The Creatures of Man (30 page)

Then the trail, not smooth to start with, suddenly got rougher. The surface was corrugated by underground sackle roots. Mead grunted when Cargy tugged the wagon over one of the higher root bulges.

"The rooters ain't been working this part much," said Cargy.

"Probably a lone bull," Mead remarked.

"I guess so." Cargy studied the trail ahead uneasily.

Men had opened the Mergan trails, but maintenance was left mostly to the rooters, local animals that resembled Earth boars in many respects. The rooters had taken to the trails with alacrity, moving in family groups along territorial stretches about three miles in length, digging out and feasting on the roots which bordering trees kept extending under the open strip. The trails gave the rooters mobility and safety from plant attacks while allowing them to eat well. They had never had it so good before man came.

But their lives had imperfections. Sometimes a bull would lose his mate, or never succeed in getting one. Then he would turn psychotic and vicious. He would claim a mile or so of trail and defend it bitterly, not only against intruding rooters. Sometimes he would attack a passing human. And an animal who lived by digging roots out of the hard soil had to have natural tools that could function as murderous weapons.

If there was one thing in the wilds that Cargy really feared and hated, it was a lone bull rooter. True, he had managed to come away unscathed in the two encounters he'd had with the creatures, but with the handicap of having to defend old Mead as well as himself, he wasn't sure how a fight now might end.

And he couldn't even hurry through the dangerous stretch of trail. A maverick bull claimed more territory than it could keep eaten clean, which made the going slow and rough.

"I don't guess you got a gun, Mister Mead," Cargy said.

"No. It's been a long time since I needed one."

Cargy grimaced. The old man was no help at all. And that crazy bull had to be somewhere in front of them.

The confrontation came moments later. The boy heard an angry snort, and fifty feet ahead a large, battle-scarred rooter leaped into view. Its tiny eyes studied Cargy, then it repeated its snort and began approaching in a fast, short-legged trot, head held high and tusks extended.

Cargy dropped the wagon handle while he drew and electrified his knife. He took a few threatening steps toward the bull.

"Stay close to the wagon, boy!" Mead called out in a nervous quaver.

Cargy realized that he couldn't worry about Mead's safety at this instant. He had to fight the rooter the only way he knew how, and that would give the animal several opportunities to get at the old man. He had no idea if the rooter would take these opportunities or not.

The animal charged, zig-zagging very slightly as it came to confuse any evasive attempts by the boy. But Cargy's move wasn't merely sideways; it was mostly upward, the way a high-jumper lifts his legs high and to one side as he goes over the bar. As the animal sped underneath him, Cargy got his knife down in time to slash a shallow cut in the tough hide over the animal's hind quarters. The bull bleated in pain and rage and, as Cargy had hoped, it turned. Old man Mead was going to be safe on this first pass of the fight.

At such close quarters, and hampered by the uncertain footing, Cargy didn't have time to get set for another high-jump, but the rooter was too close for a zig-zag approach. Cargy was able to sidestep its charge, but had to let it pass on his left and couldn't get his knife across in time to do it any damage. He flicked a glance at Mead before whirling to face the animal again.

"Don't look at me!" called Mead. "Keep your eyes on the rooter!"

Good advice. In two passes Cargy had done the animal no serious damage. And a rooter, he was numbingly aware, took a lot of killing. This beast could take several slashes from his knife and go on fighting, but if it got a sharp tusk into any part of him
just once
, the battle would be over.

It was turning to come at him again.

"Hah!"
old Mead screeched.

The rooter's eyes shifted to the man in the wagon, and its gaze became fixed for an instant. Then it started behaving very peculiarly. It screamed as if being tortured. It lowered its head and shook its whole body like a wet Earthdog. It was breathing in hard, hurting snorts as it began running in a tight circle with its lowered tusks plowing furrows in the ground. That was nest-digging activity, and Cargy had never seen a male rooter do that before. It was as if the animal were trying to dig a hole to hide in.

The boy took a quick glance at Mead, and saw the old man had his hands on his goggles, like he had taken them off and had just finished putting them back on.

The rooter was now standing motionless, not looking at anything. Then it fell on its side and twitched. A moment later it stopped breathing.

"I . . . I think it's dead," Cargy said, feeling wobbly.

"Yes," said Mead, "it's dead. Can you drag it aside so we can get by?"

"Yeah." Puzzled and dazed, Cargy approached the rooter with caution, seized it by a foreleg and tugged it to the edge of the trail. The animal was thoroughly dead.

"Sit and rest a while, son," said Mead, when the boy returned to the wagon and reached for the handle. Cargy dropped to the ground, glad to be off his wobbly legs.

"W-what killed it?" he asked.

"Something it couldn't take," said Mead. "Something was poured into it that it couldn't contain. What happens to a paper bag if you try to carry hot coals in it?"

"The bag burns."

"But if you put the coals in a metal can?"

Annoyed by this simpleton-type questioning, Cargy replied, "The can gets hot."

"But it carries the coals," nodded Mead. "Well, son, the rooter's nervous system is a paper bag in some ways. It isn't built to hold certain things, such as rational intelligence. Pour in something like that, and the rooter's nervous system burns out, and it dies."

Cargy thought this over for a moment, then asked, "What's wrong with your eyes, Mister Mead?"

"You're a sharp lad," Mead approved. "You made the connection quickly. Yes, I killed the rooter by removing my goggles and looking it in the eye. It happens that my eyes are such that an unobstructed meeting of glances with any animal forces the animal to—so to speak—
read
my mind completely. The rooter suddenly had all my knowledge impinging on its nervous system, and no equipment in which to receive that knowledge and store it. So its system overloaded and collapsed."

Cargy nodded his acceptance of the explanation. He had never heard of mind reading before, but that didn't bother him. A first-comer, and one who wore cross-slitted goggles, might be capable of doing almost any strange thing.

"What if you looked at me?" he asked.

Mead winced at some old memory and said, "You would be a metal can, son. Your nervous system would heat up and warp, but you would hold my knowledge."

The boy sat up straight and his eyes were wide. To know everything a man like Thomis Mead knew! To have an Earth education, probably—maybe even remember what Earth looked like!

Cargy understood the value of education, and he was ambitious. With Mead's knowledge, why, he could do almost
anything
.

But there was that business about the metal can getting hot. And warping.

"Would it hurt much?" he asked.

"It would leave you insane," Mead replied expressionlessly. After a moment he added slowly, "It happened once, two days after I got the way I am. I didn't know it would happen, of course, and the first man I met . . ." His sentence trailed off, and he muttered: "Horrible. Horrible."

Feeling chilled and frightened, Cargy stood up, grasped the wagon handle, and resumed the trek toward Port City. After going a short distance they moved out of the dead bull's territory and onto smoother ground.

Over his shoulder Cargy asked, "Has anybody else got eyes that do like yours?"

"I hope not." Mead's response was weak and tired. "But it could happen. That's why I'm going to town, to warn the Bureau of Xenology. Ought to have told them decades ago."

Xenology? That, Cargy knew, meant stuff about native life. Had old Mead caught a new disease that did things to his eyes?

But why had he waited so long to tell the Xenology experts? That was not a polite question to ask out loud. For
anybody
on Merga, much less a heroic first-comer, to withhold information about a local-life danger was worse than criminal.

Mead tired rapidly as the afternoon wore on. Cargy saw he was on the verge of falling out of the wagon long before dark, so at the next widening he pulled off the trail to camp for the night.

He helped the man out of the wagon and let him rest while he attached his ground-needles to his defense batteries and carefully electroprobed out a small campsite, listening with his ear near the ground to the crackings and suckings as mobile roots were drawn back from the area between his probes. When he was satisfied that all dangerous roots were withdrawn, and all small plants within the campsite area were thoroughly stunned or dead, he put down a groundcloth and pitched his tent.

Mead said, "There's a foamsheet in my pack, son."

"Yes, sir." Cargy was pleased, because a foamsheet was almost like a mattress. He opened the man's pack and stared at its contents. "You got stuff to eat, too."

"Take whatever you need, son," the old man mumbled.

"I'll fix us a good supper," Cargy said, delighted with the thought of real canned meat to eat, instead of what he could forage in the way of native seedpods.

He got Mead settled comfortably on his half of the foamsheet in the tent. Then he opened various heatercans of Earthspecie meat and vegetables and spread the feast at the man's side.

They ate—the boy ravenously and the man with nibbles. "You ain't ate enough to go with, Mister Mead."

"All I can do, son," mumbled the man, heaving an exhausted sigh. Almost immediately he fell asleep.

Cargy studied the oldster with concern. An all-day journey still lay between them and the nearest of the farms surrounding Port City—farms where help could be found or summoned. Would the man be able to make it?

The boy wasn't sure. He had seen plenty of sick people, and injured people, and insane people, especially back during the war when he was just a kid. He could tell pretty well whether a person was too sick or hurt or crazy to live, just by appearance. But extreme old age he didn't know much about, and that was what seemed to be ailing Mead. He recalled hearing two men in town talking and laughing about some man who was so old he died suddenly because about a dozen things went wrong with him at the same time. Maybe old Mead was near that point. As a first-comer, he had to be awfully old, and that was for sure.

Unhappily, Cargy ate the remains of Mead's supper, rigged the camp's defenses, and went to sleep.

If anything, Mead was worse the next morning. The night's sleep may have rested him some, but it had drained his energy reserve even more. Also, it had stiffened him. He wouldn't try to eat anything solid, and only after using a discouraging amount of patience did Cargy get half a cup of liquidized nourishment into him.

The only prospect that kept Cargy from feeling sure of defeat was the hope that, getting closer to the city, he might meet a hiker or hunter or somebody else with a radio pretty soon.

He broke camp and drew the wagon up close beside Mead, who was still resting on the foamsheet. "Time to go, Mister Mead. Maybe I can help you get in."

"I'll need help," the man whispered, sitting up slowly. "Get behind me and help me pull up."

Cargy kneeled at the man's back, clamped his arms around his waist, and heaved. With a groan Mead pushed down with his arms and swung his body sideways to sit halfway on the rim of the wagon bed. "Now," he wheezed, "help me slide . . ."

As he shifted his weight on the bed rim, the wagon tilted toward him. He started to fall. Cargy tried to grab him again and hold him up, but the old man slid through his arms before he could get a grip. The old man slumped flat on the foamsheet with a look of intense pain in his eyes.

"I'm awful sorry, Mister Mead," said Cargy.

Mead glanced at him and said, "That's all right, son," but Cargy never heard the words.

His mind was a fearful hell-pit of pain and wild confusion. Identity screamed for existence under the smothering impact of other-identity. Nerves quivered with messages of pleasure and pain utterly foreign and totally unwelcome. Nerve centers were swamped with billions of information bits, with the tight interference patterns that, when in orderly array, compose the stuff of thought-imagery. These were unloaded at random, and necessarily in tremendous haste, wherever there were cells available and approximately appropriate for their storage.

Cargy fell, squirming and twitching, in the grass behind his wagon, breathing in irregular gasps, his eyes wide open and staring at nothing.

"Oh, my God!" moaned Mead. He fumbled at his eyes, from which the goggles had been raked by Cargy's arms as the boy tried to slow his fall. "Oh, my God!"

He studied the quivering boy for a few seconds with a stricken expression on his face. A strong, tough lad, well-muscled and broad-shouldered even in early puberty. A promising sharp mind. All ruined now.

"This might help," said Mead, unmindful of whether or not the boy could attend his words. "I don't know, but I've thought about it. It isn't automatic, like what just happened, but I think it can be made to happen. And this old hulk is finished, anyway.

"Life force can be
taken
, boy. I know that. It happened to me. So it ought to be able to be
given
. Perhaps with enough life force in you, you'll be strong enough to straighten out. Boy, look at me. Boy?
Boy!
"

With what physical strength he had left, Mead hitched himself over to Cargy's side. He slapped the boy's face, and saw the young eyes come to a focus.

"Look at me, boy!" he commanded. Cargy's eyes met his, and something immaterial shifted.

The body that had been Thomis Mead slumped down lifeless. Beside that hulk, Cargy Darrow's body lived. Its twitches gradually faded, its breathing became even, and its eyes closed. It slept . . .