I hunched down on the floor. I watched Krak's viewer with horrible fascination as she rode the subway to her appointment with doom. Hers.

There was every chance that I would soon be rid of thai vicious female, the murderous Countess Krak.

The neighborhood in Morningside Heights was not too bad. It was full of winter-dead trees and peopled with rather well-dressed but sullen kids, who watched the Countess Krak go by in total conviction that she was a truant officer in disguise and was about to blow the whistle on them all. And Krak's purposeful progress could not have done otherwise than give that impression. Gods, I thought, how they would have screamed and run had they known they watched a murderer on the brink of bloody slaughter. Even the streetwise kids of north Manhattan would not have been able to stomach what I was sure was about to occur.

The grim pound of her boots halted before an apart­ment house that bore the number 352. It was not a shabby apartment house: Miss Simmons must have some income of her own. There was no doorman, but the brass mailboxes shone. And there it was, right there on number 21, the nameplate:

Miss Jane Simmons

It meant she lived alone! Gods, wasn't anything going to stand between the Countess Krak and this awful crime? Ah, yes, there was. Police Inspector Grafferty would soon be on his way.

Unsuspecting of the trap I had set for her, the Countess Krak pushed the buzzer. I was torn between hoping

Miss Simmons, who must have been at the UN, had not yet returned home and savagely hoping that she was, so Grafferty could catch this Manco Devil in the very act of mangling.

The brass grate spoke up. "Yes?"

The Countess Krak said, "I am a fellow teacher, from Atalanta University, Manco, and I want to talk to you about a student of yours."

The voice came back, "It's about time somebody listened to me! Come right up!"

Oh, blind, blind Simmons! You just invited yourself to murder!

I punched the radio button.

"Go ahead," said Raht.

"Have you done your duty?" I said.

"Police Inspector Grafferty was quivering like a bloodhound. I talked it up as a private inside tip. He said he could smell the headlines already. Eager. I caught him at the Civic Center and he's just now locating squad cars. He won't fail you."

"Good," I said and clicked off. Oh, Countess Krak, you've been outsmarted for once and you won't even be able to trace it to me! Grafferty the glory hound was going to do this one himself! It's a long ways from the Civic Center to Morningside Heights, but the police drive over everybody.

The Countess Krak regarded the foyer door. It kept clicking and she didn't know you were supposed to push it when it clicked. It stopped clicking. She gave it a shove, a very impatient gesture. The lock was faulty. It swung right open.

She strode past a fountain and between two statues. She saw the elevator was in use and went up the stairs.

She turned down a carpeted hall and stopped before Apartment 21.

The door opened without her even knocking. Never was a woman so anxious to be done in. Simmons was already talking. No hello or who are you. She looked dishevelled and very wild of eye. She said, "You know what he did today? He sabotaged the UN bill! He's got to blow everything up, even women's rights! He's a frothing fiend! We teachers must gang together in a solid phalanx of fury and stop him, even before we blow up the UN! Nobody is safe with him on the loose. And the college thinks that just because I was in a psychiatric ward, they don't have to listen to me. They think I'm paranoid about him. And just to make matters worse, the New York Tactical Police Force is after me again."

Miss Simmons was having trouble locating the Countess to talk to her. The Countess must have seen that she was speaking to someone who was as blind as a bat.

"The police!" said the Countess. "Then you need head protection." She kicked the door shut behind her and right in front of Simmons took the hypnohelmet out of the square shopping bag.

I suddenly realized that I still had Simmons' glasses in my pocket. Unwittingly, I had made it very easy for Krak.

The Countess simply turned the helmet on and dropped it over Simmons' head! Just like that!

Krak looked around the rather large and well-furnished living room. Looking for a place to stamp, I thought. A radio seemed to be playing in the next apart­ment. The Countess Krak saw that a corridor led to a bedroom. She pushed Simmons toward it.

Like a sleepwalker, my favorite ally went down the hall toward her doom.

There was a wide bed, a boudoir table and an easy chair, all decorated in frilly white organdy. The Countess Krak closed the bedroom door. She lowered Simmons onto the bed. She arranged the pillow so it would support the helmet properly. She plugged in her microphone and then sat down in the easy chair.

Simmons had evidently been changing out of her street clothes when the door buzzer went, for they were lying on the floor. She had tossed on a dressing gown. It had opened now as she sprawled there. Not a bad-looking body.

Krak apparently didn't care for that. She moved out of the chair again and pulled the dressing gown together to make Simmons decent. Then she laid her sable cape aside and took off her own jacket, the equivalent of rolling up her sleeves to get to work.

The Countess spoke into her microphone. "Be calm, relax. You are quite safe." Oh, what a liar, I thought. "Sleep, sleep, pretty sleep. Can you hear me?"

Muffled, "Yes."

"What were those eight men going to do to you in Van Cortlandt Park?" said the Countess, leaning back in her chair.

Muffled, "Rape me. All eight of them. They were going to rape me hour after hour."

The Countess lowered her mike and pushed it into her shoulder. "I thought so," she muttered in Voltarian. "A real rape-crazy slut. The whole thing has been just a pose to steal Jettero!" She raised the mike and reverted to English. "When was the first time you saw Wister?"

Miss Simmons flung out her arms, throwing the robe wide open. Her hands extended down, straight out, so rigid they were quivering. Her feet jerked down. She looked like she'd been put on an electric rack. A faint scream came, muffled, from under the helmet.

"Answer me!" snapped the Countess Krak.

Simmons said, "Registration Hall last September." The quivers increased.

Krak said, "You are there at that moment. You see Wister. What do you really think?"

Simmons let out a faint scream. The vibrations of her body increased as the rigidity grew.

"Answer me!"

Simmons said, "He is too good-looking."

The Countess lowered the mike into her shoulder and muttered in Voltarian, "Just as I thought. Love at first sight." In English she said into the mike, "Anything else?"

The answer was a muffled scream, "That it was awful that he was a nuclear physicist major and had to be stopped."

"Why?" said the Countess.

Miss Simmons looked to be in torment. She shouted, "THERE MUST BE NO EXPLOSIONS!" Then in lower volume, muffled by the helmet, "My father held the chair of psychology at Brooklyn University. He said explosions were substitutions for sexual (bleepulations) and a girl must be frigid, frigid, frigid to protect her­self." She was stiff, stretched out now like hard marble, totally rigid.

Krak spoke into the mike, "When did he say that?"

"When he caught me putting firecrackers in the dog's (bleep)."

The Countess dropped the mike. In Voltarian she muttered, "What a weird planet!" She sat there a bit and then picked it up and said in English, "The real incident was different. Your father made a mistake. You get NO pleasure out of hurting animals. You were feeding the dog milk and petting it. That is really what you were doing and what really happened. Your father was totally wrong. Accept it."