"Maybe," Jerry thought hopefully, "I've got an _easy_ one." It was possible, of course. His host might be in the midst of an afternoon siesta, and Jerry could relax and "sit out" his forty minutes of Contact. But such cases were few. At any moment a predator might come down into that orifice in the soil, and Jerry would have to fight for his host's life to preserve his own. Relaxed Learning was seldom feasible. "I'd better see what sort of fighting equipment I have," he decided, wishing vainly that he could just turn his head and look his body over. This proceeding by _feel_ was a slow, tortuous, and sometimes deceptive process. Hollow fangs that seemed capable of injecting venom into an enemy might--as in the case of the Venusian Sea Vampires--turn out to be an organ for drinking water, the sacs above the fangs being for digesting liquids and not for storing poisons. Jerry stimulated what should be his tongue into action, checking for the presence of fangs. Within the mouth of the creature, which felt large in relation to its head, he sensed a rasping movement, a kind of dull dry rustling, but could feel nothing with the tongue itself. "Best have a look at it," he decided suddenly, and, opening his jaws, extended the tongue. * * * * * Jerry was distinctly shocked by the thing that skewed and writhed forward from beneath his eyes. His sensation was not unlike that of a man who opens his mouth and finds a snake in it. And Jerry further realized that he was now seeing with another sextet of eyes, at the end of the tongue. He was not one alien--he was two! His primary six eyes took in the pink-and-gray horror extending ahead of him. The tongue was almost like another animal, serpentine in construction, and had two horny--what?--arms?--pincer-jaws?--at either side of the "head". They were tubular, like a cow's horns, and lay at either side of a wide slit-mouth in the tongue itself. On impulse, Jerry swiveled the tip of the tongue back upon itself, and gazed through the six eyes around the tongue-slit-and-jaws/arms at the main body of his host. Then, suddenly feeling ill, he snapped the tongue back into his mouth and shut his jaws. It had been a horrible sight. Where he'd expected to see the abdominal region of his host, just behind the thoracic section, there lay a wet, red concavity, in the midst of gaping jaws. Jerry himself was enhosted in a "tongue" of some still larger creature within that soft earthen burrow! And some remaining fragment of his host's awareness told him that the creature of whom he was the tongue was itself the tongue of yet another creature. He was a segment of some gigantic segmented worm-creature whose origin lay who-knows-how-far beneath the earth.