_Ground your ship! I am your master! I am--_ _You'll be nothing in five minutes_, Carter thought fiercely. His ship was moving downward now, back into Deneb IV's atmosphere. It was decelerating rapidly. At ten thousand miles, Carter cut in the automatic pilot and climbed into his ejection suit. Still the ship plunged downward. Five thousand miles. Two thousand. At sixty thousand feet, Carter pressed the emergency ejection stud, and a giant cybernetic hand shoved him gently but firmly through the gaping hatch of his ship. He was swept away, off to one side, and drifted slowly the long distance to the ground. The bombardment of thought from the Khethlani became almost unbearable. The alien creature knew now that it was doomed. "Go ahead," Carter yelled derisively. "Hypnotize my spaceship! Make it turn around!" He was still twenty thousand feet from the ground when a bright flare of energy squirted forth as his ship roared into the building that housed the Khethlani. * * * * * There was just a smoking pit in the ground when Carter got there. Everything had been totally destroyed by the crash. And for the first time since his landing, Carter no longer felt the itching in his mind. The Khethlani was dead. He turned and saw a man approaching, dazed and smoke-blackened. It was Gendron. "Who are you?" Gendron asked uncertainly. "Where are my men? My ship?" "You're the only one left, Commander. The others didn't get away in time." Quickly, Carter explained to the dazed officer, who had no recollection of anything that had happened to him since entering the Khethlani's sphere of power. "That's--that's unbelievable," Gendron said. "It's all over now." Carter glanced upward. Something bright was circling the planet in a landing orbit. "What's that?" "It's a spaceship," Carter said. "Drawn in by your decoy SOS signal--only now it's the real thing." "Will he see us?" "He'll see the smoke," Carter said. "He'll rescue us." There'd be some delay now, he realized, before he got to Ophiuchus VII for that vacation. In fact, he might never get there, he knew now. He had a big job ahead of him--and he was the only man in the universe qualified to do it, him and his tin skull. He glanced upward. The job was waiting. There were eleven more Khethlani out there to be rooted out and destroyed. THE END