The small degree of control his electroprobes gave him permitted him to put the pod down in a small clearing, instead of in the treetops. But his control wasn't enough to stop him short of—or carry him past—the area which his mental map marked as psychivore country.
In trying to put as much distance as he could between himself and these spooky monstrosities, he had landed himself precisely in their midst.
He wanted to cringe down out of sight in the pod the instant it bounced to a halt, but he knew he couldn't do that. The tracer-bleep was doubtless on the job, guiding the rescue clopter toward him. He couldn't have those guys following him down here, where a casual glance around could cost them most of their souls and leave them with the evil-eye affliction.
He took a deep breath, threw back the dome cover, and scrambled to the ground, digging in his pockets for a thin ten-minal coin to use for a screwdriver. He undogged the hull patch that protected the antenna assembly and let it fall to the ground. He peered in at the connectors, radiants, and safety switches for an instant, and found them as Mead remembered. With shaking hands he unscrewed the stops on two switches, flicked them into OFF position, and then climbed hurriedly back into the pod and re-closed the dome.
He realized that, in sparing the rescue squad from the perils of landing here, he had cut off any hope for help for himself. And the reasons why he had gotten himself in this predicament now seemed very trivial compared to his need to be elsewhere.
With mounting distress he considered what he had just done. He had landed, gotten out, killed the tracer-bleep, gotten back in, and was now staring fixedly at the mount panel. Not once had he dared to raise his head and glance around!
He had never had to act like that before. He, Cargy Darrow, who took fruit away from the dangerous but easily-killed jokone bushes without using electricity, and who stunned the deadly swerlemin tree only a limb at a time!
But he knew how Mead had been: he had the memories of all those nothing-years to remind him he had rather be dead—or even in a rescue home for life—than to be like that.
So, even though he was thirsty and getting hungry, he did not raise his eyes and run the risk of meeting the soul-devouring glance of a waiting psychivore. Finally he closed them, reclined his seat, and fell into a fretful sleep.
It was dark outside when he woke, and the question came to his mind immediately: Can a psychivore feed in the dark?
It didn't seem likely, judging from Mead's experience. There had to be sight to establish that eye-to-eye rapport—not that there was anything special or magical about the photons that made this contact possible, but the caught glance seemed to be a necessary first step, a preliminary that set up whatever kind of bridge it took for soul-stuff to pass over.
Or did the psychivores have vision that extended into the infrared, so they could feed at night?
Cargy wished with chagrin that his Mead-memories had never heard of infrared. Because he had to get out of the pod and trim it down to something flyable, and he didn't want to think about that infrared business while he did so.
He raised the dome cover and slid to the ground, where he paused and listened attentively to the night-sounds. He heard no noise he couldn't identify as normal. With a shaky sigh, he went to work.
The difficulty of his task soon took his mind off the psychivores and he felt better. Space shielding on a pod was supposed to be removable in emergencies, but it was hardly ever done, so naturally the manufacturers didn't bother to make it easy. With the proper tools he could have stripped the vehicle quickly. His Mead-memories knew just how to do it. But a coin was a poor excuse for a power-driven lock-tip screw driver, and the cutting-torch mode into which his electroprobes could be snapped was never intended for slicing the tough, heavy bolts that held the shielding in place.
But little by little, the shielding came off and dropped to the ground with heartening weighty thuds.
The glare of his cutting torch kept Cargy from noticing the growing light as dawn arrived. He had finished the stripping job and was ready to run makeshift manual control lines into the pod's cabin when a sound froze him. It came from behind him, and not many feet away.
It was a sound firmly ingrained in his Mead-memories—the peculiar barking grunt of a psychivore!
With it came a flood of recall. It was an ample key to Mead's occluded memory of his long-ago encounter with such a creature. Cargy now knew what he would see if he turned around . . .
It was more like a limbless trunk of a young tree than a giant snake, he decided. The snake part was at the bottom, and was really the mobile taproot which the creature had pulled out of the soil when it reached the stage of going one better on the rest of Merga's active plant forms, and became locomotive. The old taproot was its one "foot", and was used much as an Earthsnake used its whole body to wiggle along.
But most of the psychivore's length stood erect, very like a sturdy tree trunk some eight feet tall. It had a top-heavy look, as it terminated in a globular head roughly the size of a man's, but a head that had no mouth or snout. In a line down the center of its "face" was a single green eye, plus one ear orifice and one nostril orifice.
With its total lack of bifurcation, it probably lacked the hemispheric brain division found in the higher animals of all planets, but the psychivore was obviously not an animal, anyway.
After a motionless second, Cargy continued with his work, never letting his eyes stray from what he was doing. After all, Mead had thought a psychivore's eye was its only weapon, so if he didn't look at that eye . . .
Two overlapping barks stiffened him with the realization that more than one of the monsters were present. He tried to work faster with hands that felt numb and clumsy.
Frantically, he scanned his newly revealed Mead-memories for some clue that would tell him how to defend himself. Surely in all those years Mead had thought of . . . something!
But he hadn't. Instead, Cargy found a very convincing theory that, in order to become locomotive, a plant had to become a psychivore as well, because a motile plant was necessarily wasteful of life force. So a plant that actually "walked" would have to feed on life force of other creatures, and animals would have the most plentiful supply.
In fact, the psychivore Mead had encountered had been the master of a herd of bovine-like animals that it apparently "milked" of life force. It was from landing his flyer to investigate this herd that Mead had run into the psychivore in the first place, and . . .
Cargy thrust the useless memories aside, because the barks were coming closer. They sounded persistent, as if they were demanding that he look up. They were so near that he could hear their wriggling feet swish the grass.
Then he was bumped from behind, as if he had backed into a small tree trunk.
Grimacing with alarm, he poked blindly behind him with his electroprobes and made contact. There came a whooshing moan and a retreating rustle in the grass. An instant later he heard the other psychivores (there seemed to be three altogether) also drawing back. He stopped working to listen intently. Yes, the monsters were no longer barking—they were giving up their attack and leaving!
Cargy grinned, his confidence suddenly restored. Those things had never run into an animal like him before! His hands were swift and sure as he finished rigging his makeshift controls.
But he didn't dare forage for food and water. Instead, he got the pod in the air as quick as he could and began flying slowly toward Port City while getting the feel of the controls.
He was not too worried about being spotted by the rescue squad. Their search would be far from psychivore territory, in the area where his flight path over Port City would have carried him. So he felt safe in raising the pod to an altitude of three miles to take a look around. His Mead-memories picked out a few landmarks which enabled him to get his bearings more accurately.
Just as he started easing down toward a more comfortable altitude, he caught a glimpse of a structured shape a few miles off his course to the south. A square shape, like a laid-out farm field. Curious, he angled the pod in its direction and continued to decrease altitude.
When he flew over it, there was no room for doubt in his mind. Below him, and right at the edge of what his Mead-memories identified as psychivore country, was a farm!
It wasn't anything fancy, but for any man to build the roughest sort of homestead in such an isolated and perilous place meant he had to be quite a guy in Cargy's way of thinking.
Circling at about one thousand feet, the boy studied the layout. There was only one building he could see, and that was a large, low shed-like structure near the center of the field. He could see large animals of some kind, looking like black blobs from above, moving out of the structure to wander about rather aimlessly, like cattle starting a day's grazing.
But what struck him as more interesting and more understandable at first glance was a log fence that enclosed the entire field, which must have been close to twenty acres in size, without a gate or any other kind of break. That fence, he realized, would not only keep domesticated animals in; it would keep psychivores out!
A psychivore could not climb a fence, nor jump over one. Maybe it could crawl under one that left crawling space at the bottom, but this fence did not.
Suddenly it struck Cargy how much work had to go into building such a fence, and keeping it maintained. A log in the Mergan wilds didn't hold together for very many years, even when it was well dried and off the ground. And that big shed probably was a continual repair problem, too, with its roof made out of some kind of thatching.
Whoever ran this farm had to be a hard worker.
Cargy brought the pod down in the field across a small stream from the shed and grazing animals. He climbed out and looked around. Nobody was in sight.
"Hello!" he shouted.
He listened to the silence for a moment, then ran down to the creek, dropped to his knees and drank deeply. With a sigh of pleasure he stood up and wiped his mouth while studying the cattle.
He recognized them. They were the same species of animal Mead had seen in the psychivore's herd!
He couldn't guess what use they would be to a farmer. Humans had yet to find a Mergan animal that was good to eat.
Reminded of food, he turned his attention to the grove of trees a short way down the stream and well inside the fence. After yelling some more and still getting no answer, he walked to the grove and began looking for fruit or seedpods, preferably the latter since they had more protein. His luck was good. He had not gone far when, carefully skirting an excitable benderbud clump, he came onto a fragbark missilenut that was loaded.
He studied his terrain for a few seconds and picked out a place under the tree where the ground was hard and free of brush. Standing well clear of the chosen spot, he picked up a fallen branch and took a precise poke with it at the missilenut limb which hung directly over the spot. At his touch, the limb twanged with a sudden release of vibrational energy, and a bombardment of nuts zinged to the ground. The whole tree quivered alertly for a few seconds, but Cargy did nothing else to stir it up, so it became quiescent.
Eagerly the boy gathered the nuts, not many of which had hit the ground with enough force to bury themselves completely out of sight. With mouth and pockets full, he had started out of the grove when his eye caught something that looked wrong. He stopped.
Evidently it was something the farmer had done. An uprooted sapling of some kind, with a couple of roots growing ridiculously high on the trunk, had been left leaning against a dead sackle tree. He walked closer. Why, he wondered, would a farmer bother to pull up a tree, or leave it leaning there?
"Don't knowledge me!"
The boy jumped back in alarm. The voice had come from the sapling!
"Please don't," it begged. "Please go away. "
The sound was muffled, and like a whispered bass. The enunciation was clear, but was not supported by enough vibrations per second to give the voice much body.
A talking sapling was almost as spooky to think about as a psychivore, but after the first startled instant Cargy wasn't about to leave. Anything that pleaded with him to go away couldn't be much threat.
"I won't hurt you," he said. "Looks like the farmer has given you all the trouble you can use."
"He wasn't a farmer," the sapling replied. "He was an explorer named Mead."
This made no sense at all! "Who—what—who are you?" Cargy demanded.
"A harmless herder, self-exiled from my kind," came the sad soft rumble, "to avoid afflicting them with madness worse than my own."
Cargy began to see the light, he thought. "Did Mead 'knowledge' you? Is that what's wrong?"
"Yes."
"But how? He did it to me, too, but you've got to have eyes for that to happen. And you haven't."
"But I have. One eye, at any rate. You don't see it because I'm hiding my head in this hollow tree trunk."
Cargy gulped. "You're the . . . psychivore!"
"The what? Oh. Yes. I could be so classified, if one is concerned about the manner of my nourishment. Will you please promise not to knowledge me?"
"H-hold on, while I figure this out," Cargy replied.
He hadn't paid much attention to that part of Mead's memory of the psychivore before, but obviously the creature had not come away from the encounter unscathed. Cargy recalled now that Mead had watched with amused, little-souled indifference as the creature went into a fit after it had nourished on him. Instead of walking away, it had dragged itself, root-foot first, out of the man's sight.
As part of its meal off Mead's soul, it had obviously gotten the total, indigestible sum of his knowledge as well. It wouldn't be quick to dine on another human!
"How did you get those upper roots, and a voice?" Cargy asked.
"From Mead's knowledge. The arms allowed me to construct a fence, to protect others of my kind from contact with me. The voice I developed in case I met another human, to beg him not to knowledge me again."
"You just wanted arms and a voice and, got them?"
"Not at all! Much time and energy was required. Mead's knowledge defined the necessary structures."
"And you built the barn for your cows?"
"Yes. I used such as I could of the knowledge forced upon me."
"Okay," said Cargy. "I've got it straight now. I won't knowledge you if you don't try to nourish on me. If you do, you get knowledged automatically. Understand?"
"Yes." The psychivore wriggled its foot back from the dead tree and freed its head from the hole. It turned and gazed solemnly at the boy. He gazed back, and nothing happened.
The boy grinned: "We don't look much alike, but we've got a lot of stuff that's the same in our heads."
The two of them strolled out of the grove and toward the shed, chatting of such things as the diverse habits of Mergan vegetation and of Mead's life subsequent to his meeting with the psychivore. After a little mental searching, Cargy came up with the name Barkis for his new friend, and the psychivore (after consulting the same memories as Cargy's) agreed that it would be satisfactory.
It was particularly interested in Mead's theories about itself, and Cargy described these in considerable detail. Soul-stuff, Mead had thought, drifted like an insubstantial fog from Merga's motile plants, and was doubtless absorbed in great quantities by the grass-munching herd animals of the psychivores. After an animal had been "milked" its nature was such that it soon recaptured its normal supply.
Barkis agreed that Mead's theories fitted with what the psychivores knew of themselves and their animals. In the shed, where comatose herd animals were sheltered until they recovered from a "milking", Cargy watched Barkis take nourishment. Then they wandered back outside.
"Something I don't understand," complained the boy. "Your folks talk mostly by exchanging bits of soul, you say, and when you do, one of you learns everything the other knows that he didn't already know. What's already known to both sort of cancels out in the exchange. You were used to getting knowledge the way you got it from Mead, so what bothered you about that was getting too much strange knowledge at once, wasn't it?"
"Yes."
"Okay. What I want to know is, why do you think the other psychivores would go crazy if you communicated with them? You didn't go crazy, or at least not for long."
"But I did, and I'm still thoroughly insane," Barkis replied.
"You don't seem like it to me," Cargy said uneasily.
"But I am. My willingness to grow arms, and to construct artifacts, would be obvious evidence of insanity to my kind. And they would know, as I did not at the time, that the insanity is permanent. At the beginning I was sustained only by the hope that the aberrative effects would gradually fade away. One of my kind, communicating with me now, would receive at once the shock of a new-data overload plus the realization that the aberrative effects of it were permanent. It would be too much to take at one time."
Cargy nodded slowly. "But somebody," he said, "will have to communicate with them."
"Yes," agreed Barkis, "in the long run contact with humanity is unavoidable. But I am obviously unfit for the task."
"Me neither," said Cargy. "That ain't my line."
"Actually, it is the task of your Xenologists. I'm afraid you must inform them of us, Cargy."
"I told you why I can't do that," the boy growled.
After a silence, Barkis suggested, "Could you not inform them by writing?"
"They wouldn't believe a letter from me, no more than they'd believe me in person."
"But," said Barkis, "they would believe one from Mead. And only you know Mead is dead."
Cargy blinked. Then he grinned.
"Hey, that'll work!" he exclaimed. "My writing looks pretty much like his did, and I can leave it where his supply man will find it. Hey, I better start to Dappliner Valley right now, to get to work on it!"
Barkis approved, and slithered along with the boy to the autopod.
"When the Xenologists show up, don't tell them anything about me, Barkis," the boy urged in parting.
"I will keep your secret, but I hope you will return soon."
"I will, in a few years when I grow up. I have to watch my step till then."
And also, Cargy mused as he took the pod into the air, he was going to be too busy for much visiting for a while. He had to get that letter chore done, and then back to business, which he had been neglecting for a whole week already. And now that he had the pod for transportation in the wilds, he was going to be in a position to expand like mad!
Why, he could even take on a couple of Port City's snooty gourmet restaurants as steady customers! They ought to be glad to pay plenty to offer fresh wildfruit on their menus—probably priced at five times what they paid him for it!
Some guys, he mused with annoyance, will do most anything to make a buck.