On the nineteenth day, Alaree again met me in the corridor. This time our encounter was more brief. He plucked me by the sleeve, shook his head sadly and shrugged his shoulders, and walked away.

That night, he took to his cabin, and by morning he was dead. He had apparently died peacefully, in his sleep.

“I guess we’ll never understand him, poor fellow,” Willendorf said, after we had committed the body to space. “You think he had too much to eat, sir?”

“No,” I said. “It wasn’t that. He was lonely, that’s all. He didn’t belong here, among us.”

“But you said he had broken away from that group-mind,” Willendorf objected.

I shook my head. “Not really. That group-mind arose out of some deep psychological and physiological needs of those people. You can’t just declare your independence and be able to exist as an individual from then on if you’re part of that group-entity. Alaree had grasped the concept intellectually, to some extent, but he wasn’t suited for life away from the corporate mind, no matter how much he wanted to be.”

“He couldn’t stand alone?”

“Not after his people had evolved that gestalt-setup. He learned independence from us,” I said. “But he couldn’t live with us, really. He needed to be part of a whole. He found out his mistake after he came aboard and tried to remedy things.”

I saw Willendorf pale. “What do you mean, sir?”

“You know what I mean. When he came up to us and stared soulfully into our eyes. He was trying to form a new gestalt—out of us! Somehow he was trying to link us together, the way his people had been linked.”

“He couldn’t do it, though,” Willendorf said fervently.

“Of course not. Human beings don’t have whatever need it is that forced those people to merge. He found that out, after a while, when he failed to get anywhere with us.”