GET OUT OF MY BODY!

"I have come to discuss a very grave problem," said the talking-attendant.

"Then let's get down to details," said Chester Forge. "It's urgent you said."

Interviews with Ravians always made Chester nervous. They wouldn't use the psi-control voice sets, and there was something uncanny in talking to a human, a talking-attendant, when you knew it wasn't the man speaking at all, but the alien intelligence he was temporarily host to.

It was even more unsettling when the Ravian was a high official, as at present. Their minds were even more coldly intellectual, dry and logical than the usual Ravian tourist's. And they could make a lot of trouble. Chester's job as tour-chief here at Knoxville—more specifically, Port Knoxville, where the ships came in—was to keep the tourists happy as possible. No, not happy. Happiness is an emotion. Satisfied maybe.

"There are scant useful details I can give you," said Monnn, the Ravian, through the lips of the talking-attendant. "There was a stowaway on the sightseeing ship that came in this morning—one of our people. He is a fugitive. He has left the ship and is here on earth somewhere, perhaps in Knoxville. He must be captured."

Chester Forge was jolted, but he had found you got on better with Ravians if you never showed feelings. He made his voice calm.

"A fugitive, hmmm? What was his crime?"

"The question is immaterial," said Monnn. "So typical of your people. But I suppose you will function better if not bothered by curiosity. Minnn, the stowaway, told a lie."

"A lie?"

"The worst of crimes. Minnn was a politician, campaigning for office, and he lied in making a promise he could not execute."

By Joe, thought Chester, now I've heard them all. Well, the rule is you never, never question the tastes of an alien. The Martians have a mad passion for hop-toads, the Zarlos like to have things hurt them, the Frin talk all the time and the Rorn don't talk at all, and—

"We'll get him for you," said Chester more firmly than he felt.

"We feel you may fail," said the Ravian. "We ask permission to send our own searchers, no quota on numbers, open-area travel permission."

Chester went white. "I'm afraid we can't grant that. I promise we'll get him for you."

"Why can you not grant that?"

"Well—population. There aren't enough volunteers to host any more than the present quota, and of course you can't get around without hosts."

"How human," said Monnn through the attendant. "You are afraid of us. Yet you know we have no desire at all for this planet, and that we know you know this.

"Why do you lie? On our planet you would be treated as Minnn will be—your personality dismembered, the useful parts assigned to another, the imperfect disposed of."

"Be that as it may," said Chester, a chill in his spine. "We will find this fugitive ourselves."

"Of course. And if you do not, within two of your days, we must come to search ourselves. One more thing—Minnn may turn killer. And now I shall retire—manipulating this organism is most fatiguing."

The talking-attendant stood blank-faced for a moment as the Ravian withdrew to some nook of his mentality. Then he blinked and peered around, discovered he was in Forge's office, and saluted.

"That's okay, John," said Chester. "Thanks. Take him back to his husk."

The attendant left and Chester picked up his visor, punching the button for Security Chief....

On Clinch Street, little Sally Odum was walking home from school. She turned down an alley for a shortcut, and there she saw the toy. It was a black, fringed globe, a little larger than a grapefruit. "Gee!" exclaimed Sally, and reached out and grabbed it.

The globe changed from black to gray, from shiny to dull, and from firm to flaccid. Sally felt a little tingle in her fingertips, a tiny tug in her mind. Looking thoughtful, she slipped the limp toy under her jacket. She trotted home, hid the thing at the bottom of her toy box, and promptly forgot about ever finding it.

Minnn, exhausted from the psionic strain of rolling his body through the thick earth air all the way from the port to the city, and then directing the feeling and movement of Sally, made one little adjustment in her memory, then turned off his awareness and rested. In the rich rush of mental currents he would soon be replenished. In the meantime he was safe....

The Ravian had given Chester Forge two days to find Minnn. A day had passed and nothing had happened. He had kept things quiet, up to now. There was no indication his quiet search would produce anything. It was time for a different tactic....

Sally Odum's father looked up from the news-sheets that had just come off the clicker. "Mary, did you see these items about the Ravian loose in the city?"

His wife was playing chack with Sally. The child had beaten her four games running, and Mary was just beginning to wonder if she was mother to a genius. A mother does not appreciate interruption of such musings. "Ah—no," she answered absently. "What about um?"

"Seems this bird—Minnn's his tag—is thought to be hiding out in some human around town. He forced."

Mary was more interested. "Isn't forcing against galactic convention?"

"Darn right. This guy's a fugitive, like I said."

"I knew they'd get in trouble, letting these foreigners come down."

"Look, honey. One thing, we need the trade. A Ravian pays four picks of plainum for a day or two in a human. It's all here in the news-sheet. A Ravian hasn't got emotions, and when they're in a host they can feel everything the host feels. Real Kicks. The host gets to spend one pick himself—a small fortune—he has a shivaree and the Ravian goes for the ride. And for the host it's all voluntary."

"What about this Minnn?"

Sally listened with bright attention, slightly flushed.

"It says here he could be anywhere, any man, woman or child. Tells how you can spot 'em and names a reward. Person with old Minnn inside is a little flushed, feverish, doesn't sleep very well. They...."

"Say, honey, Sally didn't sleep well last night. Do you think she's all right?"

"Any kid has a restless night sometimes, Mary. Lemme finish. The person is apt to be kind of listless, and might have memory blanks. Oh—and the Ravian enters a host by some kind of physical contact, and he can get to another host only by a contact with the first one."

"Maybe we ought to take Sally to Dr. Price, hon. She just hasn't been herself lately."

"Oh well," sighed Odum, and threw down the clicker-story. "Tell you what. All you do is visor security, tell them you're pretty sure a person has this Ravian, and the person gets a real good physical—free. Let's just tell them Sal has the symptoms and get a deal."

Sally got up listlessly and the screen banged as she wandered out.

"What symptoms?" asked Mary.

"You mean you weren't listening?" And Mr. Odum told Mrs. Odum all the signs the article had listed, while Mrs. Odum gradually paled.

"But—those are exactly the symptoms she does have," she said when he finished. Their eyes met and he reached for the visor.

The security cops arrived. Chester was with them. As they boiled from their 'copter they nearly knocked over an old gentleman who was creaking his way delicately along the sidewalk, and one cop stepped on a small dog, which bit him.

Two of them stayed with Sally, who stood in the yard with a scared expression; two others entered the house with Chester. They all came out of the house and Mary explained to Sally that she was not to be frightened. Sally was given a nice raincoat with built-in mittens—it was triple-ply mento-insulation plastic—and everybody bundled into the 'copter.

Sally liked the ride and the raincoat, but when it was all over she was sad. Mr. Forge seemed disappointed somehow....

Minnn lay quiet in his new host soaking in data. Perfesser Frye ... old ... quiet, jogging complex of contentment, and dissatisfaction. Cheated on price of eggs ... nice house over there, awful the way they've changed things ... little girl, patted her on the head, might have had a child like that. Enjoy what you can. Glow-thought connected with something called beer.

Minnn was shocked to find that, almost the opposite of Sally, Perfesser Frye was a complete liar. He was not a professor, and the knowledge he impressed people with was mostly a collection of long, mispronounced words and memorized facts of which the Perfesser did not know the meaning. His landlady believed he was coming into an immense inheritance based on platinum on Vega, and she allowed him a familiarity which Minnn found amusing and which included rent exemption. The man was a collection of lies. Even his rheumatism was not genuine, but psychosomatic.

That evening the Perfesser had the unpleasant experience of seeing his own face on the landlady's show-visor set, with the information that there was a price on his head. This was the last he remembered for some time, although to the landlady he appeared to retain full consciousness. He leaped to his feet most unrheumatically, tied her up, bashed in the visor, and pattered out into the streets, which were deserted.

The Perfesser had good eyes for distance use, Minnn found. He swung the Perfesser's hook-beaked head about searchingly. At the end of the street men were coming, in mento-insulation. Minnn swung the lanky frame about, almost capsizing it, and sprinted long-leggedly in the opposite direction.

In a few blocks the heart was pounding and the face was hot and the lungs could not suck enough oxygen. The Perfesser was not feeling anything consciously, but his parasympathetic nervous system was giving Minnn the horrors.

The cops could not be seen. Minnn withdrew to rest. The Perfesser came to an abrupt halt, and gazed about him glassily. He remembered the nightmarish moment watching the visor; now he found himself in the street panting like a horse and raining sweat. He stood getting his breath and trying to think, then moved off purposefully....

Chester's eyes felt like they would drop out on his desk at any moment. He had had no sleep. He was entertaining a plan to visit the Ravians, in disguise, as a tourist, and make things miserable for them, when two buzzers rang at once.

He answered his chief's buzzer first. Had Minnn been caught? No? Well, the governor had called and the heat was on. The chief was forced to give Forge a choice of producing Minnn in 24 hours or being sent as supercargo to the Mars-deserts. That was all.

The second buzzer was Monnn, speaking through "a talking-attendant."

"Your two days are up this evening," said the Ravian. "Any progress?"

"We ought to have him any time now."

"Nonsense. Minnn had been in that young girl—I could tell, when she was here."

Forge got little pleasure from his reply. "I know that. We're after the man Minnn moved to."

Monnn was unperturbed. "Good. You have about an hour."

"One thing," said Chester. "You say Minnn might kill. Any special way he'd go about it?"

"How should I know?" asked Monnn. "Minnn is an outlaw, under pursuit and away from his planet. On our planet there are no killings." And he hung up....

The Perfesser, umbrella under his arm, black serge suit dusty, walked down a long alley and into Steve's Beer Bar. Beer, he always figured, was a real help when you were perplexed.

Minnn witnessed this logic with disgust. The Perfesser's memory-units showed the beer just made him more perplexed. But Minnn was resting in witness-state, very tired from making the Perfesser do all that running.

The Perfesser hooked his umbrella over the bar and was waited upon by Steve himself. "You look kinda bushed," said Steve respectfully.

"A man my age must watch himself, Steve. Especially when he is enervated by the hardihoods of lifetime scholarship."

"Rough," said Steve admiringly. He didn't know what the language meant but it sounded gorgeous.

The Perfesser turned to a pushed-down man beside him at the bar. "You would hardly believe, friend, what has just happened to me. One moment I was watching a home-visor-view—and the next I was standing in the street. I can scarcely credit this phenomenon."

"Funny things happen," said the pushed-down man. "I drive a laundry truck, and one stop is out to the national asylum. They got people out there what don't know where they even came from, too."

"You sure this really happened, Perfesser?" said Steve. "I mean—you wouldn't make it up or nothing." The Perfesser had drunk only one "fish bowl" of beer—it was a little early for his star-spangled lying.

"I can aver it happened," said the Perfesser stiffly. "A phenomena of psychic rarity—similar things have occurred to intellectual persons at various points in history."

Minnn was not enjoying himself. Humans were fun when they were having fun, but other moods were unendurable. Coupled with illogic it was worse. Minnn was considering shifting to the truck driver when the man suddenly arose. "Well, night, Steve, Perfesser—I gotta get the sheets a-rolling," said the man, and vanished out the back door.

It was seconds later that two policemen burst in the front door and headed straight for the Perfesser. Minnn acted instantly. The Perfesser's awareness was clamped out and the creaking frame was sent speeding to the back door.

Down the alley the laundry truck was starting, and the Perfesser's voice sailed after it, "Wait, fellow. Hold on!"

The truck slowed and the wizened face of the driver peered back just in time to see the police burst into the alley and open fire. The face was withdrawn instantly and the truck gained speed.

The Perfesser ran after it, shouting until his breath gave out. There was junk in the alley and it was crisscrossed by other alleys with traffic on them and the driver dared not approach top speed. The cops shot twice again at the Perfesser, who was running like an antelope.

Minnn felt a crash in the Perfesser's shoulder and the tall body swayed. A bit of lead had entered the clavicle. Minnn strained and the ends of the veins constricted, slowing the loss of blood. The Perfesser's heart and lungs were behaving alarmingly but Minnn kept the body running. He was gaining on the truck.

The truck gained speed and so did the Perfesser. Ancient arteries, brittled with deposits, strained and began to give. The Perfesser's arm raised as he drew alongside the truck. The umbrella-tip neared the driver.

A bullet grazed the Perfesser's side—Minnn suddenly realized they were not shooting to kill: and also the shaky frame he had taken would not be able to run much longer. With a surge of concentration he pushed the body forward. The umbrella-tip touched the driver, Minnn drove himself down the metal ferrule, somewhere an artery burst, and the body of the Perfesser sagged, wobbled, and, still carried forward by momentum, smashed into a wall and toppled over. It lay there on its back. Being front-man for a Ravian had been Perfesser Frye's last falsehood.

The truck got out of the alley, going fast, and kept going fast until it came to the asylum. The driver did not go to the back door—there might be people waiting for him. He walked in the front door, up to the receptionist, and touched her. Then he discovered himself standing there, and walked embarrassedly out again.

The receptionist remained at her desk. A visitor was moving toward her; as he passed, the receptionist touched his hand.

Down a hallway opening into the reception room came a little group of men—three attendants from the hospital and the hospital director; a talking-attendant and Chester Forge, and the truck driver. All were gloved and clad in mento-insulation but the talking-attendant.

"I was standing right here," said the driver excitedly. "Right here in front of this desk."

The talking-attendant rested his hand on the receptionist's forehead. "Not there now," he declared.

"Have any of you seen anyone near this desk?" called the director to the room at large. A woman pointed to the visitor the receptionist had touched. "He was!"

The visitor began to run.

"We've got to get him before he gets into a patient!" yelled Chester. "In an unbalanced mind even Monnn can't find him! Get him."

They went plunging after the visitor.

Minnn was pleased. He had a head start, and this human had good running potential. He would have fun. An interne stepped out of a door, the visitor touched his hand, the interne stepped back through the door, rapidly. The searchers swirled down the hall and grabbed the visitor and Monnn made his test. "Not here now," he reported.

The interne strolled into an elevator, went up a story, walked quietly down another corridor. Excitement was percolating through the place almost as though the inmates breathed it. There were many inmates on this floor; he could force into one almost at leisure.

Another elevator jarred to a stop, doors opened, and the searchers bolted out. Chester's face was like a purple plum, his eyes were red and wild. The long chase was teasingly close to ending, and could be frustrated forever.

The interne turned and thumbed his nose at Forge, who gave a bellow of anger. As the men surged toward him, the attendant sprinted a few yards, reached out and touched a patient. The halls were full of them; attracted by the excitement. Unobtrusively the patient touched another, who in turn touched another, who disappeared in the crowd.

"Go back to your rooms," shouted the director of the hospital. "You are impeding a hunt for a fugitive."

But the patients didn't see any fugitive, and they stayed, and more kept coming.

There was a disconcerting blur of thought-emotion in the patient Minnn was using. The pursuers were the length of the hall away; he caused his host to turn, shriek a bad word, and thumb her nose at them.

They came running, impeded by the crowd. The patient turned a corner, touched another patient, who touched another.

It was quite an experience, Minnn decided. He had whirled through a rich kaleidoscope of minds and emotions; in one woman there had been a fountain of ecstacy he would have to go back and sample sometime. He had come to the perfect place. Except as he chose to do it, to tease, these inmates could not reveal him, and no Ravian could detect him. He could stay here an indefinite length of time—wait them out—then go back to the toy chest where his husk lay—or trace Sally Odum's memory for it in case she had moved it—and repossess himself.

He could learn to live on this planet—perhaps he could even get governmental sanctuary, though that was not essential. He would not be lonely. Ravians do not get lonely. They do, however, have a sense of power.

But the pursuers were coming down the hall, the Ravian in the talking-attendant attempting to sort through the twisted minds, the person from the tourist service almost out of his own mind. And though Minnn was having sport, he was a little tired. He turned the eyes of his host toward the group of hunters, and saw that they had stopped coming and stood talking. He walked his host to a window-bench, sat it down, turned its mind toward slumber, and relaxed.

Chester had to have a plan, and, driven to unwonted efficiency by the threat of bureaucratic disgrace and exile, his mind began to form one. The plan was not without its dangers, especially to Chester, but it was the only plan they had.

Power was shut off to all elevators, and at the flip of a switch all the doors on the group's floor were locked. "We've got him penned on this floor," said Chester. "I only hope he doesn't come across a mouse."

"He's probably on this floor," corrected Monnn through the talking-attendant. "And he'll probably stay. Ravians have a slight psionic control, as you know, and it's barely possible Minnn could force himself through a door-panel."

"How about a wall?"

"I doubt it."

"What if there was nobody on the other side for him to force into?"

"He would not last very long ... we would lose him. And that would go hard for you, Mr. Forge, because we do not want Minnn done away with, we want him captured."

"I don't need to be reminded," said Chester, mentally getting a two-handed hold on the always-be-polite-to-a-tourist rule. "And now let's smoke him out."

The director and a helper lingered unobtrusively near a firehose; the rest of the group strolled on down the hall. Minnn had rested and was alert again. Through his host-eyes he saw there were many patients milling about—there were so many ready refuges. It occurred to him that he had not particularly bedeviled his countryman, and he caused his host to pick up a vase and hurl it at the head of Monnn's talking-attendant.

Almost instantly a blast of chill water struck Minnn's host, knocking her sprawling. Minnn found her emotions most unpleasant. He took her mind fully, forcing her up from the floor, and a ram of water pounded her down again. Somebody was rounding up the other patients, pushing them out of his reach. People were yelling, running.

Somebody down the hall aimed a wide-nozzled gun at Minnn's host. There was also the blat of an explosion and something hit his host in the chest. "What poor weapons," thought Minnn, and then the thing exploded. A thick gas swaddled the host-patient, Minnn felt the body sagging. There was no time for him to weigh all factors for a really logical decision, and he made a snap-judgment to leave this body before it lost consciousness and sealed off his contact with his environment.

A form was stumbling past, and Minnn reached his host's hand up and touched it. In a flash he had entered. Almost instantaneously he realized that this time it was different. The nervous system was alive with wild, determined resistance.

His host was Chester Forge.

Chester reeled back from the gas-shrouded, drowsing inmate. The gas would stay near her, held by the biostatic charge in all its particles. He had to keep away from it; he needed all his consciousness for his battle.

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.

Then Minnn and Monnn locked forces, and Chester reeled with the shock and swirl of the combat. The two forces mixed, fused, separated, mingled, yet Chester somehow knew always which was which, got bursts of the reasoning of each, knew in some indescribable way the alien, indecipherable natures of each of them. For an instant he panicked. Something mysterious and terrible as the dark energy of infinity was pounding and flashing in his merely human synapses and cells, something he understood yet could not understand at all.

He felt a draining, and knew Minnn was tapping him for energy. Chester rallied to help Monnn. He pulled his energy, his thoughts, away from Minnn, rolling up, balling, clenching his powers, keeping them out of reach, probing for a chance to strike. Minnn filamented through half his body; part of the alien was needling and darting into Chester's mind, burrowing toward knowledge of his plan. Chester buried his plan in the very center of the ball of thoughts, hiding his last ace.

He could not keep this up much longer, and he could feel that both Minnn and Monnn knew this. It was time for the big assault. He sent flash after flash of willpower crisping through his nerves, and Monnn interwove himself in these assaults. Minnn was being forced back, and back, intolerably pressured.

Minnn hurled his energies at them in a sudden rush, and Chester felt something in him begin to tear like a piece of silk.

Concealed from Minnn like the kernel of a nut, Chester cupped the knowledge, his last ace. He was at the verge of cracking, now was the time to play it. He edged toward the wall of the room, where a patient sat darkly on a bench. At the same time both he and Monnn drove forth their last few ergs of pressure against Minnn.

Chester felt something raise his arm. His arm moved toward the patient; his palm touched the man's cheek. There was a sudden cleanness in him, and Minnn was gone.

He leaped backward through the door and it swung to and locked. A peep-panel was opened in it and the black fringed husk hung up before the opening. Chester touched the talking-attendant so Monnn could pass over, then leaned weakly against the wall opposite the door.

"I give him half an hour," he said. "Who's got a drink of water?"

It turned out that they had waited only twenty-two minutes when the fringed sac began to take a luster, to puff and to fill. When they were quite sure Minnn was entirely within it, they wrapped it tightly in the insulation and took it away.

"It was a good plan," said Monnn through the talking-attendant as they drove back toward the town. "We could never have forced him to leave you to enter his husk—his logic would have driven him to fight even harder and to stay, with rather unfortunate results to you, Mr. Forge, but under pressure he would leave to enter another host. And it was lucky the walls of that room held him—as you said, that was a gamble we had to take. But I wish you would again describe to me the phenomenon in that room. It sounds quite strange."

"It's something that happens to humans," said Chester, "and I knew no Ravian could put up with it. Illogic disturbs you, and you tour in human beings only for the sake of one kind of emotion, the pleasant kind. In that room there was no logic, and the emotions were of a different kind, a kind you haven't heard of. The humans there were in what is called a depressive ward. They are illogically unhappy, all the time."

"I see," said Monnn through the lips of the attendant. "You have good logic, Mr. Forge. I have a new respect for human logic. Yes."