"Never mind. Anyway, then they think it over, and if we're in luck, they decide the hell with it, and go home."
"Leaving thousands of suddenly dead bodies, and incredible misery and sorrow among the friends of their puppets," said Geoff. "Oh, I'm with you. That's our whole objective, to rid ourselves of them. But it just hit me: what a lot of tears will be shed because we stepped into this matter."
"Shall we turn back now?"
"Don't drivel. Only ... great merciful powers!" He drank from his glass, his hand shaking. "What will we wreak!"
"Do you think it'll work, Will?" asked Marion quietly.
"It's the biggest bluff of all time, darling. But it must work!" I paused. "There's one big factor. I've hinted at it—here it is. We've always taken it for granted that when the human body dies, the usurper simply goes back to his own world and begins again by getting himself born into a new husk here. Jerry Wolfe figured that out originally, and we've accepted his theory as gospel. But I submit that it needn't be true. I don't know why I ever thought it was. How do we know what happens to the monster when its hull of human flesh dies? How do we know that it's only the puppet which perishes? Echo answers: we don't know. Maybe the aliens are so bound to their false humans in this dimension that when the bodies die, the aliens must die too. What's so impossible about that? After all, I've told you that they haven't any powers here except those of the bodies they inhabit. God knows what they can do in their own never-never land—but here, they're little better than so many natural-born people. And if they're that restricted, that much identified with these puppets, maybe even their death is mutual."
I cleared my throat and took a drink of Scotch. "What happened when I killed my first ogre? I went to a pub with Geoff and watched. Pretty soon all the beasts sittin' there started to flap their arms at one another and turn different colors, and then a lot of them got up and left. Aha, yes, I said to myself, the gorgon who got his has gone around behind the dimension-screen telling his chums about it. But I was arguing from a false premise. I was basing my ideas on what I believed to be a fact—yet that fact hadn't been proven at all, and probably couldn't be proven this side of the silver land!"
"Nor disproven," put in Alec.
"But I can show you more to disprove it than you can dig up to prove it! What happens when I assassinate an alien? His human vehicle croaks, while he himself swells up, turns a vivid horrid hue, and goes pop. I submit that that looks more like the death of the alien itself than a simple relegation to another region.