Zealley had come.
He was alone. I aligned the sights of my rifle on his head, waited until I had a clear shot, and squeezed the trigger.
The yellow hat sprang upward and Zealley sank from sight among the hurrying workers.
The job was done.
Finding a way back to New Nebraska took me a year, for I no longer fitted my passport picture and description at all.
"Except for the danger to others," I said when I reported in, "I wouldn't have bothered coming back."
"A good thing for you that you did bother to come back here," I was told.
The biochemists had gone on with their work through the years I'd searched for Zealley. They had learned that the symbiotes' life cycle developed in three distinct stages: five years of propagation, fifteen years in the dormant aging process, an undetermined number of years in the final form.
If the blood of a carrier was replaced any time during the first five years, the bugs in the residual blood in the body began to propagate again, delaying the aging process another five years.