attaches itself to Sam, using Sam's skills and knowledge to make a clean escape. Thoroughly under control, Sam uses the Constitution Club—whose membership includes many important members of the city's political elite—to gain more hosts for the slugs. The Old Man captures him, takes him to Section's new headquarters, and coerces Sam into allowing himself to be taken by the slug again. Under drug-induced hypnosis, Sam reveals that the slugs come from Titan, the sixth moon of Saturn. Being forced into a traumatic situation strains Sam's relationship with both Mary and the Old Man. Later, Sam finds that the president and Congress are ready to accept the idea that the United States has been infiltrated, and they pass a law that requires people to go naked to demonstrate that they are not carrying slugs. As the Army prepares a counterattack in the most heavily infested areas, Sam goes alone to Kansas City to get an estimate of the number of slugs involved. There he learns that he can kill a slug by crushing it with his hand. He also discovers that the slugs reproduce through fission—which means that there are far more of them than the Army realized when making its plans, and therefore the plan is doomed to failure. Escaping from the city, he returns to Washington too late to stop the operation, which fails; the invading soldiers are either killed or captured by the slugs, who thus gain control of a corps of trained combat soldiers. After a short leave, during which he and Mary get married and have a brief happy honeymoon—rudely interrupted by a slug that seems to have been targeting Sam for repossession. Recalled to ugly reality, Sam and Mary return to work. Together with the Old Man, they go to Pass Christian, Mississippi, to inspect a flying saucer that had made a bad landing. Inside the alien ship, Mary is overwhelmed by repressed memories from the time she was a child on Venus and had been possessed by a slug. The slug had died from Nine-day Fever, a deadly disease native to Venus, showing that the disease kills slugs faster than their human hosts. Adopting biological warfare, the authorities infect unsuspecting slugs with Nine-day Fever, then allow them to escape, having discovered they will transmit the disease to others. Several carefully timed days later, thousands of volunteers are parachuted into enemy-held territory to administer