Somebody down the hall aimed a wide-nozzled gun at Minnn's host. There was also the blat of an explosion and something hit his host in the chest. "What poor weapons," thought Minnn, and then the thing exploded. A thick gas swaddled the host-patient, Minnn felt the body sagging. There was no time for him to weigh all factors for a really logical decision, and he made a snap-judgment to leave this body before it lost consciousness and sealed off his contact with his environment.
A form was stumbling past, and Minnn reached his host's hand up and touched it. In a flash he had entered. Almost instantaneously he realized that this time it was different. The nervous system was alive with wild, determined resistance.
Chester reeled back from the gas-shrouded, drowsing inmate. The gas would stay near her, held by the biostatic charge in all its particles. He had to keep away from it; he needed all his consciousness for his battle.
He would never be able to quite describe many of the things he felt during the struggle he waged within his own organism like a civil war. Minnn had entered at his right wrist. Although Chester had mentally braced, the alien had surged up his arm almost instantaneously, nearly to the shoulder. Chester called on his mind to hold Minnn there. He worked some part of his mind to hold Minnn there. He worked some part of his mind like a new muscle--one cannot explain how it is he works a muscle, he just does it. Simultaneously Chester reeled down the hall toward where Monnn, in the talking-attendant, stood by an open door. Monnn and the door were his two aces in the hole.
His flesh crawled; the alien was digging, seeping, sparking through him, along his nerves, like a fluid, a worm, a gas, an insidious writhing electricity. And the alien was winning. Inexorably he drove along the stubborn channels to the seat of control, the watchroom in the skull.
The talking-attendant stood with a rustling, limp black sac out-held--Minnn's husk, taken from the toy chest of Sally Odum. If Chester could force the writhing Minnn back down and out of his fingertips and into the husk....
But he couldn't. The sweat rolled down his face as the fight went on inside him. He had no way of knowing what would happen when Minnn, who was nearing it, reached his brain. Insanity? Convulsions? Death? At the very least, Minnn would control him, and also know his thoughts, his plan, his two aces in the hole.