He decided to try his best to put the Hoffman case out of his mind until late tomorrow afternoon when, from Bartlesville, he could phone the laboratory for the report on Buck.
Then, if the dog bad had rabies, which would explain
He had one more can of beer to make himself sleepy, and went to bed. After a while he slept.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The mind thing was still in the hollow log. He had not had himself moved since the dog had put him there the day before, and then had killed itself by running in front of the car.
Since then he had taken only one host, and that for purposes of reconnaissance. He had wanted a better picture of the surrounding country, a better one than he had gained from Tommy’s mind. A bird’s-eye view. So just before dawn on his first morning in his second hiding place he had entered a crow (he knew it as such from the picture of “crow” that Tommy had had) while it was sleeping in a tree directly over him. He had tried the crow’s night vision but it had been poor, so he had waited until light and then had flown it far and wide, watching through its eyes. First to the road and along it, flying high, memorizing the exact location of every farmhouse he passed and, by correlating Tommy’s memories, knowing the number of occupants of most of them and roughly what kind of people they were. He flew east until the road ended. Tommy had thought that the last house there was vacant, but he had been wrong; there was a station wagon parked in the cleared space in front of it.
Then the crow had circled and gone back, following the road in the other direction, all the way to Bartlesville, passing the Garner and Hoffman farms on the way. He let the crow rest a while in a tree near the edge of town, and then flew him in circles over Bartlesville, again correlating Tommy’s memories with what he was seeing.
A radio and television repair shop interested him most. Surely the man who ran it would know at least something of elementary electronics and would therefore be a good host, at least for a while. But Tommy hadn’t known the man’s name nor where he lived, although he had known that he didn’t sleep at the shop. A lot of scouting would be required to learn that; and besides, with anything less than a human host to carry him, it would be highly dangerous for him to be carried into town and hidden somewhere where the repairman would sleep within his perception range.
When he had finished with the crow he had it dive and crash into pavement; there was no use in flying it back to the woods. And his mind was immediately back in himself, in the hollow tree.
And there his mind had stayed, but it had not been idle. He had, he found, been quite fortunate in one way in his choice of this second hiding place. It was deeper in the woods and in wilder country than the cave had been. Many more creatures passed within his ken, close enough for him to study them closely. Deer had passed, and a bear. A wildcat and a skunk. Many birds, including the two he knew of, which were large enough to carry him—an owl and a chicken hawk. Air transport by day or by night, when needed. From now on any one of those creatures could be his host any time he wanted one, as long as there was one of the variety he chose asleep within ten miles or so.
There had been smaller creatures, too, and he had studied them as well, when there was no larger one available at the same time for study. Snakes too, though they interested him little. They traveled slowly—and they died slowly. A hard-to-kill host was awkward. To be sure of killing one, he’d have to waste time crawling it to the road and waiting for a car. And even after that, even with a broken back, a snake could live quite a while.
So had passed the time until this afternoon, when something had happened, or had started to happen, that showed him he would soon have to make his next move.
He was getting hungry. More exactly, since he did not eat in the sense in which we think of eating, he was beginning to feel the need for nourishment. Time must have passed so rapidly for him back home before and during the furor that had led to his exile that he had not realized how long it had been, before his being sent here, since he had taken nourishment. This was something that he had to do only once every few months, and he had assumed that he had plenty of time to get himself established on Earth (once he had learned that there were intelligent creatures here) before he need worry about hunger; he had been wrong.
His species had evolved in water and had lived by absorbing microorganisms from the water directly into themselves; a digestive system had never been developed. When evolution had given them shells for protection the shells had been, despite their increasing strength, sufficiently porous to let them continue to absorb nourishment as before. Before developing shells their only protection against their natural enemies had been speed. On a light- gravity planet and in the buoyant medium of water their ability to levitate, to move in any direction, had been amazingly effective as a means of escape. That, and the sense of perception, had been theirs for as far back as they had been able to trace their own evolution.
The ability to control other minds, to make other creatures their hosts, had developed later, as their intelligence had grown. It had led the more intelligent among them to quit the deeps and live close to the shore, for evolution had proceeded in a different direction on land, and there were land creatures, who sometimes slept near enough a shore to be captured as hosts, who were much more suitable as such than anything the water had produced. They had
With the use of suitable hosts, the mind thing’s species had developed a civilization and a science. At first they themselves had had to stay in water most of the time and operate their hosts on land. Finally they had developed a technique that eliminated that difficulty. They discovered that an occasional immersion in a nutrient solution permitted them to absorb their needed nourishment a thousand times faster and more effectively than continuous immersion in water. Now, with the help of suitable hosts, they could live as far from water as they wished and satisfy their food needs by having their hosts immerse them for an hour or so in a nutrient solution once every several months. Some of them still lived in the sea but these were relatively primitive groups, as far removed in development from their more progressive contemporaries on land as an Australian aborigine or an African Pygmy is from an atomic scientist.
But the highly civilized groups of his species had been fed by occasional immersion in a solution for so many thousands of years that they had lost the ability to live solely on what nourishment they could absorb from water. Their situation was roughly analogous to that of a human being kept alive by intravenous feeding for so many years that his digestive organs have atrophied and he can no longer survive by taking food in the manner that was once normal to him.
The mind thing could have had himself fed in the woods, using animal hosts; it is what he would have had to do if he had found no intelligent species available. But doing so, he knew, would be a long and difficult operation, involving the use of a considerable succession of hosts, each best adapted—or least poorly adapted—for one particular part of the task.
A human host working in a normally stocked kitchen could prepare an adequate nutrient solution quickly. Its exact ingredients didn’t matter as long as it was rich in protein; his body would absorb only the things it needed and taste was no factor since he had no equivalent of a sense of taste. Soup stock, meat soup, or gravy would serve admirably. Even milk would serve in a pinch, although he would have to be immersed in it much longer than in a meat-rich solution.
Once he realized that he would have to take nourishment soon in any case, he decided that doing so at once and getting it over with for several months would be worth the slight risk of taking a human host sooner than he had planned to do.
He considered the choice of a human host for his purpose. Best would be someone living alone, someone who would not have to justify or explain his actions to anyone else if caught doing mysterious things in his kitchen in the middle of the night. But the nearest person he knew of living alone was Gus Hoffman, Tommy’s father, and his farm was at least twice as far as the nearest one. Every extra mile he had to have himself transported increased his risk. The nearest farmhouse was occupied by only two people, an elderly couple named Siegfried and Elsa Gross.
