rt. The
female had suffered repeated convulsions that affected the formation of
the embryos and we were an ugly litter of little mongrels, doomed by our
physical imperfections to a shorter-than-normal life if we were allowed
to live and exposed to early drowning if we could not quickly charm
ourselves into a home.

"The remainder of the litter--my brothers and sisters, if I could think
of them as such--were callously placed in a weighted sack and tossed
in the swamp, but by that time I had found a home. The Douglas home.
Their child, Timmy, was an imbecile whose short-circuited mind lay
open to me. I found by hasty experiments that Homer's mind was capable
of controlling and manipulating the imbecile, like a puppeteer. The
difficulties of controlling two bodies at once are tremendous, which is
why Homer always struck you as clumsy and almost half-witted--he had to
receive the absolute minimum of concentration so that his exhaustion at
climbing the bluff this afternoon, for example, was not recognized in
time. Well, there it is. I took over Timmy's helpless body eight years
ago--too abruptly and with many errors--but it insured my survival for
a short time at least. Now that time is at an end and the greater part
of what I must do is still to be done--"

* * * * *

Phil sat with his face averted, his hands clenched between his knees.
"The instinct to survive," he said in a muffled voice. "I can't blame
you for what you did, but it was cruel! What a damnable trick to play
on the parents!"

"Believe me, I know what you feel but there was no other way."

"No other!" He swung around, his face mottled and his breathing heavy.
"Whatever you are, you made a Machiavellian puppet-master out of a
lousy, flea-bitten mongrel! Was it beyond _those_ powers to heal Timmy's
mind?"

"I am not a psychopathic criminal."

"Do you imply that healing Timmy would involve repeating the swindle you
worked on Homer?"

"No. I could have by-passed the simple neural block that was leaving
Timmy helpless, and so have given him what to you would have seemed his
normal intelligence. In addition, I could have completed the work that
nature left incomplete in all of you, and so have released his full,
enormous capabilities. I could have done all this--can still do it--and
still leave Timmy's ego untouched, to develop in its own way, among its
own kind, knowing nothing of me for what I am."

"But you haven't done