On the radar screen, they saw a blob
pursuing a dot. It had turned.

Relief washed over them. It had been close!

"In what portion of the sky would the leech be?" O'Donnell asked, his
face expressionless.

"Come outside; I believe I can show you," an astronomer said. They
walked to the door. "Somewhere in that section," the astronomer said,
pointing.

"Fine. All right, Soldier," O'Donnell told the operator. "Carry out your
orders."

The scientists gasped in unison. The operator manipulated the controls
and the blob began to overtake the dot. Micheals started across the
room.

"Stop," the general said, and his strong, commanding voice stopped
Micheals. "I know what I'm doing. I had that ship especially built."

The blob overtook the dot on the radar screen.

"I told you this was a personal matter," O'Donnell said. "I swore to
destroy that leech. We can never have any security while it lives." He
smiled. "Shall we look at the sky?"

The general strolled to the door, followed by the scientists.

"Push the button, Soldier!"

The operator did. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the sky lit up!

A bright star hung in space. Its brilliance filled the night, grew, and
started to fade.

"What did you do?" Micheals gasped.

"That rocket was built around a hydrogen bomb," O'Donnell said, his
strong face triumphant. "I set it off at the contact moment." He called
to the operator again. "Is there anything showing on the radar?"

"Not a speck, sir."

"Men," the general said, "I have met the enemy and he is mine. Let's
have some more champagne."

But Micheals found that he was suddenly ill.

* * * * *

It had been shrinking from the expenditure of energy, when the great
explosion came. No thought of containing it. The leech's cells held for
the barest fraction of a second, and then spontaneously overloaded.

The leech was smashed, broken up, destroyed. It was split into a
thousand particles, and the particles were split a million times more.

The particles were thrown out on the wave front of the explosion, and
they split further, spontaneously.

Into spores.

The spores closed into dry, hard, seemingly lifeless specks of dust,
billions of them, scattered, drifting. Unconscious, they floated in the
emptiness of space.

Billions of them, waiting to be fed.

--PHILLIPS BARBEE

Transcriber's Note:

This et