Repeated efforts on his part to withdraw it back within his jaws met with failure. Again he tried looking through its eyes, and found his tongue-vision even dimmer. Then with a tremor of shock, he realized that his own vision was dimmer, too.

His host was dying. It was no longer needed to house the tongue.

Up ahead of him, the tongue-part was digging busily with those pincers, erecting for itself an extension of the burrow. Like a mole in reverse, it did not make a mound by tunneling through the soil, but by lying atop the soil and erecting itself a circular tunnel in which to await victims.

Jerry's mind brought to him a vision of what this section of this unknown morass must look like, with miles and miles of curving tunnels, each housing a hideous worm-creature, of whom all segments were dead except the front one, which would in turn be dead as soon as its tongue had fed a bit and grown to mature size.

Shivering within his mind, Jerry wondered how much of the forty-minute period had gone by.

He had no way of estimating. His personal time-sense was overpowered by that of his host. A man within a gnat, with the lifespan of a day, would feel subjectively that he had lived a lifetime within it, although only those same forty minutes would pass by until his return to his own body, helmeted upon the couch.

Each new segment might take a day to grow, or it might take a few minutes. Jerry could not tell. He could only wait until he was sent to his next Contact. There was no method of self-release from Contact. That was why survival was imperative.

A flicker of movement caught his dimming vision, and he realized that his tongue had snared yet another of the jellyfish-things. The second lump was quickly absorbed as he watched, and he found he could no longer make contact at all with the six eyes of the tongue-tip. His own six were blurring, with a rapidity he was able to observe, and he knew that the life of the host could not last very long.

Vaguely, he was aware that the stubby growths of his tongue had now sprouted into appendages such as his own. The tongue could no longer be called that, because it was nearly a full-grown segment. Within it, he imagined, it was growing a new tongue of its own, the faster to hasten its own eventual demise.

"I've got to stop it," he thought. "But how can I? It won't withdraw, no matter how hard I try. And if it would, it's grown too large 

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