"I wouldn't know. Apparently it's not."
Morgan couldn't believe it. But he sat stunned in the darkness. What was this thing in the cabin with him? Was she still human? He began inching along the wall, but a board creaked.
"I don't want to shoot you, Morgan. Don't rush me. Besides—there's something outside, I tell you."
"Why should you worry about that?—if you've really been stung."
"The first sting evidently didn't take. The next one might. That's why."
"You weren't sick?"
"During the incubation period? I was sick. Plenty sick."
Morgan shook his head thoughtfully. If she had been through the violent illness of the parasite's incubation, she should now have one of the squeaking little degenerates in place of a brain. The fibers of the small animals grew slowly along the neural arcs, replacing each nerve cell, forming a junction at each synapse. There was reason to believe that the parasite preserved the memories that had been stored in the brain, but they became blended with all the other individualities that comprised Oren, thereby losing the personality in the mental ocean of the herd-mind. Was it possible that if one invader were out of mental contact with the herd-mind, that the individual host might retain its personality? But how could she be out of contact?
"They're getting close to the door," she whispered.
Morgan gripped his hatchet and waited, not knowing who would be the greater enemy—the girl or the prowlers.