"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 bad 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.