"Sammy," Knight asked suddenly. "Do you feel queer?"
Sammy looked at Knight, his eyes suddenly harried.
"Honest-to-gosh, Kent, I wouldn't admit this to anybody else. But I wonder sometimes if I am all right. Everybody else seems just a little odd to me. I don't know what it is, I just feel it. But, then, maybe it's me. I'm scared all the time, Kent, and I don't know why. Sometimes, I believe something's trying to steal me." He looked up, waiting for Knight to laugh.
But Kent Knight's hazel eyes were very serious and very searching.
"Not the physical me," Sammy amended. "But the real me, the essence of me. So I try to drown that fear in my bottles. I never had that feeling until we landed on that asteroid. And now it won't go away."
You were supposed to have the answer, Sammy, Knight thought despairingly. But I guess you haven't. The Thought Conquerors have got to you, too. Because we are complex in our mental makeup, the reaction is different. You only feel there's something wrong with It in you; It didn't seem to affect Mallory much; It made Captain Hansen believe he's young; It made itself known to me and I wanted to fight It.
But how can you fight It when you have no measure of your opponent—when Its attack is so varied—when It comes and goes as It wills?
He shrugged in answer. To Sammy, he put the question, "So we're going home?"
"It won't be much longer now," Sammy said. "The make ready signal buzzed just before you woke up."
The urgency struck at Knight. Only a hundred thousand miles from Earth! Rather, Earth was only a hundred thousand miles from slavery—abject submission to these Thought Conquerors, first seen by Earthmen as furry little butterballs.