“Forgot to recharge it,” Joanna said bitterly. Swinging about and whirling the bullwhip about her head, she advanced straight toward the herd, cracking the whip at them, the flicks sounding like a series of rifle-shots. Some of the cattle shifted uneasily and refused to come forward. Here and there a steer even turned and broke away. But the leader, and those close behind him continued their inexorable advance. Lynne got a flash of a too-familiar alien thought, and cried aloud, “Careful, Joanna, they’re going to stampede.” The leader executed an odd, an un-oxlike little shuffle. Then he lowered his bloody horns for the charge. Lynne Marcein, at that moment of great peril, became telepathically hyper-acute. She received, sifted, analyzed, and identified a series of terrifying mental impressions which came in such quick succession that they seemed dreamlike and unreal. There was Joanna, whatever fear she felt sublimated to outrage at the grotesque derelictions of the animals whose breeding and care was her job. Joanna was going to use her whip until the stupid, insane creatures turned and fled in blind panic. But the creatures were neither stupid nor insane. At least, the brains and beings that controlled them were not craven. They were as determined as Joanna to destroy her, an obstacle in the path of their appalling urge for such degenerate pleasure as their bovine embodiment would permit. She caught the mass urge to destroy, and instantly thereafter the driving mental force of the leader with his gore-soaked horns. By concentrating telepathically on the leader, Lynne automatically shut out all other minds from her consciousness. This was a weapon that would have stood all telepaths in good stead when the zombies threatened their sanity with mass possession. For the Martian aborigines, standing alone, lacked the strength to overpower and possess a human TP brain. Their power lay in numbers, not in the individual mind. VII All this Lynne learned in an eyelid’s flicker, while the leader lowered his horns to charge, and the lazy snake of Joanna’s long whip made a black silhouette against the Martian sky. She sensed the revelry and sense of power that came from possession of a strong animal body after uncounted ages of disembodiment. But that feeling of power was accompanied by the unsureness of not knowing exactly the stolen body’s limitations or what animal instincts the possessor might have to control at a moment’s notice. She sensed concern at the defection of some of the herd, evidently against the wishes of their zombie controllers.