“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 existence when not attached to a body they could animate and think with. The easiest way to put it is that a detached—uh—earring god, which is what the Ganymedean natives called them—was asleep, dormant, ineffective. Had no power of thought or motion in itself.” Charlie and Blake were looking bewildered. Charlie said, “You’re trying to say, Hank, that when one of them came in contact with a person, they took over that person and ran him and thought with his mind but—uh—kept their own identity? And what happened to the person they took over?”
I said, “As near as I could make out, he stayed there, too, as it were, but was dominated by the entity. I mean, there remained all his memories, and his individuality, but something else was in the driver’s seat. Running him. Didn’t matter whether he was alive or dead, either, as long as his body wasn’t in too had shape. Like Haynes—they’d had to kill him to put an earring on him. He was dead, in that if that ring was removed, he’d have fallen flat and never got up again, unless it was put back.”
“Like the native whose legs had been cut off. The entity running him had decided the body was no longer practicable for use, so he handed himself back to the other native, see? And they’d find another body in better shape for him to use.”
“They didn’t tell me where they came from, except that it was outside the solar system, nor just how they got to Ganymede. Not by themselves, though, because they couldn’t even exist by themselves. They must have got as far as Ganymede as parasites of visitors that had landed there at some time or other. Maybe millions of years ago. And they couldn’t get off Ganymede, of course, till we landed there. Space travel hadn’t developed on Ganymede—” Charlie interrupted me again, “But if they were so smart, why didn’t they develop it themselves?”
“They couldn’t,” I told him. “They weren’t any smarter than the minds they occupied. Well, a little smarter, in a way, because they could use those minds to their full capacity and people—Terrestrial or Ganymedean—don’t do that. But even the full capacity of the mind of a Ganymedean savage wasn’t sufficient to develop a space-ship.”
“But now they had us—I mean, they had Lecky and Haynes and Hilda and Art and Dick—and they had our space-ship, and they were going to Earth, because they knew all about it and about conditions there from our minds. They planned, simply, to take over Earth and—uh—run it. They didn’t explain the details of how they propagate, but I gathered that there wouldn’t be any shortage of earrings to go around, on Earth. Earrings or bracelets or, however they’d attach themselves.”
“Bracelets, probably, or arm or leg bands, because wearing earrings like that would be too conspicuous on Earth, and they’d have to work in secret for a while. Take over a few people at a time, without letting the others know what was going on.”
“And Lecky—or the thing that was running Lecky—told me they’d been using me as a guinea pig, that they could have put a ring on me, taken me over, at any time. But they wanted a check on how they were doing at imitating normal people. They wanted to know whether or not I got suspicious and guessed the truth.”
“So Dick—or the thing that was running him—had kept himself out of sight under Dick’s sleeve, so if I got suspicious of the others, I’d talk it over with Dick—just as I really did do. And that let them know they needed a lot more practice animating those bodies before they took the ship back to Earth to start their campaign there.”
“And, well, that was the whole story and they told it to me to watch my reactions, as a normal human. And then Lecky took a ring out of his pocket and held it out toward me with one hand, keeping the pistol on me with the other hand.”
“He told me I might as well put it on because if I didn’t, he could shoot me first and then put it on me—but that they greatly preferred to take over undamaged bodies and that it would be better for me, too, if I—that is, my body—didn’t die first.”
“But naturally, I didn’t see it that way. I pretended to reach out for the ring, hesitantly, but instead I batted the gun out of his hand, and made a dive for it as it hit the floor.”
“I got it, too, just as they all came for me. And I fired three shots into them before I saw that it wasn’t even annoying them. The only way you can stop a body animated by one of those rings is to fix it so it can’t move, like cutting off the legs or something. A bullet in the heart doesn’t worry it.”
“But I’d backed to the door and got out of it—out into the Gandymedean night, without even a coat on. It was colder than hell, too. And after I got out there, there just wasn’t any place to go. Except back in the ship, and I wasn’t going there.”
“They didn’t come out after me—didn’t bother to. They knew that within three hours—four at the outside—I’d be unconscious from insufficient oxygen. If the cold, or something else, didn’t get me first.”
“Maybe there was some way out, but I didn’t see one. I just sat down on a stone about a hundred yards from the ship and tried to think of something I could do. But—”
I didn’t go anywhere with the “but—” and there was a moment’s silence, and then Charlie said, “Well?”
And Blake said, “What did you do?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I couldn’t think of a thing to do. I just sat there.”
“Till morning?”
“No. I lost consciousness before morning. I came to while it was still dark, in the ship.”
Blake was looking at me with a puzzled frown. He said, “The hell. You mean—”