Buck can back-trail him from there, find out where he’d been, in that direction. Dunno it’ll tell me anything, but I want to know.”
“I’ll go with you,” Garner said. “Might as well. Don’t feel like working and I guess you’re the same way. Wait till I tell Maw.”
Gus Hoffman waited for him, and the two men started off.
The mind thing wasn’t worried, but he was annoyed with himself for having panicked and killed his first, and thus far only, human host. Subsequent and calmer thought showed him that it hadn’t been necessary. He had to lead them away from the cave, yes, but after that there had been no need for him to make his host kill himself. After he’d led them a safe distance he could have fallen and pretended to be asleep or unconscious when they reached him. When they awakened him he could have been surprised to find himself there, especially to find himself naked, and he could have remembered nothing since going to sleep beside his girl at their trysting place. True, his case would not have been diagnosed as simple amnesia, not after running away from his father as he had, but, it would still have been called only temporary insanity. They wouldn’t have locked him up in an asylum for that, which had been the thought that had made him make Tommy destroy himself—incarcerated, he would have been completely valueless as a host; also, he knew from Tommy’s mind that mental institutions take elaborate precautions to prevent their inmates from committing suicide, and he might have been stuck in Tommy’s mind for quite a while. And an unsuccessful attempt at suicide might have got him into a padded cell, which would have made it impossible.
But he realized now that they would not have incarcerated Tommy, not for one brief period of temporary insanity. They’d have watched him for a while, but not too closely or for too long, if he seemed again perfectly normal. There’d have been a talk with the doctor, of course, and he would probably have recommended taking Tommy to a specialist, a psychiatrist. But that would be good because, since there were no psychiatrists in Bartlesville or even in Wilcox (that Tommy had known of), it would have meant a trip to Green Bay or possibly even to Milwaukee. Either of those places would have a public library large enough to be worth while for him, and if he could have had some free time—or even have made a getaway for a while, if accompanied—he could have made at least a good start on learning some of the things he would have to know.
Yes, as Tommy’s mind would have expressed it, he had goofed. However, he couldn’t blame himself too much. It is tremendously difficult to understand immediately all the ins and outs of a completely alien world, a completely alien culture, Especially since thus far his only concepts of that world, beyond his immediate range of perception, had come from the mind of a not too bright, not too well educated high school boy who had taken no interest in any serious subject except farming. Tommy would have made an excellent farmer.
The main disadvantage of his present position, safe though he thought it was, was the fact that from here it would be almost impossible to get another human host. Men came through these woods, usually to hunt, but the chances of one happening to go to sleep near enough, within the forty-yard extreme range of his perceptive sense, were remote.
To get his next human host he’d have to use an animal host first, to transport him near enough to a place where a human would be sleeping. There would be risk in that, during transport, but it was a risk he would have to take. And, although he had actually not encountered as yet any animals within his range, he’d learned from Tommy that there were such animals, several of them. A deer could carry him easily in its mouth; so could a bear. There might be air transport, too. A chicken hawk, since it could carry off a chicken heavier than he was, would be ideal. An owl might serve; Tommy had known that owls swoop down on mice and fly off with them, but he’d had no clear idea of how heavy an object an owl could fly with.
On the whole, he thought, a bird would be best. A deer or a bear might have trouble with fences, and if there was a dog in the farmyard it would bark and waken the household. But a dog would not notice a chicken hawk circling down in the middle of the night to leave something on the roof. Then, as soon as the hawk had flown away and killed itself or got itself killed, he would have his choice of hosts among however many people would be sleeping in the house. The first act of his new host would be to retrieve the mind thing’s corporeal self from its exposed position on the roof and put it in a safe place of concealment.
There was no hurry; this time he would think every detail through and make no more mistakes. Besides, no owl or chicken hawk had as yet come within his perception range.
Nor a deer nor a bear. Only field mice, rabbits, and other small creatures had as yet passed within range.
But he had studied them, each of them. One can never tell when a small animal might, for some special purpose—burrowing under a wall, for instance—make a better host, temporarily, than a larger one.
Once he had studied an animal inside and out—studied it himself, not just examined the concept of it in a host’s mind—he could get himself a host of that species at any distance up to about ten miles, provided that one was sleeping within that range. Having studied a rabbit, for instance, he had only to concentrate on the concept of a rabbit, if one was sleeping within ten miles or so—the nearest one, if there were several. Once a hawk had flown past within his range—no matter at how fast a speed—he’d be able to get himself a hawk for a host any time he wanted one, if it was during the night when hawks slept. Sooner or later hawk, owl, deer, bear would come within range; he’d have himself a wide variety of potential animal hosts.
Things would have been easy for him—there’d have been no problem at all to speak of—if the same thing could have been done to highly intelligent hosts—which in the case of this planet meant human beings. Such creatures automatically resisted being taken over, and there was always a mental struggle sometimes lasting for seconds. To win he had to use all his power and to have the creature, the individual creature, within the limit of his senses of perception. And, of course, asleep.
That had been found to be true on almost all the inhabited planets which his species had visited or occupied. But there were rare exceptions, and during the night he had experimented to make sure Earth was not one of them.
He tried a field mouse first, concentrating on one by using the one which had been his first terrestrial host as a prototype. Annoyingly, it took him almost an hour to kill it so he could get his mind back into himself. First he had tried running it head-on into a tree and then into a stone. But it was so light, had so little inertial mass, that even against the stone the impact had served only to stun it momentarily. It couldn’t climb well enough, he discovered, to get sufficiently high into a tree for a fall to kill it. He had taken it into the open, into a patch of bright moonlight, and had run it in circles there, hoping that the movement would draw the attention of an owl or some other nocturnal predator. But no predator seemed to be around. Finally he did what he should have done in the first place: he examined its thoughts and memories, such as they were. And he learned that there was water nearby, a shallow brook. The field mouse had immediately run toward it and into the water, and drowned itself.
Then back in himself in the cave again, he made his second experiment. He knew that there would be men sleeping within a few miles, past the edge of the woods to the south. Within ten miles in that direction was the town of Bartlesville where hundreds of men would be asleep. Using Tommy as his prototype, he concentrated on
He made one further experiment. With some intelligent species it was possible to take over one at a distance if, instead of concentrating on the species, one concentrated on an individual, one which had already been studied and memorized. After studying Tommy, but before entering him, he had studied the girl Charlotte, inside and out. He tried concentrating again. And again nothing happened.
Although he couldn’t have known it, Charlotte wasn’t asleep as yet; she had gone to bed but was still crying into her pillow. But that didn’t matter because it wouldn’t have worked if she had been sleeping; mankind was no exception to the general run of intelligent creatures in respect to the distance at which he could make one his host.
After that he had rested; not sleeping, for his species never slept, but postponing further active thinking and planning. In any case he would have to wait until he had had a chance to study more useful potential hosts than the rabbits, field mice, and other small creatures which were all that had thus far passed within his ken. No larger creature came that night.
But now he heard—felt the vibrations of—something large coming his way. Two somethings, he decided— then three. Two bipeds and a quadruped, but one much larger than a rabbit. He concentrated his perception to its
