Produced by Sankar Viswanathan, Greg Weeks, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced Science Fiction Stories 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. _The main trouble is that you'd never suspect anything was wrong; you'd enjoy associating with _slizzers_, so long as you didn't know...._ _The Slizzers_ by JEROME BIXBY * * * * * [Illustration] They're all around us. I'll call them the _slizzers_, because they _sliz_ people. Lord only knows how long they've been on Earth, and how many of them there are.... They're all around us, living with us. We are hardly ever aware of their existence, because they can _make_ themselves look like us, and do most of the time; and if they can look like us, there's really no need for them to think like us, is there? People think and behave in so many cockeyed ways, anyhow. Whenever a _slizzer_ fumbles a little in his impersonation of a human being, and comes up with a puzzling response, I suppose we just shrug and think. _He could use a good psychiatrist._ So ... you might be one. Or your best friend, or your wife or husband, or that nice lady next door. They aren't killers, or rampaging monsters; quite the contrary. They need us, something like the way we'd need maple trees if it came to the point where maple syrup was our only food. That's why we're in no comic-book danger of being destroyed, any more than maple trees would be, in the circumstances I just mentioned--or are, as things go. In a sense, we're rather well-treated and helped along a bit ... the way we care for maple trees. But, sometimes a man here and there will be careless, or ignorant, or greedy ... and a maple tree will be hurt.... Think about that the next time someone is real nice to you. He may be a _slizzer_ ... and a careless one.... How long do we live? Right. About sixty, seventy years. You probably don't think much about that, because that's just the way things are. That's life. And what the hell, the doctors are increasing our lifespan every day with new drugs and things, aren't they? Sure. But perhaps we'd live to be about a _thousand_, if the _slizzers_ left us alone. Ever stop to think how little we know about why we live? ... what it is that takes our structure of bones and coldcuts and gives it the function we call "life?" Some mysterious life-substance or force the doctors haven't pinned down yet, you say--and that's as good a definition as any.