The Creatures of Man (31 page)

. . . But only briefly. The training of two minds warned it that the bare surface of Merga was no place for safe slumber. Cargy's eyes reopened and he crawled onto the foamsheet. For a moment he looked at Mead's body . . . the old body of part of himself . . . and knew it was dead. But that was all right. He slept some more.

When he woke again he knew he was alone, as he hadn't been when he crawled on the foamsheet. And he knew what had happened to restore his sanity. It was all there where he couldn't miss it, on the very top of his now neatly-ordered store of Mead-memories.

There was a life force, a soul, an energy, that survived physical death, the memory stated. This fact had been established as such for centuries, and suspected long before that. Just what became of the released spirit of a man was uncertain, debatable—perhaps because the spirit had a number of choices.

Mead had suspected that he could direct his own life energy into Cargy, where it would double the boy's own power to bring a return of order to his chaotic mind. And Mead had been right.

The reason Mead had been able to do so was that when Mead was a young man in the early days of the Mergan colony, he had met a
psychivore
.

A what? Cargy asked. A creature that devours the life energy—the psyche—of other creatures, his new memories supplied.

That encounter with a psychivore was the terrible thing that had happened to Mead when he was a young explorer of Merga. It was the reason for his retreat behind black goggles, and to the solitude of Dappliner Valley, with most of his soul-stuff gone and a doorway behind his eyes left dangerously ajar.

Cargy tried to get the old memory to come up clearly, but he could not. Over the years, Mead had not actually forgotten it, but had buried it nevertheless. What was available to Cargy amounted to a memory of a memory . . . with each step away from the original event vaguer and less complete than the one before. What Cargy found was little more than a verbalism instead of a picture, and the verbalism did not go into great detail.

During the moments while Mead's life force had cohabited Cargy's mind, Mead had attempted to remedy this situation but he hadn't had time. His spirit could not share the boy's nervous system long, especially after Cargy began regaining his sanity.

He had managed to make his intention plain: that Cargy should go to the Xenologists and give them the knowledge he had received concerning the psychivores. For that purpose, Mead had meant to put the entire recall of the psychivore encounter at the top of his memory-store.

But perhaps he had buried it too thoroughly to dig it out in the time he had. In any event, the only picture he had put in place for Cargy to examine was simply a map, pinpointing the habitat of the psychivores. It was deep in the interior of Merga's major land mass, far from the coastal regions which man—as was his wont—always tended to colonize first.

Sitting on the foamsheet beside Mead's body, Cargy tried hard, but briefly, to dredge up an image of the psychivore. He drew a blank, but the very effort made him feel weirdly uneasy, and he shivered.

That memory, he decided, was one he could do without. With a vast and valuable new education, most of it readily accessible to him, why fret over one frightening and occluded detail? But there was one worry he could not dismiss that way—the possibility that he had inherited Mead's "evil eye." He meant to check on that as quickly as he could.

Also, he had to get back down to business. The time he had lost trying to rescue Mead had kept him from meeting the spaceship due to land at noon. He was not going to miss the ship coming in day after tomorrow morning.

His Mead-memories told him not to make a fuss over the disposal of the old man's body. He removed the valuables from its pockets and stuffed them in the backpack to examine later. The body he dragged to the lower side of the clearing where he tumbled it out of sight among the sackle trees and bladebriar thickets. The vegetation would make good use of it.

When he was ready to hit the trail, pulling his almost empty wagon, he backtracked to the spot where he had first seen Mead. His bulging bundle of wildfruit was where he had left it, but sliverworms had gotten into the muskers, and the blues were too ripe to last another couple of days. But the other items he recovered in good shape.

He barely beat a family of rooters to the fruit. Minutes after he had reloaded his wagon and resumed his up-trail journey to find fresh muskers and blues, he met the rooters working their way down. The animals stared at him, and silently moved aside to let him pass. He had a charged probe ready, but didn't have to use it.

After he was past them he realized he didn't have Mead's "evil eye." The sense of relief hit him so strongly that he giggled.

Two mornings later he met the spaceship with time to spare.

At his usual spot outside the spaceport gate he got everything set up, arranging his merchandise in attractive assortment-packs, bribing his friends the gate guards with a few of his choicer fruits, and erecting his sign.

While he was out foraging, his sign rode face down in the wagon bed. Now he got it out and started to prop it up when the words on it caught his attention. He blinked as he read them for the very first time:

EKZOTIK WILDFRUT
Frash frum Merga Wildenes
Exsitin Tasti Trete
Miksed Asortment Pack
Onli 25 Minals
Garanteed Wont Make Yu Sik

It took him a moment to get over the enchanting discovery that
he could read
. Then annoyance came. He had paid a drunken crumbum 40 minals to paint the sign, and it was a mess of errors!

He knew how to paint a sign for himself now, but still, he had to admit, this sign sold wildfruit. A Mead-memory suggested that it was appropriate for a ragamuffin peddler, that it drew attention, amusement, and sympathy.

Cargy frowned impatiently. He could think up his own reasons for keeping this sign, without help from the Mead-memories. For instance, the gate guards and other people he knew in town thought the sign was made for him by a ne'er-do-well father, and he didn't want anybody getting the idea that his parent was imaginary. So he would keep the sign . . . and keep those Mead-memories in their place and not let them start running his life.

"Comin' down," a guard announced boredly.

Cargy tilted his head to look for the descending ship. He found it when a gleam of sunlight caught a polished surface. It was a speck in the sky that seemed to move only slightly as the minutes passed.

"Where's this one from?" he asked.

"Vega Nine."

"That's close to Earth," Cargy said, since that was an appropriate remark to come from him. He now knew that Vega Nine was not close to Earth at all. It was merely twice as close as Merga. Cargy watched the incoming ship with an awe he hadn't felt before, because he was beginning to grasp the meaning of interstellar distances.

The spaceship was now swelling visibly. Cargy thought about the giant closrem drivers, in the forward third of that quarter-mile-long cylinder, that were spinning and roaring loudly enough to shatter eardrums—or even skulls—except that they were behind yards-thick layers of refrigerated sound insulation.

So well was that mighty noise muffled that the ship floated down without sound that Cargy could hear. But there was a grinding screech as its big tripod touched down on the plasticrete apron, and rock and metal gave under the strain of the ship's tremendous weight.

If he could only figure out some way to be aboard that ship when it lifted off again!

That was something he had never wanted before. Merga was his world, and he liked it. But at this very moment, and for as long as he remained on Merga, he was going to be agitated by a powerful temptation to do something very foolish.

That was to follow Mead's final wish and go tell the Xenologists about the psychivores.

Mead oughtn't to have put that in with his memories, he thought plaintively. The old man had been isolated for years! He didn't know what was going on. He had hardly been aware of the war that Cargy and thousands of other children had suffered through with varying degrees of anguish that had left them indelibly marked. So Mead didn't know Merga was full of kids who were mental cases! Cargy knew, because he had been in the Refugee Rescue Home with several hundred, and he still encountered no few of them in the streets and alleys of Port City.

Some of them were belligerent (but soon learned not to start anything with
him!
) but most of them were just cracked. They didn't know what was real and what wasn't, and Cargy had listened to a lot of fantastic stuff from these kids, told in perfect seriousness. Most of the time he pretended to believe what they said because it made them feel better.

Anyway, these kids provided a well-defined and well-populated category into which the Xenologists would plop him if he came in with a wild tale about a psychivore. And when the Xenologists learned there were no parents or guardians to come take him off their hands . . . well, Cargy could guess what would happen then. Well-meaning adults would take charge of his life for him.

That was why the temptation had to be resisted. But resisting was hard, because he had to fight more than Mead's final wish. He was bucking his early training as well.

Humanity on an alien planet had to stay alert to dangers posed by local lifeforms. Nobody on Merga was allowed to forget the absolute necessity of reporting anything unusual observed in the behavior of the local flora and fauna. And Cargy, a farmer's son, had as his earliest memories the reports he made to his father after he had been out playing in the fields of cultivated Earthplants. He knew beyond question that it was
wrong
to withhold information on the activities of local lifeforms.

And the psychivores were creatures nobody else knew
existed
, and the fate of Mead, and that man he had evil-eyed, proved the psychivores to be the gravest peril man had found on any planet yet!

Why, if one came into Port City right now, Cargy thought with a shiver, in no time at all everybody in town could be evil-eyeing like Mead or gone crazy like that other guy!

He
had
to stop thinking about it!

Then the passengers from the spaceship began coming through the gate and they amply occupied his attention. Now he knew why so many of them laughed when they read his sign, and he noticed that most of the laughers stopped to buy. Sales went briskly for a while.

The last to pass through the gate were eight of the handsomest, most flamboyantly garbed people Cargy had ever seen. They passed his stand without buying.

"Who was that bunch?" he asked a guard.

"Some people bringin' in a show."

"A show?"

"Yeah. Live entertainment. You know what that is, Cargy?"

"I guess so. It's stuff like on TV tape, except real people do it right where you're at."

The guard chuckled. "You got it. Them folks're goin' to do a show at Civic Hall the next four days."

Cargy gazed speculatively at the show people as they loaded into ground-taxis and sped away. "I guess they'll go on to another planet right after that," he remarked.

"Yeah," said the guard.

Cargy began packing his stuff. He handed the guard two packs of his unsold fruit. "Here's for you and Bill," he said.

"You got a lot left over this time, ain't you?" the guard sympathized. "Let us pay you."

"Naw. You guys're friends, and I got money left from last time yet." Cargy said his goodbyes and moved away, drawing his wagon around the spaceport perimeter and into the Old Town section of the city.

A half hour brought him to Mrs. Tragg's Room and Board, an old brick dwelling showing numerous indications of decay. He pulled his wagon around back and rapped on the kitchen door.

Mrs. Tragg appeared, wiping a wisp of stringy gray hair out of her big dried-pudding face. "I expected you day before yesterday, boy," she snapped accusatively. "Where was you?"

"I got slowed down," Cargy replied meekly.

"Somethin' wrong with your stumblebum daddy?" she prodded.

Cargy lowered his eyes and didn't speak.

"Well," she huffed, "you gotta use that room
regular
if you expect to keep it. It's
costin'
me, keepin' a place for you that you don't use more'n two nights in a week! And on top of that, here you come strayin' to my door two days late! You can't do that and expect anything from me!"

"No'm," agreed Cargy. He had expected this scene, but found that it didn't shake him up as it had when it happened before. His Mead-memories let him understand that Mrs. Tragg was trying to ease her own insecurity by making him feel insecure.

"Well, lucky for you, nobody got your room this time," she finally admitted. "Here's your key. I reckon you want me to take your leftover fruit on your rent like always?"

"Yes'm, and I'll pay you for four days this time. I'm going to stay that long and look for a town job."

"Has somethin' happened to your daddy?" she demanded.

"No ma'am. He just said I might make more money in town, now that I'm getting some size on me."

"Fine daddy!" she growled.

After settling with Mrs. Tragg, Cargy pulled his wagon into the dim little basement room that was his in-town home. With the door locked behind him, he sat on the edge of his cot and pulled Mead's wallet from inside his jacket.

He had looked at the money in it before, and his Mead-memories had confirmed what his eyes had seen. But he wanted to count it a bill at a time.

He fingered lovingly through the sheaf of currency. Yes, four of them really were hundred-kon bills. Also, there were nine twenties, and a ten, and two ones. Combined with his own earnings, this gave him a total of K602.85!

But . . . tremendous as this sure would have seemed a week earlier, he knew this was a pitiably small amount of wealth compared to his need. A single fare to Princon IV—Merga's nearest populated neighbor—was over K400. He was, he decided bleakly, far from rich enough to be an interstellar traveler. Even if spaceships took unaccompanied, undocumented kids aboard, which they didn't.