"Then," said Croft, striking quickly while the man was lost in the grip of religious fervor. "Will you help me to do that for which I came—will you help me to help Tamarizia should the need arise?"
"Aye." To his surprise Abbu sank before him on bended knees. "How am I to serve him who comes at the behest of Zitu, in so miraculous a way?"
"Call me Jasor as in the past," decided Croft. The name was near enough to his own to fit easily into both his ears and mouth. "Yet think me not Jasor," he went on. "Jasor was a dullard, weak in his brain. Soon shall I show you things such as you have never dreamed. Think you I am Jasor or another indeed?"
"You are not Jasor," said the priest.
"Nay—by Zitu himself, I swear it," said Croft. "Go now and send back the nurse. Say nothing of what I have told you. Swear silence by Zitu, and come to me every day."
"I swear," Abbu promised, rising, "and—I shall come, O Spirit sent by Zitu." He left the room backward and with bowed head.
Croft let every cell of his new body relax and stretched out. He closed his eyes as he heard the nurse return, and gave himself up to thought. It appeared to him that he had made a very good beginning and won an ally in Abbu, into whose astonishment he had woven a thread of the man's own religion to strengthen his belief. Now it remained to gain utter control of the body he possessed—to master it completely, and make it not only responsive to his physical use, but to so impregnate it with his own essence that he might leave it for short times at least in order to return to the earth.
And to accomplish that he had just four days. Lying there apparently asleep, he sought to exercise that control he possessed over the body now lying on his library couch. And he failed. Strive as he might, he could not compass success. In something like a panic he desisted after a time and sought to fight back to a balanced mental calm.
Was he trapped? he asked himself. Was he a prisoner of the thing he had sought to make his own? Reason told him the question was folly—that already the body was responding in a physical sense. In the end he decided to take a longer time in his endeavors, and so at last fell into a genuine sleep.
From that he awakened to the sound of voices, and turned his eyes to behold a woman past middle age, with graying hair, and a man, strongly built, with a well-featured face, in the room.