The cage was as high as one-fourth the height of any of the men before it, so Jerry reckoned his own size as about one-sixth. If they were all six-footers, then he must be about rabbit-sized. He glanced down his body and saw hard gray scales over a curving belly, with a pair of hind feet that seemed to be all phalanges and no metatarsals. From "heel" to foot-tip, Jerry had three long, hard-looking black spikes. "Something like a swan's foot with the webbing removed," he mused.
A look at his forepaws before his face showed him three similar phalanges, though only two-thirds the length of the hind ones, and having in addition a sort of stubby rudimentary thumb. His forearms were scaly, too, and possessed a wicked spur of the same black material jutting downward from the elbow.
Happily, three sides of his cage were polished metal walls, so he was able to get an inkling of his facial characteristics in the warped uncertain mirror of the surfaces. He saw startled-looking eyes, round as quarters, with red irises that dilated greatly with each tilt of his head toward the shadowy rear of the cage, and narrowed the orifice about the pupil to a pinprick when he turned near the front. He seemed to be noseless, also. When he tried to sniff, nothing happened. The attempt made his head feel stuffed up, but he knew that the feeling was only inside his mind, and not an actual sensation.
Jerry looked at his mouth. It was just a wide slit in his round, earless head—no, not earless; there were auricular holes under a flange of gray scale—just a wide slit with a glint of sharp-pointed bright orange teeth.
"Well," he thought, "I'm at least a carnivore, possibly an omnivore, with teeth like that. The light in this room is apparently not intolerable to those fur-faces out there. So—if the slight shooting pains in my head plus the shutting of the irises when I face into the room are any criteria—I must be a nocturnal beast of some kind. Eyes like this would be blinded by sunlight."
He decided he was, in the ecology of the fur-faces, something along the lines of a raccoon, even if his flesh were scaly as a pangolin's. "Maybe I'm a pet," he hoped. "But there's something about the atmosphere of this room—"
Something rustled and clacked against the wall of his cage.
Jerry withdrew his control a fraction to let the host's mind tell him what it might be. The mind of his host was atingle with antagonism. Yet, as Jerry heard a similar movement somewhere off to the far side, the mind of his host grew suddenly tender and excited.
Jerry re-assumed control, having the information he needed. His cage was one of at least three, possibly many more, housing animals like the one enhosting him. The nearby cage contained an animal of his own sex, the other contained an animal of the opposite sex, possibly a mate. Whether male or female, Jerry had no idea. He had in any Contact—barring a procreative arrangement beyond the simple bisexual—a fifty-fifty chance of being male. The worm had been self-generating, the unicornate lion-thing had been male. What Jerry's present sex was, he had no idea. Even on Earth, scaly creatures tended to baffle all but the experts as to sex. Jerry inspected the mind of his host for a few moments, but could find out only that it yearned for that other one in the other cage. The intensity of the yearning gave no clue if the urge were man-for-woman, woman-for-man, mother-for-child, child-for-parent or—it was barely possible—friend for friend.
Jerry decided to ignore the yearning by taking full control of the host once more. He took stock of his circumstances. Here he was, a nocturnal carnivore, caged with many of his own kind in a vehicle moving through space or water.