"Perhaps that is why Glinda established her capital at that point," Sharts said. "There is a weak or weakening spot there, and she wanted to be there to guard it."
Sharts looked gloomy and said, "What if Glinda dies or the weak spot becomes larger?"
"I hate to think about that," Hank said.
Maybe he would be better off if he went back to Earth.
"Anyway," he said, waving his arm to indicate the whole oasis, "I can't believe that this is the only alive area and that the rest of the world is a desert."
"Why not? Isn't that made clear on the obelisk?"
"It was true when the obelisk was made. Or maybe it wasn't true even then. My point is the air."
"The air?"
Sharts looked puzzled, and he did not like to be puzzled.
"Yes, the air. The planetary atmosphere. Its oxygen is continually being renewed by plants on the earth and in the sea. But, if the energy-things have destroyed all the plants, where is the new air coming from? This land isn't big enough to keep its inhabitants from asphyxiating. There's air blowing in all the time from the desert, and it would sweep away the oxygen generated here."
"Perhaps the plants in the ocean have not been killed," Sharts said.
"Perhaps. Even so, I doubt that they would be enough. Of course, I really don't know enough about the subject. But I'll bet... anyway, I think... that all the energy beings are in the desert around the green land. Elsewhere, they'd have no prey, and they would, I suppose, die of electrical starvation.
"So, plants have grown again in many other places, and they've flourished and spread because the energy-things haven't found out about them."
One of the surprises while reading the Long-Gones' cartoons—that was what they were, cartoons—was that the mind-spirits or firefoxes had not come from the universe of the big energy-beings.
These had been created by the ancients after the invasion. They were, if Hank had interpreted rightly, the result of another experiment by the Long-Gones. Using the destroyers' configurations as models, the scientists had made a different type of energy-being. These were designed to transfer the neural-mental contents of a person to a synthetic body. By doing this, the scientists had hoped to become immortal, to pass their minds from one body to another.
Hank did not know why the experiment had gone wrong. But it had. The firefoxes were sentient and, therefore, self-conscious and self-motivated. They had refused to obey the scientists and conduct themselves as laboratory subjects. Also, the hope that the firefoxes would be able to transfer the contents of a mind to another body turned out to be false.
The things could occupy the bodies of animals and human beings. But they could not possess the minds of the latter, though they could those of animals. Something in the structure of the human neural system and, perhaps, the degree of intelligence, prevented the firefoxes from influencing the brains of Homo sapiens.
The firefoxes had escaped and, in a manner similar to that of the destroyers, propagated themselves. They occupied the cerebral-neural systems of animals and birds and reptiles, though they were either unable to or did not care to invest those of fish and insects.
(Hank, learning this, wondered why humans did not eat fish and frogs. Sharts told him that the Quadlings, Munchkins, and Ozlanders did not do so because of religious prohibitions. The fish was the symbol of Christ-Thor and hence sacred. As for the frog, that was forbidden because of the ancient myth that a frog was a fish that had learned how to walk or, at least, hop. The Winkies and Gillikins, however, did not have this tabu.)
What the pictures could not tell was just how the mind-spirits or firefoxes interacted with the neural systems of the occupied animals. Hank had to extrapolate that from what he had observed. Take, as an example, a firefox which had possessed a hawk just after it had escaped from the Long-Gones' laboratory like a voltaic Frankenstein's monster. The firefox was perhaps as intelligent as a human being. But when it became one, as it were, with the bird, its physical and mental capabilities were limited by the body it invested. It had to operate through a diminutive brain and a body specialized for flight and without speech organs.
The hawk-firefox could learn language from humans, but it could not utter speech with the bird's oral apparatus. It solved that problem by learning to modulate sound waves with energy output. In some ways, its voice was a telephone transmitter.
There was also what might be called a negative flow. The hawk's nonhuman nervous system affected the firefox's, and the result was an intelligence level that could never match that of the more intelligent humans.
Also, the firefox was, when it first occupied the hawk's body, like a human infant. It had to learn language and to gain experience just like a baby. The difference was that the hawk-firefox learned much faster than an infant.
One of the factors preventing the symbiote's full intellectual and emotional development was the short life of the hawk. It learned much faster than the infant, true, but it did not have a long time to learn.
However, when the hawk died, the mind-spirit lived on. It traveled around in whatever manner circumscribed it, and, when it came to an unoccupied body, it attached itself like iron filings to a magnet.
This process, Hank was sure, caused some kind of traumatic shock. The firefox lost its identity as a hawk, or, rather, it lost its memory of its former life as a hawk. But, like an amnesiac, it retained its memory of language and its unconscious knowledge of its environment.
In some ways, the firefox experienced what the Hindus called transmigration or reincarnation.
Though the firefox assumed a new identity every time it occupied a body, its retention of certain abilities enabled it to grow mentally and emotionally. The knowledge accreted to a certain extent.
Thus, it could be assumed that the firefox did not die. That occupying Bargma, for instance, might be anywhere from fifteen hundred to forty thousand years old. But its intelligence was limited in operation by the avian nervous system. Also, much that it had learned was lost or beyond recall.
Hank did not believe that a firefox could, unaided, invest and make alive an inanimate object. But a witch could do that for a firefox though it probably was not easily done. If it were easy, there would be many more Scarecrows than there were.
Glinda, he was certain, had animated the Scarecrow. And she had managed to transfer a human being's mind-contents, the Tin Woodman's, from a dying body to a metal simulacrum.
Another probably rare phenomenon was the dispossession of one firefox by another. A firefox had been made visible by the electrical potential in a storm, and Hank had seen—well, almost seen—the free firefox oust the entity which occupied the hawk. However, the dispossessor had failed to possess the dispossessed. Instead, it had occupied an inanimate object, the airplane.
Or was it possible that the original entity in Ot, hurled from the hawk-body, had taken up new residence in Jenny?
Whichever event had happened, Glinda had influenced its course.
Why had she effected this? Because, Hank thought, she had a use for a living aircraft just as she had had a use for the Scarecrow and the Woodman and had arranged to put them in Dorothy's path.
Hank explained his theory to Sharts. The giant nodded and said, "That makes more sense than the religious explanations. Though that does not mean that your theory is right and the priests are wrong. It might mean that both of you are wrong. Or half-right.
"I will admit this, though. Despite your deficiencies of character, you are not without some intelligence."
Hank did not know whether he should thank Sharts or hit him. Having witnessed the man overpower a bear, he thought that it would be best to control his fists.