A second effect of the shock on me, besides the brief unconsciousness, was a permanent disruption of my short-term memory, so that a period of some seconds, perhaps a minute, immediately preceding the shock, is still a blank to me.
A third effect, one with far greater consequences, was a temporary derangement of my entire memory, that is, amnesia. This condition persisted until a short time before I was actually rescued. The amnesia, as so often the case in individuals of our race, was accompanied by a heightened suggestibility, so that I was ready to accept without question the identity assigned to me by the natives with whom I first came in contact.
Strange as it may seem, this identity was that of a new life-form, experimentally created by the man whose equipment I had been inspecting when I was struck down. A concatenation of events made this seem to them the only possible explanation of my sudden appearance in their midst.
I am not sure whether the "creator" himself still believes that his experiment was an unqualified success; I do know that he has striven frequently to repeat it, and that his continued failures have at least begun to awaken some self-doubts in his heart. But I now know also, after having lived among them, that this race of our creation is given to strange and powerful dreams; that though physically smaller than we are, and ugly in our sight, they are more like us, indeed, than we in our creation ever expected or dared to hope that they might be; and that ultimately they may be the ones to provide for us the companionship we have long sought and lacked, as we continue to seek answers to the great unsolved questions of life and death, and of our true place in the Universe.