Chickens and cats and dogs and meadow mice — and not one of them suspected, not one of them had known, that another mind than theirs had occupied their brain.
But the brain of a man might be a different matter. Highly trained and sensitive, it might detect outside interference, might sense if it did not actually know the invasion of itself.
The girl won't wait. I've been away too long. Her affections are less than skin-deep and she has no morals, absolutely none, and I'm the one to know. I've been on this damn patrol too long. She will be tired of waiting…she was tired of waiting when I was gone three hours. To hell with her…I can get another one. But not like her…not exactly like her. There isn't another one anywhere quite like her. Whoever said this Sutton guy would be an easy one to crack was crazy as a loon. God, after ten years in a dump like this, I'd fall on someone's neck and kiss 'em if they came back from my own time. Anyone at all…friend or foe, it would make no difference. But what does Sutton do? Not a God-damn word. Not a single syllable of surprise in any word he spoke. When I first spoke to him he didn't even break his stride, kept right on walking as if he knew I'd been there all the time. Cripes, I could use a drink. Nerve-racking work. Wish I could forget that girl. Wish she would be waiting for me but I know she won't. Wish…
Sutton snapped back his mind, stood quietly in the road.
And inside himself he felt the shiver of triumph, the swift backwash of relief and triumph. They didn't know. In all their ten years of watching they had seen no more than the superficial things. They had him down on tape, but they didn't know all that went on within his mind.
A human mind, perhaps. But not his mind. A human mind they might be able to strip as bare as a sickled field, might dissect it and analyze it and read the story in it. But his mind told them only what it wished to tell them, only enough so that there would be no suspicion that he was holding back. Ten years ago Adams' gang had tried to tap his mind and had not even dented it.
The Revisionists had watched ten years and they knew each motion that he made, many of the things that he had thought.
But they did not know that he could go to live within the mind of a mouse or a catfish or a man.
For if they had known they would have set up certain safeguards, would have been on the alert against him.
And they weren't. No more alert than the mouse had been.