lines of his form glowed a bit more strongly now than they had before, although the great hunger still shook his frame. His thought-forms wove in and out in visions of power, a power he had never thought of possessing back in the time of the Great Pattern, a power with which he could absorb everything, every-- And then Rahll's thought-form twisted into a totally unfamiliar shape. And he thought of Hale.