As I stuffed things into my big battered Gladstone I found myself changing.

A cryptic statement, that, and one which requires explanation; yet how can I say just what it was like, this metamorphosis? At first I was the same creature that had crouched behind the false stalagmite and slain the guard, then had leaped from the second-story window to flee into the night. This was a—I was about to say a wholly physical being. That isn't true. There was brainwork of a sort behind its actions, but an alien brainwork. Could you understand the thoughts of an ape? Could you describe them if you did?

At any rate, I slid away from this physical being, imperceptibly, until Bill Cuff the prosaic pulpster seemed in the ascendant. Touching familiar things: my typewriter, sport shirts, cigarette lighter, a stack of manuscript—appeared to bring me back to what had all my life been normality.

Yet this creates the portrait of a sort of Jekyll-Hyde personality, an extreme example of schizophrenia. I would not have you believe this for a moment. I was not two souls warring in a single body, nor a lunatic of any sort.

No. I was not two people. I was a sleeper who had awakened in a manner not explained, not understood, but acceptable at once as quite natural. I found myself in a body which I had already been occupying for twenty-eight years and two months and seven days. There was no other personality in this body with me. The body was mine. The mind therein, fully developed along its own lines, was my mind.

The body and mind were mine, but the I—the older I—which had wakened was of somewhat different stuff. It had taken the body and mind (perhaps while I slept on the marble bench, perhaps during the brief argument with the guard), merging with them and dominating them. Yet the dual brain, the single body with new proclivities, were one, were all Bill Cuff. They differed but they were one.

I have said that before this night I had never even struck anyone. Yet there had always been the possibility that I might; might strike and slay, go berserk as I had now done. I had written many tales of brutal violence. Without my knowledge, there had been the seeds of savagery within me. They had flowered.

I looked in the mirror. I saw a well-set-up young fellow, a little broader than average for my six feet, heavy-boned, not much excess fat. My face was broad too, with high cheekbones and a small mustache and wide gray eyes, under an unruly thatch of thick black hair. I had a rather unintellectual look for a writer; it had always annoyed me. But I didn't look brutal. I had a sort of mild-mannered air, like a wider Jimmy Stewart.

In all that night I never questioned anything for more than a second or two until I came to pack my belongings. Then the lifelong habits and prejudices came back to make me ask myself for an accounting. No remorse, nor fear, nor any such weak emotions; simply curiosity at the changes.

What is it, I asked myself; reincarnation?

That would explain many things, including the paradox of two individuals in one—who were not two, had never been two, yet were different.

Postulate a gorilla, reborn in a man. His racial memories come to life after a certain period of time. He is still a man, has the reasoning ability of a man, is thoroughly Homo sapiens in everything, except that suddenly he can swing through the trees and can think in a manner strange to man—a furtive, sly, cunning, beastly way, if you like, but a way that will help to preserve him even in the stone jungles of man.

As I said this to myself, I caught at one phrase therein. Swing through the trees.

It was obvious that my physical powers had undergone a terrific change. I did not remember my hands ever being so powerful before. Never, certainly, had my reflexes been so flawless. Why, take but one instance: my leap from the second floor of the museum. That leap yesterday would more than likely have cost me two fractured ankles.

Superstitiously I looked in the mirror again and felt my muscles. Had they grown overnight, bulging out into the great biceps of whatever primitive entity had emerged within me? So far as I could tell, they were just my old muscles—not bad for a writer, because I swam a lot and did calisthenics regularly, but surely no marvels as muscles go. The change appeared to be in my use of them. Instinctively I could employ them in the most effective way. What could that be but a racial memory acting beneath the surface of the skin?

Other implausible explanations of the business occurred to me as I packed. I discarded them. Nothing seemed to fit except the abrupt return of a personality from eons ago, some great brute out of my lineage. That chimed with the curious recollection I had had in the cave, and with the accent I had several times put upon the word man to describe my enemies. A gorilla? I laughed to myself. An intriguing thought, indeed! I did not for a minute believe it. But what?

***

I caught the five A.M. train for another big city—never mind which. I had about two hundred dollars in my wallet, a fair selection of clothes and essentials in my Gladstone, and the portable typewriter in its beat-up case. For a while I was well enough provided for. I settled back in the reclining chair, watched the dawn come up beyond the windows of the train, and listened with half an ear to the whispering voice that was calling to me from the unknown.

An hour passed. I was drowsing, comfortably, my eyes shut. Then in an instant I was wide awake. Someone was watching me. I felt their gaze through my eyelids. As though moving in my sleep I turned myself around, opened my eyes the merest slit. It was the girl across the aisle. I observed her carefully. She was a pretty blonde, and yesterday's Bill Cuff would have been flattered to find her regarding him. Not I! A steady regard was a menacing thing.

I made sure she was alone. Then I opened my eyes wide and said, "Do I know you?" It flustered her. She turned pink and said confusedly, "I—I don't think so!"

I had one of those singular picture-thoughts, that seemed to come and go unbidden in my mind. I saw another female of this girl's race, whom I had taken from her people. I had desired her deeply, and later had trusted her more than I should.

She had betrayed me to her kin, and I had died.

For a moment I considered killing this woman. There were too many men all about us; I should have to flee instead. I stood up, gathered my Gladstone and typewriter, gave her a long hard look, and went forward to the next coach. She must have been completely baffled.

After a few minutes I grew restless. I was enclosed by the walls of this conveyance, and vulnerable to attack. We came into a small city. The train left it, moving slowly. I suppose it was waiting for another train some distance ahead to be shunted off its track. I could stand the confinement no longer. I put my machine under my left arm, took the Gladstone in my left hand. (Always leave one hand free for emergencies.) I went out to the platform between the cars. A conductor was standing there counting tickets.

"Shouldn't change cars with all that luggage, sir," he said. "Train rocks a good deal and it's dangerous."

He took a step toward me. I put up my hand to tear out his throat and realized that he was simply going to pass by. I pressed against the wall. He went into the next car. I would have to watch myself. Needless killing at this stage of my flight would only complicate matters. I swung down to the last step, waited for a level stretch of cindery earth, and dropped off. The train was going perhaps twenty-five miles an hour. I lit as easily, as safely as a leopard bounding from a tree. I began to think there was nothing I could not accomplish in the way of strength and agility.

I walked back into the small city. Instinctively I sought the lower districts—not Skid Row, but the tenements and cheap hotels of the poor. I took a room in one of the latter. I barricaded the door and put up a makeshift burglar alarm on the window sill: a couple of glasses, a water pitcher, other objects, all perched precariously on the edge so that nothing could come in without knocking them off and rousing me. Then I crawled into bed and slept for twelve hours.

In the evening I had a meal and the papers sent up to me. I read them while I chewed on leathery steak coated with half-congealed grease, and tiny potatoes as appetizing as the boiled eyes of iguanas.

The papers had it all. My name, life story, photos, even a list of the magazines for which I had written. Brutal Slayings ... Writer on Rampage ... Have You Seen This Man ... all the rest of the trite screamers.

Then I came to the local paper. It was thought I might be here. It was thought that the man who acted so strangely on the west-bound train that morning, and who vanished at a point several miles out of town, might have been Cuff the Murderer. Descriptions tallied. Tentative identification had been made from telephotos. My lip lifted in a silent snarl. The hounds were baying close.

I dressed and shaved off my mustache. I put on dark glasses and went out to a bar. The liquor tasted like water from a goldfish bowl. I walked the streets. About midnight a policeman gave me a second look, then called questioningly. I waited until he came to me, and then with savage glee I put him across my knee and broke his back.

I went to the hotel and stored up some more sleep, like an animal, preparing for the time when I should be fleeing or fighting around the clock.

***

It was some two hours before sunrise. I was dressing, packing leisurely. There was a knock at the door.

My light was on. I could not pretend to be asleep. "What is it?"

"Police sir. We're checking for a wanted man. Will you open up, please?"

I threw the last of my stuff into the Gladstone and shoved it under the bed. Putting my ear to the panel of the door, I listened for their breathing. There were two of them, and probably more within call, checking other rooms where a single man was registered. I tipped the shade of the lamp so that my face would be in shadow, and opened the door. They walked in, one of them diffident, the other as insolent as a thug, with his hand on his holstered revolver.

The second would be the less dangerous, I thought; he would be faster to draw that gun but more stupid in his reactions to a surprise than the other, who looked the more intelligent. So as they entered, turning to face me, I pushed the door shut with my heel and let the smart, shy one have a quick jab on the angle of his jaw to quiet him for a time. That left me the tough boy, and I looked forward to a good time with him.

He was fast on the draw. His gun was not buttoned down and it fairly flew out to cover me. I am big and make a fine target. His eyes were squinting at my chest where he expected to shoot me and he never saw my foot come off the floor. The gun exploded out of his broken hand and skidded across the room.

He was full of guts. He came at me with his one good hand and his knees and even his teeth. I did not want to be marked. I kept my face away from him and let him hit me twice in the stomach. Then I caught his wrist and flying-mared him over my shoulder. The crack of his skull against the wall was a burst of sharp sweet music. I grinned wide. Then I bent over the other policeman. I had hit him more scientifically than I had known. He wouldn't get up any more.

That made five.

Five murders! Five killings, using no weapons, just my hands, for five violent homicides!

I stood there in the center of that room, which I had made a gory shambles, and for the first (and last) time remorse touched me. I was Bill Cuff, law-abiding writer; if not exactly an altruistic dweller by the side of the road and friend to man, at least I had always been a normally decent guy who would go to a lot of trouble to keep from hurting anybody. What had happened to me?

A voice inside me said, But you are only killing men.

Men? But I'm a man, damn it all!

No, you aren't.

What am I, an orangutan? I asked myself with heavy sarcasm.

No, not that. No more kin to ape than to man.

An extraterrestrial, then, descendant of a flying saucer pilot?

No, not that either.

I put my face in my hands. Oh for the love of God, what am I then? What am I?

I knew I wasn't a man and I didn't know what I was.

The thing that was me, that had lain dormant until twenty-six hours before, and then had waked and taken over its rightful inheritance which was my body and my mind, what was it?

I didn't know what it was. But I knew a few things about it. It had once crouched in a cave with others of its breed, to listen to the angry yelling of hunting men. It had once stolen a human she and mated with her, and been killed by her treachery. It was master to an incredible degree of its sense and muscular equipment, even of its heart, which it could slew at will, and of its breathing, which it could stop entirely for fantastic periods of time.

It was rising in me now and it was I. Remorse died forever. Human traits and sentiments died that I could no longer remember ever harboring. I was I and though I did not yet know exactly what I was, I knew it was no fit of madness that had taken possession of me, no devil of the olden times to be driven out by exorcism, no second personality to land me in an asylum; but the soul that had come down through untold centuries hidden in my genes, traveling its recondite course through blood and flesh and brain matter until it woke again to conscious life in Bill Cuff in the early autumn of 1952.

The pictures I had seen thus far were racial memory, remembrance of a dawn world, and I knew there would be more of them. I would hold patience in my hands and wait till time brought full recall.