It doesn't help. Someone does try to mug him with a kitchen knife on the way.

The kitchen knife will mysteriously snap as soon as it strikes! Cam picks himself up off the ground, rummages in his pocket, offers the guy a limon.

The guy will take the limon and run. No one else tries anything on the way.

Back at the hideout, Torn is asleep, Rit is gone, someone is sleeping restlessly on one of the top bunks, and someone is whispering a bedtime story to a small child.

Aww. Cam will do his reading very quietly. What's in the rest of the eco book?

When last he left the History of Eco Studies the field was dominated by the sages.

Their mix of theoretical and practical approaches supposedly became a problem when Gol Acheron and his sister began studying dark eco. There's a brief digression about how reliable various aspects of the various stories about them are, and what it would say about the societies that invented them if they were invented. One version of the story is even reproduced in full in the book: their exposure to dark eco drove them mad and led them to want to team up with the lurkers for world domination, only for them to be driven even madder and seek to betray the lurkers and destroy the entire planet; then someone from one of the villages they raided got mad, broke into their citadel, prayed for a miracle, received light eco from the heavens, and destroyed the dark sages.

Regardless, it is clear that treating dark eco as something to be studied, understood, and used represents a major change in the field. These days people take precautions to limit their exposure and don't try to destroy the world.

Recently, the attitude that eco is something sacred has been fading. Simultaneously, advances in statistics have led to changes in the way experimental results are reported. Consequently, modern and historical writing on the topic sound very different: the field has gone from discussing how red eco embodies the virtue of steadfastness to running controlled trials of people's running speed and grip strength with and without red eco exposure.

There's an entire chapter on the history of eco containment, and the weaknesses of older materials, and what new experiments have been made possible (for example, injecting eco into people is now technically feasible).

Gosh.

Cam sets the book aside once he's through with it and does a bunch of conjurations to try to put together an origin and timeline about the origins of lurkers and ottsels and metal heads and - he doesn't actually know the name of the main species. Which of these are native, he knows where the metal heads came from but are there more in the universe, are there any Precursors left besides that one egg...?

This planet was barren until the Precursors came and terraformed it hundreds of thousands of years ago, bringing or creating starting populations of a wide variety of species, including very close ancestors of the local humanoids and the lurkers (and the crocadogs and the palm trees and the ferns...). Precursors who have ever been present on this planet are overwhelmingly likely to have been ottsel-shaped at some point, with the distant second most common shape vaguely resembling the oracle.

There are no longer any other metal heads.

There is one ottsel-shaped person on this planet right now, an orange one who looks much more similar to the one who cowrote one of Mar's books than the average Precursor. There are a handful of ottsel-shaped Precursors elsewhere in the solar system. And then there are the other Precursors. They don't look much like ottsels. Some of them resemble the oracle even more vaguely than the others. Some look capable of flight. Most are cyborgs; most are purple or black or both; most are spiky. Other precursor artifacts tend to be smooth, curvy, and brown or bronze with occasional red or blue or black details; the ships the spiky purple Precursors are on, on the other hand, are purple, spiky, sometimes tentacled. This variety has existed for hundreds of thousands of years, but the share of all precursors who are spiky and purple has increased dramatically over time.

Huh! (He made all these models very tiny and gave himself a magnifying glass; he sweeps them all into a paper bag once he's consolidated his notes.)

He phones the metal heads.

The metal heads are phoneable.

He puts headphones in, speaks very softly right into the pickup. "Hey, uh, I checked, and there are still Precursors around, which makes me more reluctant to abort their egg. Also nonzero of them are on this planet and they aren't obviously involving themself in your affairs, can you explain this?"

"...I take it you met Daxter," says the metal head leader.

"Didn't get the name."

"The talkative one. He is not a Precursor. Baron Praxis has replaced part of his skull with metal but that does not make him a metal head. Daxter is not a Precursor."

"Comes up when I conjure for members of the species."

"Can you conjure people whose parents were Precursors, or who hatched from Precursor eggs?"

"One sec." He does this.

The non-egg one currently on this planet is in neither of those categories. The ones elsewhere in the solar system, on the other hand, seem to belong to the species in the normal way.

"Okay, the ottsel manages somehow not to have this trait, I don't know why he's a member of the species, maybe they cloned him or something, that might do it. The rest of them have eggs and parents though."

"It would be very surprising if they were aware of us and not planning our extermination."

"Well, they're out there. There are two color schemes of 'em even."

"Two - ah, the dark makers, yes. They were once Precursors. I expect the two, ah, 'color schemes' are at war with one another."

"Did you have some kind of long term plan for avoiding them?"

"No. I thought they were gone, because it has been ages and there is still life in the universe."

"Okay. Do you have an early formulation of such a plan, or should I, like, maybe go talk to them?"

"I would urge you not to draw their attention to this place."