— Quester, Thinker said, don't take that tone of thought. The three of us are caught in a single trap — if it is a trap. I'm inclined to believe it may not be a trap, but a unique situation which will work to our advantage. We share one body and our minds are closer than any minds have ever been before. And we must not quarrel; we must not have differences, for we can't afford them. We must work together always. We must harmonize ourselves. If there are differences, we, must work them out immediately, we must not let them fester.

— That, said Quester, is exactly what I'm doing. There is a thing that bothers me. What happened to that first me?

— That first body, Changer told him, was biologically scanned. It was taken apart, almost molecule by molecule, and analysed. There was no way in which it could be re-assembled.

— You murdered me, you mean.

— If you want to call it that.

— And Thinker, too?

— Thinker, too. Thinker was the first.

— Thinker, Quester asked, do you not resent this?

— What good would resentment accomplish?

— That is no answer and you know it.

— I can't be sure, said Thinker. I would have to cogitate it. One must, of course, resent any violence done him. But I would be inclined to consider what has happened as a transfiguration rather than a violence. If this had not occurred to me I could never have existed in your body or touched your mind. All the data that you gathered from the stars would have been lost to me and lost most pitifully, for I'd never have known of it. And you, in turn, if it had not been for what the humans did, never would have guessed the significance of the pictures that you garnered from the stars. You simply would have gone on garnering them and enjoying them and perhaps not even wondered at them and I can conceive of nothing more tragic than that, to be on the edge of mystery and not even wonder at it.

— I am not so sure, said Quester, that I would prefer the mystery and forgo the wonder.

— But don't you see the beauty of it? Thinker asked. Here the three of us, all of us most different. Three types most distinctive. You, Quester, the roughneck and the bandit, Changer the cunning schemer, and I…

— And you, said Quester, the all-wise, the far-seeing…

— I was about to say, said Thinker, the fumbler after truth.

— If it will make either of you feel better, Changer told them, I'll apologize for the human race. In many ways I like them no better than you do.

— For good reason, Thinker said. For you are not human. You are something made by humans, you are an agent of the humans.

— And yet, said Changer, one must be something. I'd rather be a human than not anything at all. One cannot stand alone.

— You will not be alone, said Thinker. The two of us are with you.

— Still, said Changer stubbornly, I insist on being human.

— I cannot understand, said Thinker.

— Perhaps I can, said Quester. Back there in the hospital I felt something I had not felt before, something that no quester has felt for a long, long time. The pride of race, and, furthermore, a pride in the racial fighting spirit that was tucked away somewhere deep inside of me and that I had not known was there. I suspect, Changer, that my race, in the time of long ago, was as much upon the prod as your race is today. And it is a prideful thing to be of such a race. It gives you strength and stature and a great deal of self-respect. It is something that Thinker and his kind perhaps could never feel.

— My pride, if I had any, Thinker said, would be of a different kind and arise from different motives. But I will not foreclose there being many kinds of pride.

Quester jerked his attention to the hillside and the woods, alerted by a whiff of danger that had come snaking along the detection net that he had laid out.

— Quiet! he told the other two.

Faint, far off, he caught the indications and zeroed in on them. There were three of them, three humans, and in a little time more than three of them — a long line of them advancing cautiously, searching through the woods. And there could be, he knew, only one thing that they sought.

He caught the faint edges of their mind-waves and they were afraid, but they were also angry and filled with a hate-tinged loathing. But, as well as this fear and hatred, there was the sense of hunt, the strange, wild excitement that drove them on to find and kill the thing that was the cause of fear.

Quester bunched his body and half rose to dart out of the den. For there was, he thought, only one way to elude these humans — to run and run and run.

— Wait, said Thinker.

— They will be on top of us.

— Not for a time. They are moving slowly. There may be a better way. We cannot run for ever. We have made one mistake. We should not make another.

— What mistake?

— We should not have changed to you. We should have stayed as Changer. It was blind panic that forced us to make the change.

— But we had no knowledge. We saw danger and reacted. We were being threatened…

— I could have bluffed it out, said Changer. But this way may have been the best at that. They had suspicions of me. They would have put me under observation. They might have locked me up. This way, at least, we're free.

— But not for long, said Thinker, if we keep on running. There are too many of them — too many on the planet. We can't hide from all of them. We can't dodge them all. Mathematically we have so little chance that it is no chance at all.

— You have something in your mind? asked Quester.

— Why don't we change to me. I can be a lump, a nothing, something in this cave. A rock, perhaps. When they look into it they will see nothing strange.

— A minute, there, said Changer. Your idea is all right, but there may be problems.

— Problems?

— You should have it figured out by now. Not problems, but a problem. The climate of this planet. It is too warm for Quester. It will be far too cold for you.

— Cold is lack of heat?

— That's right.

— Lack of energy?

— Correct.

— It takes a little time to get all the terminology sorted out, said Thinker. It has to be catalogued, soaked into the mind. But I can stand some cold. For the common cause I can stand a lot of cold.

— It's not just a matter of standing it. Of course, you can do that. But you require great amounts of energy.

— When I formed that time in the house…

— You had the energy supply of the house to draw on. Here there is nothing but the heat stored in the atmosphere. And now that the sun is down, that is steadily becoming less and less. You'll have to operate on the energy that the body has. You can't draw on outside sources.

— I see, said Thinker. But I can form a shape to conserve what energy there is. I can hug it to me. If the change is made, I have all the energy that is in the body?

— I would think you would have. The change itself perhaps requires some energy exchange, but I suspect not very much.

— How do you feel, Quester?

— Hot, said Quester.

— I don't mean that. You aren't tired, are you? No lack of energy?

— I feel all right, said Quester.

— We wait, said Thinker, until they are almost here. Then we change to me and I am a nothing or almost a nothing. Just a shapeless lump. Best way would be for me to spread myself all around the cave, a lining for the cave. But that way I'd lose too much energy.

— They may not see the cave, said Changer. They may pass it by.

— We can't take chances, Thinker said. I'll be me no longer than we have to. We must change back as soon as they are past. If what you say is true.

— Calculate it for yourself, invited Changer. You have the data that I gave you. You know as much physics, as much chemistry as I do.

— The data, perhaps, Changer. But not the habit of mind to employ it. Not your way of thought. Not your ability at mathematics, not your swift grasp of universal principles.