Killdozer! by Theodore Sturgeon

of falling water. Some of them were weeks apart, some seconds. Sometimes I was conscious and could see people tiptoeing about. Once I thought I heard music.
    But at last I awoke quietly, very weak, to a hand on my shoulder. I looked up. It was Dr. Renn. He looked older.
    “How do you feel, Rip?”
    “Hungry.”
    He laughed. “That’s splendid. Know where you are?”
    I shook my head, marveling that it didn’t hurt me.
    “Earth,” he said. “Psy hospital. You’ve been through the mill, son.”
    “What happened?”
    “Plenty. We got the whole story from the picrecording tapes inside and outside of your ship. You cut Xantippe all to pieces. You incidentally got Bort Brecht started on the Hartley family, which later literally cut
him
to pieces. It cost three lives, but Xantippe is through.”
    “Then—I destroyed the projector, or whatever it was—”
    “You destroyed Xantippe. You—killed Xantippe. The planet was a … a thing that I hardly dare think about. You ever see a hydro-medusa here on Earth?”
    “You mean one of those jellyfish that floats on the surface of the sea and dangles paralyzing tentacles down to catch fish?”
    “That’s it. Like a Portuguese man-of-war. Well, that was Xantippe, with that strange mind field about her for her tentacles. A space dweller; she swept up anything that came her way, killed what was killable, digested what was digestible to her. Examination of the pictures, incidentally, shows that she was all set to hurl out a great cloud of spores. One more revolution about Betelgeuse and she’d have done it.”
    “How come I went under like that?” I was beginning to remember.
    “You weren’t as well protected as the others. You see, when we trained that crew we carefully split the personalities; paranoiac hatred enough to carry them through the field and an instant reversion to manic depressive under the influence of the field. So you were the leader—you were delegated to do the job. All we could do to you was implant a desire to destroy Xantippe. You did the rest. But when the psychic weight of the field was lifted from you, your mind collapsed. We had a sweet job rebuilding it, too, let me tell you!”
    “Why all that business about ‘one sane man’?”
    Renn grinned. “That was to keep the rest of the crew fairly sure of themselves, and to keep you from the temptation of taking over before you reached the field, knowing that the rest, including the captain, were not responsible for their actions.”
    “What about the others, after the field disappeared?”
    “They reverted to something like normal. Not quite, though. The quartermaster tied up the rest of the crew just before they reached Earth and handed them over to us as Insurrectionist spies!
    “But as for you, there’s a command waiting for you if you want it.”
    “I want it,” I said. He clapped me on the shoulder and left. Then they brought me a man-sized dinner.

Ghost of a Chance
    S HE SAID , “There’s something following me!” in a throttled voice, and started to run.
    It sort of got me. Maybe because she was so tiny and her hair was so white. Maybe because, white hair and all, she looked so young and helpless. But mostly, I think, because of what she said. “There’s something following me.” Not “someone.” “Something.” So I just naturally hauled out after her.
    I caught her at the corner, put my hand on her shoulder. She gasped, and shot away from me. “Take it easy, lady,” I panted. “I won’t let it get you.”
    She stopped so suddenly that I almost ran her down. We stood looking at each other. She had great big dark eyes that didn’t go with her hair at all. I said, “What makes you go dashing around at three o’clock in the morning?”
    “What makes you ask?” Her voice was smooth, musical.
    “Now, look—you started this conversation.”
    She started to speak, and then something over my shoulder caught her eye. She froze for a second; and I was so fascinated by the