"We do. Partly because it tallies up with a lot of queer things, partly because it explains a lot of others. But mainly because we all knew Jerry Wolfe, and he was as sane and decent a fellow as ever breathed tobacco smoke."
"Yes, sir."
"He couldn't see all of their dimension, you understand. It was only where one of them had taken over a human body that the veil was thin enough to be pierced by his blast-warped sight. There was a sort of field of force or something around them, and he could see the beasts and their nearby background of silver lines that ran at an angle of about forty-five degrees. That was all. He killed the human parts of three or four of them, and although he couldn't touch the other-dimensional folk with his bullets, when their human puppets died they were relegated to their own world again. They faded out and vanished, he said. Their point of contact was obliterated."
"I see, sir. I begin to get the picture. These foreigners—" I could not help smiling at the word—"have been infiltrating our island by some means, using our bodies, you might say, as disguises. A dirty bit of business, sir, if I may say so."
"Very dirty, Johnson. Because if nothing is done to stop them, eventually they'll have our whole world to themselves."
Johnson evidently thought this over for a moment. I could hear everyone breathing heavily in the silence. Then, "What do they want with it, sir?" he asked.
"Lord knows. Jerry never asked 'em."
"Ah. It gives one pause, sir."
"It damned well does. It's given us so much pause—the six of us—that we've decided to devote our lives to fighting the usurpers. That's why we're doing this huggermugger business, Johnson. We're duplicating Jerry Wolfe's experience, trying to get our eyesight warped or marred or shifted, or whatever the phrase ought to be, as his was. So we can see 'em, and combat 'em, and send 'em home to their silver-lined wastelands."
"And that's what happened—"