pretty soon. He was working on a report, but I knew pretty soon he'd make his routine inspection trip through the storerooms before turning in, and I'd corner him then.

"Meanwhile, I watched the other four and I got surer and surer. And more and more scared. They were trying their darndest to act natural, but once in a while one of them would slip. For one thing, they'd forget to talk. I mean, one of them would turn to another as though he was saying something, but he wouldn't. And then, as though remembering, he'd start in the middle of it—like he'd been talking without words before, telepathically.

"And pretty soon Dick gets up and goes out, and I followed him. We got to one of the side storerooms and I closed the door. 'Dick,' I asked, 'have you noticed it?' And he wanted to know what I was talking about.

"So I told him. I said, 'Those four people out there—they aren't the ones we started with. What happened to Art and Hilda and Lecky and Haynes? What the hell goes on here? Haven't you noticed anything out of the ordinary?'

"And Dick sighed, kind of, and said, 'Well, it didn't work. We need more practice, then. Come on and we'll tell you all about it.' And he opened the door and held out his hand to me—and the sleeve of his shirt pulled back a little from the wrist and he was wearing one of those gold things, like the others, only he was wearing it as a bracelet instead of an earring.

"I—well, I was too dumbfounded to say anything. I didn't take the hand he held out, but I followed him back into the main room. And then—while Lecky, who seemed to be the leader, I think—held a gun on me, they told me about it.

"And it was even screwier, and worse, than I'd dare guess.

"They didn't have any name for themselves, because they had no language—what you'd really call a spoken or written language—of their own. You see, they were telepathic, and you don't need a language for that. If you tried to translate their thought for themselves, the nearest word you could find for it would be "we"—the first person plural pronoun. Individually, they identified themselves to one another by numbers rather than names.

"And just as they had no language of their own, they had no real bodies of their own, nor active minds of their own. They were parasitic in a sense that earthmen can't conceive. They were entities, apart from—Well, it's difficult to explain, but in a way they had no real 

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