He would never be able to quite describe many of the things he felt during the struggle he waged within his own organism like a civil war. Minnn had entered at his right wrist. Although Chester had mentally braced, the alien had surged up his arm almost instantaneously, nearly to the shoulder. Chester called on his mind to hold Minnn there. He worked some part of his mind to hold Minnn there. He worked some part of his mind like a new muscle--one cannot explain how it is he works a muscle, he just does it. Simultaneously Chester reeled down the hall toward where Monnn, in the talking-attendant, stood by an open door. Monnn and the door were his two aces in the hole. His flesh crawled; the alien was digging, seeping, sparking through him, along his nerves, like a fluid, a worm, a gas, an insidious writhing electricity. And the alien was winning. Inexorably he drove along the stubborn channels to the seat of control, the watchroom in the skull. The talking-attendant stood with a rustling, limp black sac out-held--Minnn's husk, taken from the toy chest of Sally Odum. If Chester could force the writhing Minnn back down and out of his fingertips and into the husk.... But he couldn't. The sweat rolled down his face as the fight went on inside him. He had no way of knowing what would happen when Minnn, who was nearing it, reached his brain. Insanity? Convulsions? Death? At the very least, Minnn would control him, and also know his thoughts, his plan, his two aces in the hole. * * * * * There was a twist and a tingle at the base of his skull--the invader was entering his brainstalk. It was time to play his first ace. With a burst of determination to control his reeling motor functions, Chester reached out his hand and touched the hand of the talking-attendant. Monnn swished vengefully inside him. When they had discussed this the others had been afraid. So had Chester. Two alien forces, one hostile, both struggling, might rip and rupture his psychic system like lightning bolts battling inside a transistor. But Chester Forge was a stubborn man, with perhaps a bureaucratic stubbornness, certainly a human stubbornness, and he was committed to an end to be achieved. For a few split seconds there was in Chester's nervous system what might be described as a "hush." He took advantage of it to step through the open door into a dimly-lighted room. The hospital director, insulation-swathed, followed with the leather-rustling husk.