Pushover Planet

The fleet came in fast -- from the direction of the Crab Nebula -- and decelerating at a rate which made it fearfully evident that the ships contained nothing resembling Human life.
"The remorseless aggressors had everything in the galaxy on their side -- except the little idiosyncrasies of the human mind!"  That Jingoistic blurb has been lifted from Murray Leinster's novel Talents, Incorporated (Avon, 1962), but it also fits 'Pushover Planet' to a tall T.  Crellegnan dur Shan, Fleet Commander of the thirty-ninth Planter Expedition (etc., etc., ad nauseam), pits his wits against a captured Human male called Murchison.  And, of course, he fails miserably.  Murchison might well be ancestrally related to the pneumatic pathologist of Sector General fame.

Synopsis by Graham Andrews

• NEBULA SCIENCE FICTION No 14, November 1955