The Trans-Human

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.