About a mile farther on (Charlotte’s judgment of the distance had been just about right) Buck wandered slightly off the path and sniffed something.
Hoffman bent over to look. “Dead field mouse. Squashed. Come on, Buck, back to business.” He pulled Buck back to the path.
Garner said, “Charl told me about that—while we were waiting for you to come over. Didn’t seem important, so I didn’t mention it. But it means we’re right close to the place. I mean to the place where they—went to sleep.”
“What did she tell you about a field mouse?”
Garner told him. And then said, “Damn funny thing, a field mouse acting like that. Say, what if the thing was rabid? It didn’t bite Charl, didn’t break her skin, I mean; but Tommy brushed it off his pants leg. What if his finger hit its teeth and one of ’em broke the skin a little without his realizing it; would that account for—?”
“Hell, Jed, you know better than that about rabies. If Tommy was infected, it wouldn’t affect him this soon, or that way. It takes days.” Hoffman rubbed his chin. “Just the same, when we find Tommy I’m going to check his hands. If there’s even a scratch, we’ll pick up that mouse on our way back, and have it checked. Come on, Buck, get going again.”
Only about thirty paces farther on Buck turned off the path again and this time he didn’t stop to sniff anything. He kept going. He led them back to where some clumps of bushes made a solid wall and started to push his way through them. Hoffman parted the bushes and held his lantern forward.
“This is it,” he said. “His clothes are still here.” He stepped through and Garner followed. They stood looking down.
“God damn,” Hoffman said. “I’d hoped—” He didn’t finish the sentence. He’d hoped the clothes would be gone, that Tommy would have returned here after Charlotte had left. He didn’t know what that would have meant —since Tommy hadn’t come home—but it seemed less dangerous than the alternative, Tommy being out there somewhere and still naked, whatever else might have happened to him. At any rate, he was more frightened now than when he had first heard the girl’s story. The clothes looked so—empty. Until now this had seemed like a bad dream; it was becoming nightmare.
Buck was sniffing eagerly at the clothes and then at the grass where Tommy had lain. Then, circling, he started for the bushes, at a different point this time.
Hoffman let him through and went through behind him. “Come on, Jed,” he said. “He’s got the trail again, the way Tommy left.”
Garner said, “Shall I bring the clothes?”
Hoffman hesitated. “All right,” he said. “When we find him, he’ll need ’em and no use our having to come back.”
He waited, holding Buck back, until Garner had made a bundle of the clothes and rejoined him with them.
Then he started following the pull of the leash. Back to the path first and then off it at a diagonal, toward the north-west.
Buck was straining hard at the leash now. Not only was the trail fresher, but a man wearing only socks leaves a stronger scent than one wearing shoes. Also, on the path, there had been other if fainter human scents. Now there were none.
“Easy, boy,” Hoffman said, as he and Garner followed the straining dog.
CHAPTER FOUR
The mind thing rested now. He had neatly catalogued and indexed, mentally, everything in the mind of his present host.
He knew everything about this planet Earth that Tommy knew, which was enough to give him a rough overall picture. He knew its approximate size, although not in figures, and he knew that it was mostly salt water but had considerable land area too, in several continents. He knew roughly how the world was divided into countries and the names and approximate locations and sizes of the most important of those countries.
His knowledge of local terrain and geography was much better. He knew that he was in wild country, hunting country, but only about four miles north of the nearest town. Its name was Bartlesville, and it had about two thousand inhabitants. It was in a state called Wisconsin, which was a part of a country called the United States of America. The nearest large town, or small city, about forty-five miles to the southeast, was Green Bay. Something over a hundred miles south of Green Bay was Milwaukee, the nearest large city. And ninety miles or so south of Milwaukee was a much larger city, one of the largest, Chicago. He could visualize those places; Tommy had been to them. But no farther; Chicago was as far from home as Tommy had been. But Bartlesville and the country around it he knew very well. And that was good, for this area might have to be the mind thing’s scene of operations for some time. In addition to its geography, he now knew its flora and fauna. The flora didn’t interest him, but the fauna did. He had mental pictures now of all the creatures of the countryside, wild and domestic. And he knew their abilities and limitations. If he should have to use an animal host again he would know which to choose for the job at hand.
Most important, he knew that man was the only intelligent species on Earth, and that man had science, apparently a fairly advanced science. While Tommy’s knowledge of science was almost nil (he knew a little about elementary electricity, enough to wire a doorbell), he knew that science and scientists existed, and that (this was of major importance) science included electronics. The meaning of the word electronics was vague to him, but he had seen (and owned) a radio set. He had seen television. And he knew what radar did, if not how it worked. Where these things existed there was knowledge of electronics.
And the mind thing’s eventual goal was to obtain control of an electronicist, one who not only knew the subject but who had or could obtain access to equipment and components. It would probably take him several steps—several intervening hosts—to get there, but he knew now that it could be done if he planned properly. And he had to do it. He wanted to go home.
He came from a planet of a sun seventy-three light-years away, in the direction of the constellation Andromeda, a sun too faint from Earth ever to have been named, although it has a number in Earth’s star catalogues.
He had not come voluntarily; he had been sent. Not as a scout or as the spearhead of an invasion (although it could turn out that way if he could get back), but as an exile. He was a criminal. To explain what his crime had been would require the explanation of a social system so utterly alien to ours as to be almost incomprehensible; suffice it to say that he had committed a crime and that his punishment was exile.
He had not come in a spaceship. He had been sent along a—call it a force beam; that’s a poor description of it but is as nearly accurate as any other simple phrase, in our language, would be. Transmission had been instantaneous; one second he was in the projector back home, the next second he was lying beside a path in the woods north of Bartlesville, Wisconsin, having experienced no impact on arrival.
The planet of his exile had been chosen at random, and with no knowledge of whether it was inhabited or inhabitable, out of the billions of planets in the galaxy which his race had charted but had never got around to investigating; there were so many billion planets that they never would get around to investigating more than a small fraction of them. The reason why they were able to chart planets as readily as we chart stars was that their equivalent of a telescope, based on magnification of the sense of perception instead of the far inferior sense of sight, enabled them to “see” planets almost as far as we are able to see stars.
So now he was here, and now he wanted to go home. It was far from impossible, for two reasons.
First, he had been extremely lucky in having come to a planet that had not only reasonably intelligent beings, but a science and a technology, however inferior to his own. The chances had been, say, a hundred thousand to one against it. If he had been sent to an uninhabited planet, he would have been completely helpless. If to a planet that had life but had not yet developed intelligence (like Earth of a million years ago) he
