"He told Alec--" Alec Talbot was the chap with one arm; he'd left the other in Europe somewhere, during the latter days of the war--"he told Alec a tale that day, Johnson. It's a wild, incredible, super-fantastic tale. No sane man would believe a word of it." "No, sir." "But we six believe it, Johnson." "Yes, sir. I gather it has something to do with this--" "This madness of ours. It does. You see, Jerry Wolfe was nearly blinded in India when a Tower musket was discharged athwart his eyes. The bandages were removed as he was coming home, and he found he could see ... could see rather more than most of us can." "Yes, sir," said the dignified voice. "May I ask what he could see, sir?" "He could see into Hell," said Alec Talbot quietly. * * * * * "He could see that certain people are not--people," I went on. "Let me try to explain that. He discovered that there are among us many aliens of another race, perhaps from another dimension, or from another planet, or--who knows? He thought they were out of a different dimension, because he could see silvery lines behind them which he believed to be that dimension's scenery, as it were. Each of these aliens, these usurpers, as he called them, had stolen a human body, and was using it as a focal point of entrance into our world. Do you follow me?" "With some difficulty, sir." "Drop the 'sir', Johnson. We're all plain human beings together in this." "Yes, sir." "Well, he could see these alien creatures, but within them, or behind them, he could also see the human bodies they were occupying; the bodies which to everyone else appeared to be quite normal men and women. The bodies apparently didn't contain a human soul or mind or whatever you want to call it, but were only puppets for the interlopers. He sat in Charing Cross Station and made notes on them, at one stage of his adventures, and he decided that they were entering this world by usurping the bodies of newly-born children, children of unions between two of them or between one of them and a regular human. See?" "Vaguely, sir." "He figured out that after a few of them got into our dimension, through some fluke or other, they found that they could spawn puppet-humans who would become vehicles for others of their breed. They come 'in' by route of birth. Perhaps, Jerry thought, a freak accident generations ago let just one of them into our world, and he put his foot in the door. Now there are multitudes of them here. What was the ratio Jerry calculated, Alec?" "About seven to six in our favor," said Alec Talbot. "Of course, that was figured within an hour or so at Charing Cross Station. He didn't have a chance to make a real survey. They got him first." "Yes, they got him. He was so shocked by his discovery that he didn't cover up fast enough, and they found out he could see them. They harried him all over half of England, and finally they tracked him down at the club and shot his guts out."