Heinlein abordou isso até certo ponto no livro. Ele delineou três meios de comunicação, um dos quais é uma versão do outro. As lesmas podem se comunicar de host para host, diretamente ou de longa distância. Eles poderiam se comunicar de navio para navio ou de navio para a base, o que parece ser também uma comunicação de host para host. E eles poderiam se comunicar através de uma conferência de lesma a lesma.
No capítulo oito, ele escreve:
One of the disadvantages we worked under in serving our masters-or perhaps I should say one of the disadvantages our masters worked under-was the difficulty of long-distance communication. It was limited to what human hosts could say in human speech over ordinary communication channels, and was further limited, unless the channel was secured throughout, to conventionalized code messages such as the one I had sent ordering the first two shipments of masters. Oh, no doubt the masters could communicate ship-to-ship and probably ship-to-home-base, but there was no ship nearby; this city had been stormed as a prize-of-opportunity, as a direct result of my raid on Des Moines in my previous life.
Such communication through servants was almost certainly not adequate to the purposes of the masters; they seemed to need frequent direct body-to-body conference to coordinate their actions. I am no expert in exotic psychologies; some of those who are maintain that the parasites are not discrete individuals, but cells of a larger organism, in which case-but why go on? They seemed to need direct-contact conferences.
Ele também sugere que cada lesma pode ser uma célula de um organismo maior. Do capítulo dezenove:
They did do some direct experimentation which raised my opinion of them a little. Vargas ordered brought in a baboon who was wearing a slug and had him introduced into the cage with the gibbons and the chimps. Up to then the gibbons had been acting like gibbons, grooming each other and such, except that they seemed rather quiet-and kept a sharp eye on our movements. As soon as the newcomer was dumped in they gathered in a ring facing outwards and went into direct conference, slug to slug. McIlvaine jabbed his finger excitedly at them. "You see? You see? Conference is not for reproduction, but for exchange of memory. The organism, temporarily divided, has now re-identified itself."
I could have told him the same thing without the double talk; a master who has been out of touch always gets into direct conference as soon as possible.
Embora ele não especifique especificamente como foi tomada a decisão de cultivar uma carapaça blindada, é razoável supor que ela foi feita pelo superorganismo lesma. Pode ter trocado a memória lentamente, mas aprendeu e se adaptou.