‘Lone,’ I said, ‘what do you do here in the woods?’
‘I wait,’ he said. ‘I ain’t finished yet.’ He looked at my eyes and snorted in irritation. ‘I don’t mean „finished” like you’re thinking. I mean I ain’t—completed yet. You know about a worm when it’s cut, growin’ whole again? Well, forget about the cut. Suppose it just grew that way, for the first time, see? I’m getting parts. I ain’t finished. I want a book about that kind of animal that is me when I’m finished.’
‘I don’t know of such a book. Can you tell me more? Maybe if you could, I’d think of the right book or a place to find it.’
He broke a stick between his huge hands, put the two pieces side by side and broke them together with one strong twist.
‘All I know is I got to do what I’m doing like a bird’s got to nest when it’s time. And I know that when I’m done I won’t be anything to brag about. I’ll be like a body stronger and faster than anything there ever was, without the right kind of head on it. But maybe that’s because I’m one of the first. That picture you had, the caveman…’
‘Neanderthal.’
‘Yeah. Come to think of it, he was no great shakes. An early try at something new. That’s what I’m going to be. But maybe the right kind of head’ll come along after I’m all organized. Then it’ll be something.’
He grunted with satisfaction and went away.
I tried, for days I tried, but I couldn’t find what he wanted. I found a magazine which stated that the next important evolutionary step in man would be in a psychic rather than a physical direction, but it said nothing about a—shall I call it a gestalt organism? There was something about slime moulds, but they seem to be more a hive activity of amoebae than even a symbiosis.
To my own unscientific, personally uninterested mind, there was nothing like what he wanted except possibly a band marching together, everyone playing different instruments with different techniques and different notes, to make a single thing move along together. But he hadn’t meant anything like that.