Joe shoved back his chair inch by inch.
"Uarnl's dead," he said. "He blundered things in my office and got scared and tried to get off-world in a passenger. The Patrol blasted him."
Sarah rose calmly and looked at Ray and Kent. Their faces were stony. She said: "Lof—Dir—I think the four of us together can break down his resistance to Occupancy." Her eyes traveled to an empty corner of the kitchen. "Are you ready, Uarnl?"
She faced Joe again, a sly smile on her lips.
"Uarnl wasn't killed, Yoe—atomics don't kill us. The passenyer was."
Joe wasn't surprised when she floated away from the chair and toward him, her slippers hardly seeming to touch the floor. He'd been expecting to be attacked.
But what almost broke him into little pieces was her third eye—the one that blinked open in the middle of her forehead, brushing aside a brittle shell of skin and glaring at him with its wide, unhuman hunger. Then, for one terrible second, his brain felt packed in ice; the room was grotesque, filled with alien contrivances. The only sensible thing in it was Ih's warm, familiar third eye.
With all his melting strength, Joe thought, "I destroyed the bodies!" and the whole scene dangled unmoving before him, the weird, distant setting for the climax of a play, as he heard his own voice in a wrenching groan:
"Our bodies—destroyed!"
Appalling misery and hatred for himself rocked Joe's brain. Then Uarnl recoiled, as the Aarnians' rapport was broken.