"The remainder of the litter—my brothers and sisters, if I could think of them as such—were callously placed in a weighted sack and tossed in the swamp, but by that time I had found a home. The Douglas home. Their child, Timmy, was an imbecile whose short-circuited mind lay open to me. I found by hasty experiments that Homer's mind was capable of controlling and manipulating the imbecile, like a puppeteer. The difficulties of controlling two bodies at once are tremendous, which is why Homer always struck you as clumsy and almost half-witted—he had to receive the absolute minimum of concentration so that his exhaustion at climbing the bluff this afternoon, for example, was not recognized in time. Well, there it is. I took over Timmy's helpless body eight years ago—too abruptly and with many errors—but it insured my survival for a short time at least. Now that time is at an end and the greater part of what I must do is still to be done—"
Phil sat with his face averted, his hands clenched between his knees. "The instinct to survive," he said in a muffled voice. "I can't blame you for what you did, but it was cruel! What a damnable trick to play on the parents!"
"Believe me, I know what you feel but there was no other way."
"No other!" He swung around, his face mottled and his breathing heavy. "Whatever you are, you made a Machiavellian puppet-master out of a lousy, flea-bitten mongrel! Was it beyond those powers to heal Timmy's mind?"
"I am not a psychopathic criminal."
"Do you imply that healing Timmy would involve repeating the swindle you worked on Homer?"
"No. I could have by-passed the simple neural block that was leaving Timmy helpless, and so have given him what to you would have seemed his normal intelligence. In addition, I could have completed the work that nature left incomplete in all of you, and so have released his full, enormous capabilities. I could have done all this—can still do it—and still leave Timmy's ego untouched, to develop in its own way, among its own kind, knowing nothing of me for what I am."
"But you haven't done so. Why? Why!"
"I dared not."