The Trans-Human

WHEN Johnny was five years old, he didn't know he was a human being. On his fifth birthday he was living in an eight-sided tower under a yellow sky, and he played and had his lessons in a most improbably-shaped walled enclosure, and he thought he was a very, very happy Khasr child. He didn't know that the Khasr had played a very dirty trick on him by not killing him when they massacred his parents and all the other colonists on Llandu II, and he didn't suspect that every act of kindness they showed him afterward was part of an even dirtier trick. His playmates were especially chosen Khasr, but he didn't know that, either. When he waked in the morning, his playmates waked too. Johnny slept on a soft cushion, but his playmates slept dangling from the bars of a cage-like contraption, hanging by the claws on each of their eight legs. When he'd had his bath they came crawling about him, saying "Good-morning Johnny," in human voices that they'd carefully learned to copy from human vision-records. Johnny beamed at them and zestfully asked what they'd play that day.

They had eight legs, those Khasr, and barrel-shaped bodies, and compared to their expressions an Earthian tarantula looks positively benevolent, but Johnny didn't know. He didn't remember when he'd had human parents. He'd been barely two when he was captured and carried away; the small colony his parents had lived in had been melted down to a lake of slag. There'd been elaborate conditioning work on Johnny, to make him able to stand the sight of Khasr. At first they used euphoric drugs to keep him from screaming with horror when they appeared. Then he associated euphoria with the sight of them. At three he believed implicitly that he was a Khasr. At five he thought he was a happy Khasr child.

On his fifth birthday they first showed him pictures of men. His tutors explained carefully that here were some new animals that he should learn about. Since he was going to grow up to be the bravest of all Khasr, he needed to learn about the creatures he would hunt and kill. So—and here his crawling Khasr playmates made a human-sounding chorus of agreement—so today Johnny would play at the killing of men.

And he did. He played according to Khasr traditions of the heroic. The Khasr were warlike and not nice people. When they discovered humans, and found that men were spreading all through the First Sector of the galaxy, they made war as a matter of course. But the Khasr tradition of a well-conducted war was one that their enemies didn't know anything about. Their idea of a glorious victory was a sneak-attack in which not a single one of the persons attacked had an instant's uneasiness before he was dead.

So when Johnny and his playmates played at killing humans, it wasn't hunting as human children would have played. It was strictly murder. But the slithering, clicking Khasr squealed gleefully (as they had learned to from vision-records of human children) —when Johnny turned a make-believe coagulator-beam on the foolish make-believe humans who had come out of a make-believe spaceship, and make-believe-killed every one before they knew there was a Khasr around.

It was a charming new game, this pastime that Johnny was taught on what happened to be his fifth birthday. Before the double suns set that afternoon, Johnny had slaughtered imaginary thousands of those monsters, men. He went to bed in happy exhaustion, beaming at the universe.

This was within a week or so of the Khasr massacre on the Mithran Worlds. At that time human colonies were still not using detectors. The official opinion was that the vanishing of spaceships without trace was due to pirates, and the small human colonies occasionally found burned down to slag were the victims of pirates too. There was an intensive hunt on for the people who supplied those imaginary pirates.

But the Mithran Worlds killings shattered that illusion. There were fifty thousand people on the inmost planet, nearly that many on the second, and a quarter million on the third. When every human being on all three planets was murdered and incinerated with no clue to the murderers, the size of the atrocity proved it wasn't pirates. Human official minds change slowly but it had to be admitted that somewhere there must be a race something like the Khasr, and that they must be found and exterminated. When this decision was arrived at, Johnny was not yet six.

At ten, he was not quite as happy as when he was younger. He'd noticed that he wasn't exactly like his playmates. They were as large as he was, but they had more legs, with claws on them, and stiff, furry hairs growing out of their exoskeletal shells. Johnny's two arms and two legs were smooth and hairless. He asked questions. His Khasr tutors told him sympathetically that his parents were traveling in a spaceship on which the monstrous creatures men had played a strange weapon. Because of that weapon he was not physically like other Khasr. But he was of a race of heroes, and when he grew up he would kill men by thousands and avenge the injury to himself and the insult to his race.

Johnny still believed he was a Khasr. But he had the psychology of a human boy. At ten years, a boy needs desperately to be exactly like everybody else. Denied this, Johnny acquired a personal blazing hatred for the race of men who had mutilated him. Ironically, while he hated mankind, he spoke only human speech. His companions and tutors spoke human speech to him. He didn't know there were different languages. But he proved there were different sorts of minds.

Somewhere around his tenth birthday he invented a new way of playing at murder. Zestfully he showed his crawling, stinking companions a new trick to kill men. He pretended that a make-believe spaceship was crippled, and left for the Khasr who pretended to be men to find. The make-believe men clustered around the imaginary ship. And Johnny exploded an imaginary bomb to destroy them all. It was an entirely new device, because the Khasr tradition was not even to let an enemy know that they existed. To leave a decoy ship violated that tradition. But it was a splendid trick to kill men!

Johnny's tutors praised him extravagantly. But inside they must have winced, because men had just played that exact trick on the Khasr. Near Llandu IV, a decoy-ship had exploded in the very center of an investigating Khasr fleet. Humans had acquired fragments of six Khasr ships to study, so they could learn something about Khasr weapons. Humans thought like Johnny. They invented the same kind of devices, which Khasr could not imagine because of their traditions. The Khasr encouraged Johnny to think of more ways to kill humans. They had a better use for him later, but even now he could contrive ways to kill his fellows.

When he was thirteen, Johnny came up with a scheme for capturing a human ship intact. He'd never seen himself in a mirror—he didn't know mirrors existed—and he thought he was a Khasr, but he had the ingenuity of a human boy. Also he believed he had more reason to hate humans than anybody else. So he schemed a robot signaling device to be placed on some empty, useless world. It was harmless. But under the rocks, all about for miles, there would be placed radiation-bombs. A human ship would detect the signal and trace it. It would land to investigate the robot transmitter. And the radiation-bombs would go off. They would not shift rock or destroy anything. They would simply emit unthinkable quantities of lethal radiation—subatomic particles—which would kill any living thing nearby.

Again Johnny's tutors praised him. But inside, they must have hated him with a poisonous fury. Because humans had just played that trick, too! On the barren outermost world of Knuth, they'd set up just such a booby-trap. It had worked. Humans had wiped out the crews of two first-class space-battleships and had the ships, intact, with all the newest and most perfect weapons and instruments of the Khasr.

They raged. The Khasr loved glory—of their own particular variety—and to be out-murdered, out-sneaked, out-tricked by any other race was intolerable! The ultimate of humiliation was that non-Khasr creatures had looked upon Khasr—dead, but still Khasr—and lived to tell about it. The Khasr nation was filled with a sort of screaming fury of shame and frustration of men who had beaten them at their own game.

So matters progressed. Normally, Johnny was to have been used when he was a grown man. But he was almost fourteen, now, and the Khasr couldn't wait any longer. His tutors began to feed him carefully calculated bits of information. They delicately fanned his hatred of humankind to high pitch. And within a month of his fourteenth birthday Johnny thought he'd invented the idea for which he'd been captured in the first place, and for which he'd been nurtured and trained.

At that, he improved it considerably on the idea the Khasr had had in the first place.

When he outlined the scheme—he trembled with eagerness—the Khasr seemed to be astonished at its brilliance. But, they objected, he was the only Khasr who could carry it out. It would call for special study on his part. It would even require, they told him—and the Khasr seemed to shudder—plastic operations to make him resemble men physically. He would have to pass for a human being!

Of course, they added hastily, plastic surgery improved all the time. When his task was done they could restore him to his present appearance. In fact, though they hadn't told him before, they now told him they believed they could graft on his body the four extra legs he didn't have because of what men had done to him when he was young. Yes. If Johnny could carry out his stratagem, and destroy the very nucleus of the unspeakably revolting human race, he would be the greatest hero of the Khasr race!

And the Khasr were really pleased. Their original scheme had seemed plausible. Johnny's improvements seemed to doom the human race to extermination. With Earth wiped out, the scattered human colonies could be murdered one by one.

So during the next two or three months furry horrors of Khasr came and lectured to Johnny on the manners and customs of human beings, using human speech because Johnny didn't know there was any other. Other Khasr set up phoney surgical apparatus, and anesthetized Johnny, and later told him they had changed his appearance. Presently they showed him pictures of himself. He went sick. He looked human! When they thought he could stand the sight, they gave him a mirror looted from an Earth colony before its destruction, and set up vision-records so Johnny could see how humans walked and acted and their ways of using clothing, and how they used instruments to eat with. Johnny learned. He hated it. He was bitterly ashamed. He hated mankind the more because he had to learn to pass for human. One thing that was bitter humiliation was that he could no longer wear the plastic sheaths, suitably furry, which they had provided for him to hide his soft white skin and let him look as much like a normal Khasr as possible. When Khasr saw him at the task of trying to cease to imitate their stilt-legged gait, and wearing human garments, and acting like the humans in the vision-records, the feeling of degradation was intolerable. But he ground his teeth and went on. He would be the greatest hero in the Khasr race!

He was all burning impatience after the Battle of Andromeda Two. After that, no true Khasr would hesitate at anything!

The battle was the aftermath of the human capture of two Khasr battleships intact. The humans had studied them and refitted their fleets with instruments to detect the Khasr drive. They'd found out how to nullify the Khasr coagulator-field, and they'd adapted a few new devices to work efficiently upon the technical apparatus the Khasr used.

And ultimately human ships discovered a Khasr murder-fleet near Andromeda Two. What seemed a suicide-ship dived into it. The Khasr delayed to murder it. And that suicide-ship had a very nice blowout beam which burned out the Khasr interspace coils so they couldn't get away in faster-than-light escape. They had to stand and fight. And they didn't know how to fight, but only murder. Yet no Khasr could imagine surrender.

It wasn't really a battle but a very satisfying massacre, with the Khasr on the receiving end for a change. Not one ship, not one Khasr got away. Yet the Khasr did blow up most of their ships before the humans could board them.

WITHIN a month, Johnny took off from the Khasr planet. He carried with him the foaming hatred of the Khasr race. They didn't show that they hated Johnny too, of course. There was a field turned black—the normal vegetation was purple, but it was hidden by the monstrous shapes gathered there—with a crowd of furry monsters assembled to see him off. They had carefully been trained to make human-seeming noises, and they cheered Johnny. And he rose toward the yellow sky with an inspiring memory of their clawed legs waving in farewell.

He began what he believed would be the most splendid war-feat of the Khasr race.

He could have been right.

The interspace field folded about his spaceship in the peculiarly deliberate manner of interspace fields. The stars and the twin suns of the Khasr planet gave place to a view of mere gray chaos which is all the viewplates show when a ship is in faster-than-light drive. And Johnny was alone. It was his first trip in space, but the ship—a huge one—was very nearly automatic. He didn't need to worry about astronavigation. He had only to pass for a human being, and the ship would be landed on Earth as a trophy, and then Johnny would press one small button and that would be that. So he believed.

For the best part of a day he simply exulted in the splendid feat which he, a Khasr, would perform for the Khasr race. But then a very peculiar fact turned up. Not only was this his first trip in space. It was the first time he had ever been alone so long as he could remember. The Khasr had never left him in solitude. They were busy supervising his mind: conditioning him to remember that he was a Khasr and that he hated men.

But he suddenly discovered that he was lonely. He'd never known the sensation before.

Days passed. His ship went on and on through that nothingness in which speed beyond the speed of light is achieved. The ship's transmitter sent out a purposely crude imitation of a human recognition-signal as it went past the stars and planets of the void. The signal went back into normal space, of course, and was picked up. It was analyzed. Eyebrows raised at its characteristics. Humans have eyebrows. Khasr do not.

A message went on ahead of him, faster than light and even faster than _.Johnny's ship. The message said, "A human recognition-signal, unofficial, is heading for Earth from a Khasr ship. Get him!"

Action was taken upon that signal. In interspace a ship can gain speed or it can decelerate, but it must always be gaining kinetic energy or losing it. If it tries to achieve stasis it pops back into normal space again. It is not wholesome to pop back into normal space at several light-speeds. So nobody tried to intercept Johnny in interspace. Ships leaped to meet him where he would come out.

And Johnny grew lonely. He had never been alone for as much as five minutes. Now there was nobody to talk to and nothing to do for days. For weeks. For more weeks.

There was nothing to do. The ship was automatic. There were no vision-records, because it was a Khasr ship and human ones didn't belong in it, and Khasr ones would have had Khasr speech on them—which might have caused Johnny to think. There were no books. For the same reason. It was solitary confinement. It was worse. It was solitary confinement in a ship in that unreality which is not a cosmos, which is not actuality, which is not anything at all and which is called interspace. Technically, Johnny and his ship were unrealities. And Johnny was alone.

After the first week—his ears ringing, dizzy with the silence about him—he tapped the recognition-signal. Then he heard, over and over and over again, the message it broadcast.

"Human ship!" said the signal desperately. "Heading for Earth! Prisoner escaping from Khasr!

There was never any answer. Naturally! But Johnny listened to it while loneliness ate at his vitals. A Khasr doesn't get lonely. A human does. Johnny went through an agonizing human experience, wholly inconsistent with his conviction that he was a Khasr. He had solitary confinement without even the break of a daily visit by a jailer. A week would rack the nerves of an adult human. A month would drive him mad. Fortunately, Johnny was fourteen years old and tougher than a human adult in such matters. But he had two months and a week and two days of it.... He was not a normal Khasr when the ship began to decelerate. He wasn't even an artificial one.

WHEN the warning-drum boomed for pop-out—the Khasr didn't like the sound of bells—Johnny was hanging on to sanity by the knowledge that presently he would have to talk to men and persuade them that he also was human. He would talk to someone—something—that was alive. He would have the company of the monstrosities he had come to destroy. And he craved company so desperately that he actually wanted even human company.

Which the Khasr, of course, had been completely unable to anticipate.

With a leisurely unfolding of the interspace field, the Khasr ship popped back into normal space. There was a pale-yellow sun not far away—bright enough almost to have a disc. There was all the magnificence of the galaxy for Johnny to stare at, after chaos. There were the thousands of millions of stars of every imaginable color against a background of velvety black.

Johnny stared, trembling. And then his communicator growled, while his recognition-signal still babbled its message.

"You on the Khasr ship," said a sardonic voice. "Any last words, or do we blast you now?"

Johnny gasped. Then he saw the sleek Earthship, swimming grimly toward him through emptiness. He stabbed the communicator-button and moved in range. "I—escaped from the Khasr," he gasped. "I—I—Please keep on talking!"

If the Khasr had heard him, they would have been wonderfully pleased. It was the one truly convincing thing he could have said. He heard a reflective whistle, and then a voice speaking aside from the microphone in the Earthship. . .

"Look at this! How good are those Khasr at making robots? Or is it really human?"

Johnny sweated. Robots do not sweat. Nor Khasr. He gulped:

"I've been—alone since I left. S—somebody please come on board!"

That was part of the original scheme. The Khasr had hoped originally only for a suicidal dash of their ship into collision with Earth, with Johnny using his human form and voice to delude those who would have intercepted him. And he wouldn't know it was suicide. But this was better. Johnny had planned it. But he meant it differently now!

He trembled when the space-lock opened. He almost broke down when a human figure came out into the Khasr ship, blaster ready, and looked at him with suspicious eyes. He was gladder to see this human being than he'd ever been to see a Khasr. But he'd never been alone before. The Khasr couldn't imagine what loneliness would do to Johnny.

They had not imagined how Johnny, being just fourteen years old, would affect the humans who found him, either.

They took him off the Khasr ship—but he remembered enough to make them promise to let him come back to it—and a human crew moved it toward Earth. And Johnny was among mankind. He told them the story that had been planned, of course. He'd been captured as a baby, he said, and raised by the Khasr for study. He didn't know how true that was. And he said that three human prisoners had been brought in to the Khasr planet, and he talked to them, and the four of them made plans to steal a Khasr ship and get away. But when the three prisoners made their break they were killed, so he had to make the break alone. He had three authentic names to give, as those of the prisoners. His whole story was a masterpiece of synthesis by the Khasr psychologists.

The only trouble was that it fell to pieces instantly it was checked—though Johnny didn't know it. Space messages went among the stars, and men who knew the three supposed prisoners were found. Johnny couldn't describe them. He didn't know the nicknames they called each other. His story was plainly a lie from beginning to end.

Also, a normal examination of the Khasr ship revealed that its whole substance was a highly unstable allotrope, which, however, was not radioactive. Yet when triggered it would explode in total annihilation of its own substance—not in fission explosion nor in fusion, but in annihilation—and they found the trigger. It would have set off the three-thousand-ton ship-bomb when it touched Earth, whether Johnny did anything or not. In fact, it was known from almost the first instant that Johnny was on a mission to destroy humankind, and that he was lying and still trying to carry it out.

The trouble was, of course, that he still believed himself a Khasr. The battleship was an alien environment to him. When they put him in a cabin by himself, it had four walls instead of eight. The bunk was on a shelf, not a soft cushion on the floor, and there was no sleeping-frame from which Khasr could have dangled in slumber by the hooks on their legs. Johnny didn't know that the cabin was a place to sleep in. He stayed in it because he was put there—the Khasr had not trained him to do anything but what he was told—and when someone came for him many hours later, he was shaking and panicky because of the strangeness. He was anguished when left alone.

They assigned a midshipman to introduce him to human ways. The midshipman's name was Mike, and he was red-haired and freckled, and had apparently been assigned to the battleship to get in the way of other people. He was not much older than Johnny, and he had no purpose in life except the blithe enjoyment of each moment as it came. He was very good for Johnny.

Tolerantly, he instructed Johnny in the eating end sleeping manners and customs of human beings. It was difficult for him to imagine anybody knowing more than he did, about anything, but he did ask some questions about the Khasr. However, he grew bored when Johnny essayed to answer him. He dismissed the Khasr as "spiders"—a new word to Johnny —and reverted to his normal preoccupations. They led to trouble. Specifically, there was a purloining of ship's edible stores, and Johnny was in the trouble with him. But Johnny blindly told the truth when questioned, because the Khasr had no prejudice against tattletales. Mike did, though. Scornfully, he let Johnny know. Johnny_„had been surrounded by contempt and hatred all his life, but it had been hidden from him. Now, when Mike despised him, Johnny's loneliness was almost hysterical. When Mike angrily pushed him away, Johnny wildly and unskillfully hit back.

A fight began, but Johnny did not know how to fight, and Mike regarded him in open-mouthed amazement. Then he began to grasp the degree of Johnny's abysmal ignorance. In sudden large tolerance he instructed Johnny in the fine art of fist-fighting. Johnny acquired black eyes but he had Mike's tentative respect because he kept at the job of learning. One day out from Earth, he gave Mike a black eye. Then his throat went dry in apprehension.

"That's the way to do it!" said Mike warmly. "You're doing good!" Then he went to wheedle a poultice from the ship's cook.

WHEN the vast bulk of Earth loomed out the ship's ports, Johnny shivered. Soon, he believed, he would be let back into the ship he'd brought, and he would press a certain stud, and all this ghastly race of human beings would be destroyed without anybody having felt an instant's uneasiness. Then he would go back to his fellow-Khasr.

But he shivered at the prospect. He had been two months and a week and two days absolutely alone in the Khasr ship. At fourteen years old, a human doesn't like to be alone. He had companionship among humans. Mike was his friend. He was older and felt much wiser and he treated Johnny with the consciously superior tolerance of an older brother. But he was a friend, and Johnny had never had a friend before. He'd had only officially appointed playmates and tutors. He yearned over Mike.

When the ground swelled up toward the ship he was tense and his throat ached. He saw the sky change to a lucent blue. He saw the mottled Earth below him take on tints which were not the colors of the vegetation to which he was accustomed. He saw clouds. . . .

He was deathly pale when he walked out of the battleship. He moved rather like a sleepwalker. He saw a blue sky instead of a yellow one, and the grass was green instead of purplish. And it looked right! He'd never dreamed of a world like this. He'd never imagined the smells that greeted his nostrils. He was shaken; he was stunned—and he felt an enormous welcoming in every molecule of the ground beneath him and every touch of air against his cheek. When he heard bird-songs, his throat swelled as if it would lock tight and strangle him. And he hadn't the least idea why. When he tried to ask Mike, humbly, his lips trembled and he couldn't form the words. There were even tears in his eyes and he was bitterly ashamed.

But Mike knew what was the matter. After all, Earth has been the home of human beings for hundreds of thousands of years. Every look and sound and smell of Earth has been part of the human heritage for thousands of generations. The feel of Earth is in the very germ-plasm of humanity. No other place, anywhere, can ever look wholly right to human eyes. So Johnny wasn't the first human being to see Earth for the first time and feel that desperate, overwhelming sensation of belonging which tells interstellar travelers that they have come home.

Mike put his arm gruffly about Johnny's shoulders.

"Everybody feels funny at first," he said curtly. "Hold everything. I've got to leave. You're coming along with me."

He said it casually, but it was a decision of a very high authority indeed, one who'd read all the reports on Johnny and his intended treason, and said, "Poor devil! We've got to do something for him!" So Mike had shore-leave and his family had uneasily agreed to take over Johnny until it was decided what could be done with him.

He didn't think much on the ride to Mike's home. He was dazed. He had trouble breathing. He saw trees. He saw grass. He saw birds flying. He heard the senseless, ineffably sweet sound of whirring insects in a field in sunshine.

When the ground-car stopped, Johnny was an explosive bundle of nerves. The car stopped at a house. It was utterly unlike an eight-sided tower under a yellow sky. It glowed warmly in the sunshine. Mike whooped and jumped out. A big brown animal with shaggy fur and only four legs came bounding frantically to meet him. The animal had a tail which wagged frantically, and he uttered yelps of joy. He and Mike rolled on the ground in a panting, squirming heap because they were glad to be together again. Then the door of the house opened and a woman and a girl came out. Johnny had never seen a woman before. Or a girl.

The girl's hair was red, like Mike's, and her eyes were intensely, tremendously blue. Mike gasped from the ground where he tumbled with the dog:

"That's my sister Pat, and that's my mother, Johnny."

The girl Pat was younger than Mike. Younger than Johnny. But she put out her hand and—he'd been instructed—Johnny accepted it. He was trembling. Like the dog which was glad to see Mike. This girl who smiled at him. . . . Mike's mother smiling at him too . . .

When Mike's mother put her arms around him, Johnny went all to pieces. But people who have been born on other planets often go all to pieces when they first set foot on Earth.

A CERTAIN uneasiness was felt about Johnny, of course. He'd been raised to believe he was a Khasr, and he'd come to Earth to destroy the human race on their behalf. But at Mike's home he was with Mike, who was his friend. And there was Pat, whom Johnny tried to learn to treat with the grandly superior yet kindly manner of Mike himself. But it was not always easy to play a part, however passionately Johnny might want to. He saw the sun set for the first time. He saw sunrise. He saw the stars from Earth's surface, and the full moon floating in the sky. Mike's dog made friends with him—and to someone who'd been raised to think himself a Khasr, that was an overwhelming experience. Johnny couldn't pretend about that. He saw the sea, and flowers blooming. He tried to conceal the effect of all these things upon him. He tried to mimic Mike's blithe irresponsibility. But Mike's sister Pat grinned wickedly at him when he tried to use Mike's own very manner. She seemed to realize that Johnny was having, at fourteen—two years older than herself —all the experiences most people have as babies, when they're practically wasted. She bossed him a little, and he tried to patronize her.

Johnny was very happy, in Mike's house and treated as if he were Mike's brother, even by Mike's sister and his dog.

But there were moments when the unobtrusively watching adults had their doubts. There was the night when Pat came in the room where Johnny sweated to learn a game—and carefully think in terms of fair-play as humans thought of it and not as Khasr grandeur. Pat had a natural-history book in her hand.

"Johnny!" she said firmly, "I just thought! You've never seen spiders. Have you? Like this?"

Johnny looked at the page. There was a picture. Mike's mother glanced casually to see. She tensed a little. The picture was of a Mygale Hentzii—the American tarantula. It was a good-sized picture, magnified. The creature was eight-legged, with furry armor over its limbs. Its expression of implacable ferocity was shudder-inspiring. Johnny looked carefully.

"That looks like Tork," he said steadily. After a moment he added, "He raised me. He was my nurse ... my teacher."

Pat looked blankly. Mike scowled at her. She looked apprehensively at her mother. Johnny noticed. He swung about and looked up.

"I've never been allowed to go back to the ship I came on," he said quietly. "And nobody says anything about the Khasr to me. People have found out what the purpose of my voyage to Earth was and what that ship was supposed to do, haven't they?

Mike's mother drew her breath in sharply. She'd been advised to do what Johnny asked. She said matter-of-factly:

"Yes. They found out."

Johnny said thoughtfully:

"It would have killed everything. Animals. Birds. Dogs. Everything. You and Pat, too. And Mike." Mike's mother nodded.

"I know." She repeated. "They found out."

Johnny turned back to his game. Then he glanced again at the page of the natural-history book—at the tarantula.

"That does look a lot like Tork," he observed. "My move?"

So there was something less than complete satisfaction about Johnny's future as a human being. There was unease.

NEXT day Pat showed Johnny some spiders. Mike went looking for a web of one of the big yellow-banded garden ones, which weave bands of silk in the centers of their snares. But Pat led the way competently to the back of the ground-car shed. She expertly turned over stones and stirred up dried leaves. Then she said:

"There, Johnny! There's a spider!"

Mike's mother was listening. Nobody knew exactly what was going on in Johnny's head, and it might be deplorable. He'd been raised to think he was a Khasr, and while he acted normally, now ...

"That's like the picture," she heard Johnny say. "Sure! He doesn't look like Tork, though. He looks like the lecturer who came to teach me how to act when I pretended to be human."

There was a sudden movement. Mike's mother heard Pat say:

"What'd you do that for? People say if you kill a spider it'll make it rain!"

Johnny said with satisfaction:

"I like when it rains. I like everything good on Earth." Then he said with a certain calm, masculine, brotherly generosity, "I can even stand you, Pat. You're a lot like Mike."

WITHIN minutes of that moment a spaceship popped out of overdrive a very long distance away. It was, as it happened, the very same spaceship in which Johnny had spent two months, a week, and two days, on his journey to destroy the human race while he believed he was a Khasr. Humans had examined the ship and had taken samples of its material—which if properly triggered would detonate, not in atomic fission and not in atomic fusion, but in atomic annihilation—and they had put some extra equipment in it. They'd located the position of the Khasr planet by examining the automatic-control system that had guided the ship to Earth. But they'd put a robot pilot on board, to take over when this ship came back to normal space.

It popped-out in the Khasr solar system, traveling forty thousand miles a second. Its robot pilot made what turned out to be a very minor correction in its course. It sped for the Khasr home planet. At forty thousand miles a second, detectors are not much use. When a ship has to travel less than three seconds from pop-out to landing, they aren't any use at all.

They weren't, in this case. As a matter of fact, their attempt to report hadn't even been noticed when the ship from Earth touched the atmosphere of the Khasr planet.

So not a single one of the Khasr had even an instant's uneasiness before they all were dead.