"But I think they can leave this world voluntarily, in which case they go on living in their own. Lord knows how long a life expectancy they've got, over there. Maybe their time is different from ours, so that the life of a man occupies no more than a fraction of a day in the silver land; the theft of a body and the puppeteering of it from womb to tomb may be no more than an hour's vicious pastime for an alien."
"I've been thinking of that," said Geoff slowly. "I see this whole business as a kind of fierce joke on their part, the slow and sly winning of a world from its unseeing inhabitants. So perhaps they'll leave us if their lives are endangered—perhaps the joke may not be worth dying for."
"All this," interrupted John Baringer testily, "is off the track, and really no more than so much anthropomorphism. How can a man finally and definitely state what are the purposes of a pack of inhuman beings? Go on, Will."
"Well, to prove my new theory, Arold and I went out to a pub this morning. We chose a frightful creature that was doing some solitary drinking, and Arold, who's a whizzer of a lad at such matters, slipped some slow poison into his liquor.
"We watched him die, in the throes of agony, which was taken by all the other denizens of the pub for simple indigestion or appendicitis. It took him twelve minutes to die on the floor. I timed him.
"The first three minutes he just writhed and changed colors and shot off angry sparks. He didn't know he was dying. I refer to the real entity, not the human part. Obviously he could feel the pain—they must be able to, otherwise they'd give themselves away by not making the human body jump when it's stuck with a pin, or sits on a hot stove, or whatnot—you can see that. Well, after those three minutes, he seemed to wake up to the fact that this was it. Immediately he started to leave this dimension. It was the damndest sight I ever laid eye on. It was like a man trying to haul himself out of quick-sand or heavy muck. The beast wrenched upward, and jerked back, and did what in any normal being would be called shrugging his shoulders, for all the world as if he was mired in something and wanted to get out. He had an awful time of it. Took him seven minutes and fifteen seconds. But at last he made it.
"He oozed back and away from that twisting body on the floor. He stood there, weaving and trembling, and I'll bet he was sweating, too, if they do any such prosaic thing as sweat. He was entirely divorced from the husk—which lived, mind you, for more than a minute after he'd left it. But as soon as he'd stepped away, he began to fade, and within three or four seconds he had vanished. At any rate, from my sight, and Arold's."
I signaled to Alec to fill my glass. "That's why I think they die when I murder them: because of the time it took that critter to get loose from his puppet. He was scared. I could feel it, just as I can feel their ordinary waves of hatred and abominable passions. I could sense the terror that filled that usurping bastard when he knew his husk was dying. He was purely scared to hell! Why? Why, unless he knew he'd die in both worlds if he couldn't rid himself of the shell before it perished?"
I sighed. I was tired of this whole rotten business, and light-headed from the liquor on my empty stomach. I said, "It was what I'd wanted to discover, why we poisoned the thing. I'd recalled that every alien death I'd seen, every one Jerry Wolfe saw, had been sudden and quick. I'd realized that there were no data on slow deaths. I had to have some. I got it. And I say, it's two to one they die when the human part dies, unless they have plenty of time to get away from it. That's the reason I think they'll leave us voluntarily, in a terrific hurry, when they think there's a whole crew of seers after 'em. They don't like death any more than we do. Death's a queer, an uncanny thing. Nothing that I know in nature likes to die."