they finally found and entered the little cave near the ship that Ptarra had chosen for them long before.

Night had fallen before Ptarra was satisfied. The two silths moved forward as softly as they could, but the loud breathing noises went on, and there was no stir of alarm anywhere on the mental band.

"Do you remember everything?" Ptarra asked. "You've got to regain consciousness after the first stage. You can do that, if you set your mind to it."

"I remember," Arnek agreed wearily. He'd had the whole routine drilled into him repeatedly until he was sick of it. It was like the horror of having her force him to adapt to this present silth. While he had been ready to accept assimilation, she had fought with him and with her own transformation, refusing to admit even his intuition that their race was ended. Only her cold logic had saved them. He could not deny it now.

"Be sure you take the smaller male body," she warned again.

"Unless that's the female. You found evolution different in these creatures once," he reminded her.

For a moment, she was silent. Then there was a mental shrug, and almost amusement as she answered. "Matching sex isn't logically necessary. It might even be an interesting amusement. But I must have the larger body."

She began shifting at once. The silth gasped and tried to thresh about in death as Ptarra released control. Arnek sighed to himself and began to follow.

It was worse than he remembered. After the centuries, the cells hated to give up their fixed form. The agony of the silth fed back to him, until his withdrawal stopped its heart. But slowly the nuclear matter flowed from the cells and up the pathways to their egress, taking the minimum of nutrient fluid with them.

It took nearly an hour, and he could see the thin film of Ptarra already lying over the sleeping human.

He began hurrying now, remembering her warning that the humans would not stay here once they wakened to find the two abandoned silths dead. He forced himself over the hateful dryness of the floor, up to the open mouth. Beyond lay the lungs, the circulatory system, and then the strange nerve bundle in the skull.

Some of it was ugly, and some was hard. But the last stage was almost pleasant. He had forgotten how unsatisfactory the nerves of 

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