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Alan’s desire to communicate, the skug once again set a forest of tendrils to waving upon its surface. A chorus of tiny whistles emanated directly from the mound. Listening to the wavering rhythms, Alan again imagined thoughts taking shape in his sensitive mind. The skug was keying on Alan’s brainwaves and his morphonic vibrations.
    Mouth open in a lopsided grin, Alan did a slow-motion Indian dance around the skug, raising and lowering his legs, patting his hand against the mouth in a war whoop. He felt awed by the strange beauty of the room as sensed through the morphonic circuits of the human-sized skug. But he was careful to maintain a distance of at least two meters between himself and the beast.
    Despite Alan’s sense of mental contact, the skug didn’t have much to say. Certainly it was grateful for the big meal. It seemed as if Pratt’s personality was no more. Alan concluded that the skug’s still rather rudimentary biocomputation was irreversible. For him to put a piece of the skug on his face at this time would be to suffer annihilation.
    Further tweaks were needed, and there was no time like the present. Alan resolved to continue treating the man-sized slug with the healthful and educational rays that emanated from his radio circuitry. Aiming his disk antenna towards the mound, he cranked his transmitter to full power. He taped two disks of foil to his temples by way of giving the system an input device.
    As night fell, Alan played telepathic tutor—thinking through the details of his epochal result on the unsolvability of the machine-halting problem, and mentally reviewing the partial differential equations that had appeared in his Transactions of the Royal Society paper on morphogenesis. Hopefully the arcane knowledge was hitting home.
    Alan might have done more, but now the skug arose from its torpor. It tightened up its body and slid across the floor. A lisping chorus issued from the myriad of snouts upon the thing’s surface—perhaps it was saying goodbye.
    “Wait,” called Alan, his voice harsh in the dark room. “I still need a sample of you for designing my cure. I still need to fix my face.”
    The skug extruded a meaty tentacle that waved in the air like a lariat. The base of the pseudopod pinched itself off. The liberated half-kilogram of skug-flesh dropped to the floor and formed itself into a compact sausage.
    And now, flowing like lava, the bulk of the skug progressed onto Alan’s balcony and began drizzling off the edge and into the filthy back alley below. Wanting to keep his distance but driven by curiosity, Alan went out on the balcony to watch.
    The dripping skug-flesh was rising into a pair of stalagmites in the dim alley, two slanting limbs that joined at waist height tips and grew higher, slowly taking on the rudimentary form of—a naked man? A semblance of Pratt. The skug may have erased Pratt’s personality, but, via the cells’ genetic codes, it knew the man’s shape. Jiggling at the waist, the skug-man waved a chubby arm and wobbled off.
    Would Pratt’s masters come looking for Alan again? It was past time to abandon this apartment. Using tongs, Alan maneuvered the remaining sausage of skug into a cloth sack. He knotted the top for safekeeping. Somehow he’d get a passport with a different name. But of course this all would be in vain if Alan couldn’t heal his rotting Zeno face!
    He bundled his radio equipment and a sampling of his home-brewed chemicals into a pillowcase. He cut his Zeno Metakides passport into pieces and burned them. He thumbed through the bills from Pratt’s wallet.
    He needed to fix his face, obtain a passport, and get aboard a ship. And for the short term, he needed a human ally. Someone dodgy, low-down, shameless. As if running on automatic, his mind turned to William Burroughs—the attractive oddball writer chap whom he’d met at the Café Central this summer. A Harvard man and a morphinist, Burroughs had a wonderfully jaundiced view of the