One day as he was about to sleep, he felt someone else’s presence in his mind and he forced himself to stay awake. “Who are you?” he asked. “I demand to know who you are.” He heard the voice answer, “Well, who in the hell are you?” “My name’s Arthur. Who are you?”

Tommy.

“What are you doing here, Tommy?”

“What are you doin’ here?”

The questioning went back and forth in his mind.

“How did you get here?” Arthur asked.

“I dunno, d’you?”

“No, but I’ve bloody well got to find out.”

“How?”

“We must be logical about it. I have an idea. Lets you and I keep track of the time we’re awake, to see if that accounts for all the hours of the day.”

“Hey, that’s a good idea.”

Arthur said, “Make a mark inside the closet door for every hour you can account for. I’ll do the same thing. We’ll tally it up and check it with the calendar to see if all the time is accounted for.”

It wasn’t.

There had to be others.

Arthur spent every conscious moment working out the puzzle of the missing time and searching for other people who seemed too be sharing his mind and body. After meeting Tommy, one by one he discovered all the others, a total of twenty-three, including himself and the one the outside people referred to as Billy or Bill. He had learned through logical deduction who they were, how they behaved and the things they did.

Only the child called Christene seemed to have been aware, before Arthur, of the existence of the others. She could, he learned, experience what went on in their minds when they were conscious. Arthur wondered if that was a skill that could be developed.

He brought up the subject to the one called Allen, the manipulator who was always there to fast-talk himself out of a tight situation.

“Allen, next time you are holding the consciousness, I want you to think real hard and tell me everything that’s going on around you.”

Allen agreed to try it, and the next time he found he was out, he told Arthur everything he saw. Arthur visualized it until it came into focus, and then, with a tremendous effort, he was able to see it through Allen’s eyes. He discovered, however, that it worked only when he paid attention and when he was awake, even though not out in the consciousness. He had achieved his first intellectual triumph of mind over matter.

Arthur realized that because of his knowledge, he had become responsible for a large, diverse family. They were all involved with the same body, and something had to be done to create order out of what was proving to be a chaotic situation.

Since he was the only one capable of handling the task unemotionally, he would put his mind to it and come up with something that would be fair, workable and—above all—logical.

The kids at school teased Billy when he wandered around the halls in a daze. They saw him talking to himself behaving at times like a little girl, and they picked on him. One cold afternoon during recess, some of the boys started taunting him in the schoolyard.