"Call me Tim. I don't think of myself as Homer and my Challon identification is a mental-verbal linkage. Even 'Challon' is a compromise simplification."
"I guess it would be. Those cracks I made—"
"Forget them. To what you call the hag-ridden moron jittering out of sight in your mind, so many things equate to a threat to survival. And so many survival reactions outlast their usefulness, becoming essentially antisocial and antisurvival. For a telepathic race there are no false fronts or motives or impulses. In a nontelepathic society, nothing but false faces are ever seen."
"It's beginning to get home to me ... what about that night near the swamp?"
"My poor Challonari. The shockwave of 'my' death left it alert but bewildered. It could not recognize nontelepathic intelligences and tried to turn them aside like the first one. Their deaths are on my head—or on the organic dust that eight years ago was a Challon. The Challonari was confused by the contradictions of my present identity, subtly altered as it has been by Homer's channeling mind, and went insane when faced with a basic conflict of duties. It was like ... losing a simple child."
"So we return to Timmy."
"And to you."
"Me? I'm going downhill fast. Let's have it before I hit rock-bottom and really get around to reacting. And let's have a few straight answers. You could have by-passed the first block that makes Timmy an idiot. O. K., why didn't you?"
"I would have lost control of him at once, of course. For one thing, as an ordinary child his mind would be closed to me just as yours is and I would be a voiceless animal with no protector, my existence likely to end at the bottom of a river in a weighted sack."
"No dice. Remember, I know you too well to believe you'd place your own interests first, much as I hate to admit it."