I stood there in the center of that room, which I had made a gory shambles, and for the first (and last) time remorse touched me. I was Bill Cuff, law-abiding writer; if not exactly an altruistic dweller by the side of the road and friend to man, at least I had always been a normally decent guy who would go to a lot of trouble to keep from hurting anybody. What had happened to me? A voice inside me said, _But you are only killing men._ _Men?_ But I'm a man, damn it all! No, you aren't. What am I, an orangutan? I asked myself with heavy sarcasm. No, not that. No more kin to ape than to man. An extraterrestrial, then, descendant of a flying saucer pilot? No, not that either. I put my face in my hands. Oh for the love of God, what am I then? What am I? I knew I wasn't a man and I didn't know what I was. The thing that was me, that had lain dormant until twenty-six hours before, and then had waked and taken over its rightful inheritance which was my body and my mind, what _was_ it? I didn't know what it was. But I knew a few things about it. It had once crouched in a cave with others of its breed, to listen to the angry yelling of hunting men. It had once stolen a human she and mated with her, and been killed by her treachery. It was master to an incredible degree of its sense and muscular equipment, even of its heart, which it could slew at will, and of its breathing, which it could stop entirely for fantastic periods of time. It was rising in me now and it was I. Remorse died forever. Human traits and sentiments died that I could no longer remember ever harboring. I was I and though I did not yet know exactly what I was, I knew it was no fit of madness that had taken possession of me, no devil of the olden times to be driven out by exorcism, no second personality to land me in an asylum; but the soul that had come down through untold centuries hidden in my genes, traveling its recondite course through blood and flesh and brain matter until it woke again to conscious life in Bill Cuff in the early autumn of 1952. The pictures I had seen thus far were racial memory, remembrance of a dawn world, and I knew there would be more of them. I would hold patience in my hands and wait till time brought full recall. CHAPTER VII I pulled my Gladstone from below the bed, strapped and locked it. Then for a moment I stared at my typewriter. It was doubtful that I would ever use her again, and she'd make an extra burden which I could scarcely afford to carry with me. I hated the thought of someone else's fingers on her keys. I had loved that cranky, faithful old mill. I opened her case and raising the machine above my head brought her face down onto a bedpost. Two crashes were plenty. They'd never repair my old girl now. I put her gently on the bed. "Sleep well, lady." I said, and was obscurely glad to find that my metamorphosed self could still be whimsically sentimental.