I laughed rudely. "I'm not the leader of anything."

He just looked at me with those deep, troubled eyes - eyes I can now see only in my memory.

"Yes, Jake, you are our leader. You are the one who can bring us all together and help us defeat the Controllers. We have the ability to be much more than we are, to have the stealth of a cat, and . . . and the eyes of eagles, and the sense of smell of a dog, and . . . and the speed of a horse or a cheetah. We're going to need it all, if we have any hope of holding out against the Controllers,"

I wanted it not to be true. I wanted none of it to be true.

But I knew that it was.

I nodded slowly. It felt like I was agreeing to something awful. Like I was volunteering for a trip to the dentist or something much worse. It felt like a million pounds of weight had just landed on my shoulders.

I knew what I had to do next.

"Well," I said grimly. "I guess I'd better go find Homer."

Homer. That's my dog.

31 CHAPTER 9

It isn't painful. Morphing, I mean.

I petted Homer for a while, feeling like a complete and total fool. "This is the stupidest thing I have ever done," I told Tobias.

"Look, you have to concentrate. At least, I did, I mean, I formed this mental picture of Dude, right? I thought about becoming him."

"I see. So I have to, like, meditate on becoming a dog."

"That's right. You have to think about it. You have to want it."

Normally I would have figured he was nuts. But I had just seen him turn into a cat. So if he was nuts, so was I.

I thought about becoming Homer. As I stroked his fur I formed a picture in my mind of me becoming Homer. Homer became weirdly quiet while I did it. Like he was asleep, only his eyes were open.

"Just like Dude," Tobias commented. "I think the process kind of puts the animal in a trance or something."

"He's just scared because he thinks his master is a looney tune." I continued stroking Homer's fur and concentrating, and Homer continued to lie very still. "Okay, now what?" I asked Tobias.

"Now we better put Homer outside. He might get slightly freaked by watching you turn into him."

It took Homer about ten seconds to come out of his trance. But then he jumped up, normal, hyperactive Homer again. I put him outside in the yard.

Tobias was sitting patiently when I got back, just waiting. "Give it a try," he urged me.

"Think about it. Want it."

I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes. I recalled the picture of Homer I'd formed in my mind.

I thought about becoming Homer.

I opened my eyes. "Bow wow," I said, laughing. "Guess it didn't work for me, Tobias."

The back of my hand itched and I scratched it.

"Jake?" Tobias said.

"What?"

"Look at your hand."

I looked at my hand. It was covered with orange fur.

32 I jumped about a foot, straight up in the air. "Ohh! Ohh!" I stared at my hand. The fur had stopped growing.

"Don't be scared," Tobias advised, "Go with it. Now you've stopped the morph. You have to concentrate."

"My hand!" I said. "Fur!"

"Yeah, and your ears . . . " Tobias said.

I ran to the mirror over my dresser. My ears had moved. They had slid up the side of my head, and were definitely larger than they should be.

"Go on, it's so cool!" Tobias said.

"Cool? It's . . . it's . . . creepy. It's weird. It's . . . I mean, look at my hands! I have fur!"

"You have to do this," Tobias said.

"I don't have to do anything," I said sullenly.

Tobias nodded. "Okay, you're right. You don't have to do this. You can just forget what we saw last night. And forget what we know. And as the Yeerks take over more and more people, you can just ignore it. We can all just go along and grow up in a world where human beings are nothing but bodies to be used by murdering aliens."

Okay, when he put it that way it didn't sound like a great option.

"Come on," Tobias urged.

I swallowed hard. I closed my eyes. I thought of Homer. Of being Homer.

I felt the itch mess again, and when I opened my eyes, there was fur growing on my arms.

And fur growing out of my face. And fur curling up from under my collar. My legs itched and I realized they were growing fur, too. My bones . . . well, they didn't exactly hurt, but they did feel very strange. You know when you go to the dentist and he gives you Novocaine so the drill doesn't really hurt, but you know it should hurt? I guess that's what it's like.

My bones shortened. I could feel my backbone stretching as it extended out into a tail. There was a scraping sound as my knees suddenly reversed direction. I toppled forward, no longer able to walk upright.

When my hands hit the floor they weren't exactly hands anymore. The fingers were gone. All that was left were short, stubby nails.

My face bulged out. My eyes drew closer together.

Tobias got up and tilted the mirror down so I could see myself.

I watched the final transformation as the last patches of my pink human flesh disappeared.

And the tail - my tail - sprouted to its full length.

33 I was a dog. It was insane. But just the same. I was a dog.

I knew I should be scared by all this, only I wasn't. I was ecstatic. I was giddy. I was thrilled.

Happiness just washed over me, Happiness filled me up.

I breathed in through my ridiculously long nose and wow! Wow! The smells. Oh, man, you have no idea! I breathed in and right away I knew my mom was toasting a waffle in the kitchen. And I knew Tobias had walked through the territory of a big male dog. And I knew things I couldn't even explain in human words. It was like being blind all your life and then suddenly you can see.

I ran over to Tobias and sniffed his shoe. I wanted a better idea of who that big male dog was.

From the scent of his urine picked up by Tobias's shoe I got a sort of picture of him. See, Homer knew him. His owners called him Streak. He was neutered, like me. He spent most of his time in his yard, but he broke out sometimes by digging under his fence. He got a mix of canned and dry food, Purina. No table scraps, unlike me.

All this information made me happy all over again, and I had to wag my tail. I looked up at Tobias. He looked tall and strange and not very colorful, I wasn't all that interested in looking at stuff. Smelling things was way better.

INTRUDER!

There was a noise in the yard. A dog! An unknown dog in MY yard. An INTRUDER!

I ran to the window and perched against it and cut loose.

"Rrrawf! Rrawf rrawf! rrawfrrawfrrawfrrawf!"

I barked as loud as I could. No WAY some unknown dog was just going to walk through MY yard.

"Jake, get a grip," Tobias said. "That's Homer out there."

Homer? What? But I was . . .

I tucked my tail between my legs. What was going on?

"Jake, listen to me," Tobias said. "It's just what happened to me when I morphed into a cat.

The dog brain is part of your brain now. You have to deal with it."

"But . . . there's a dog in MY yard."

"That's Homer, Jake. You are Jake. You're just in a body copied from Homer's DNA. That's the real Homer out there. You put him out there. Focus. You are Jake. Jake."

I took several deep breaths. The smells! Oh, boy, there was this one smell I couldn't quite - Focus, Jake! I ordered myself. Focus!

Slowly I calmed the dog part of my mind.

34 Let go of the smells. Let go of the sound of a dog out in your yard.