dry the knife on some grass. It was
over in an instant.

"Not stung?"

"No."

"That was too easy," he said. "I don't like it."

"Why?"

"They don't ambush that easy unless they're in rapport with another
group someplace close. We'll have some more of them after us if we
don't get away."

They hurried about the unpleasant task of splitting open the
once-human skulls to remove the legless parasite-entities that filled
the bony hollows where brains belonged. The Oren creatures lived in
their stolen homes long after the borrowed body died, and they could
signal others to the vicinity. Morgan tossed the globular little
creatures in the ditch where they lay squeaking faintly--helpless,
once-removed from the body of the host who had long since ceased to
exist as a human being.

"Let's go!" he grunted.

"Same way?"

"Yeah."

"But they _came_ from that way!"

"Have to chance it. Too dangerous, hanging around the highways. Out
here we can find places to hide."

They set off at a trot, chancing an ambush in reverse. But Morgan
reasoned that the Orenians had been returning to the highway after a
day's exploring on the side-roads. After plunging for half-an-hour
through the darkness, the road began winding upward. The cypress
archway parted, revealing star-scattered sky. They slowed to a walk.

"Can't we sit down to rest?" she panted.

"Can if you like. Alone."

She shuddered and caught at his arm. "I'll stick."

"Sorry," he murmured. "We can stop soon. But they'll be chasing along
the road looking for us. I want to get into the spruce forest first."

She was silent for a time, then said; "With Earlich, it was the other
way around."

"Earlich? The fat boy? What do you mean?"

"I always had to wait on him."

"Did you wait?"

"Until he ran out of bullets."

Morgan clucked in mock disapproval. But he was not in the least
shocked. In the flight from Oren, it was devil take the hindmost.
Weaklings, and people who paused for pity, had long since been stung.
After several weeks of agony in which the brain became the nutrient
fodder of the growing Oren embryo, they were lost in the single
communal mind of Oren, dead as individuals. The adult parasite assumed
the bodily directive-function of the brain. The creatures so afflicted
became mere cells in a total social organism now constituting a large
part of humanity.

Shera suddenly whistled surprise. "Is that a _cabin_ there?--through
the trees?"

They had