The Brain-Stealers

12

When the bus let him out on what seemed mere empty country road, some ten miles short of Clearfield, he found it hard to believe. As the bus went purring away into the night, he felt so terrific a let-down that for a moment or two he was as weak as he'd pretended to be. Until the very last second he'd been afraid of some such absurd accident as his wig falling off, or that the bus would suddenly arrive at a place where forewarned men would be waiting to receive him as the object of their search.

But nothing happened. He was alone. Katydids sang in the darkness. Frogs croaked somewhere in the night nearby. A whippoorwill senselessly and monotonously repeated its refrain. There was a soft rustling of tree-branches. Once he saw a moving light, and panic filled him, and it was a firefly.

He stepped across a shallow ditch in the starlight and worked his way into a wood. He blundered through it until he felt open space before him and an iron-wire fence such as seemed to be used here either as boundary-markers or to restrain unusually docile cattle. Here was a clearing. He followed its edge around to the other side, because at the edge the ground would not be ploughed and would show no tracks. He went farther and farther from the highway.

He found himself wading through knee-deep fallen leaves, gathered in a hollow by some vagary of air-currents. He was very, very tired and numbed in his mind. He lay down and prepared to sleep, and his wire cap shifted on his head. He started wide awake, cold all over. He'd modified the design of his wire cap, of course, so that it stayed more or less firmly on his head without a wire-strand under his chin to hold it on, but it would not be safe to sleep that way! He'd almost gone to sleep without fastening the cap so it couldn't be dislodged while he slumbered.

He fixed it, but the near-lapse frightened him. He lay awake in the darkness, listening to the tiny small sounds of the night. And this shock of fear had an odd effect. It suddenly occurred to him that not only the story he had to tell but all his actions were those of a madman. He had seen one Little Fella, one Thing. It was a preposterous, roundish, pinkish ball that bounced when it fell, and then quivered as flames licked at it.

But his memory could be a delusion.

He could be insane. He had experimented with thought-amplification, and it was desperately dangerous. Security was quite right there! It was quite possible that in his basement laboratory, with its quarter-inch steel walls, his brain had been affected by the thought-fields he had made. The infinitely delicate organization of his memories and his perceptions could have been disarranged. Neurones could have become distorted in function because they were subjected to the stresses his fumbling apparatus had produced. Perhaps he had committed the crimes of which he was accused! Combined delusions and memory-lapses would account for everything...

He had been under a ghastly strain of panic and of horror. He was poisoned with fatigue. He felt an impulse to tear off the iron-wire cap and find out once and for all whether he was mad or not.

Sleep came suddenly, at long last, and then he slept heavily. Only toward morning did he dream. Then he was lecturing lucidly to that eminent person. Doctor Phineas Oberon, the Security Director of Psychological Precautions. Doctor Oberon sat fatly back in his chair and listened with the complacency of the third-rate man in a position of authority.

"It's perfectly simple!" Jim was saying exasperatedly. "Consciousness isn't a radiation. It's a field of force! In effect, a static field! In our brains it governs the degree and distribution of excitation of the neurones! And we simply haven't had the instruments with which to examine such fields in detail, before! I've made 'em! You can check the theory and try 'em out! And there's a generator of the field that can be hooked onto the scanning instrument—the modulator—and make the same field all over again with greater intensity! It's so simple!"

"My dear young man," said Doctor Oberon complacently, in Jim's dream, "your proposal is illegal. Section IV, Part 3, paragraph C of the Security code as amended reads, 'The amplification of the physical factors involved in thought, awareness, perception, aperception, reason, knowledge, memory, or any of the phenomena included in animal or human consciousness is forbidden save in official Security experimental zones and under first-priority supervision.' The violation of that provision is a first-degree offense against Security." But dammit," cried Jim shrilly in his dream. "It's got to be done! It's—look! We make electricity in our bodies, but electric eels do it more strongly. We make thought-fields in our brains, and these Things do it more powerfully. But just as we can electrocute an electric eel with a dynamo, despite its power, we can handle the Things—"

"It would be quite illegal," said Doctor Oberon with finality. "And you are disqualified for consideration for experimental work in any case, because of your conviction of a breach of Security—"

"But man!" cried Jim in the impassioned urgency of dreams. "Don't you realize? All that's needed—"

Then he opened his eyes, and he was half-covered with fallen leaves, and it was broad daylight, and birds were singing, and he was very hungry.

He stood up slowly. In his dream he had known exactly what needed to be done to destroy the power of the Things at once, but he couldn't remember it, now that he was awake. He puzzled over it a little. Of course, in dreams we all have marvelously brilliant thoughts, which usually turn out not to be so brilliant when we examine them in daylight. But this had been unusually convincing. It seemed to have been completely logical and completely reasoned out. In the dream he'd known not only why he was urging that something specific be done, but how it would work and what its effects would be. But it was all gone now.

After a moment he shrugged. He was one man against Security, and the Things, and all the slaves of the Things and everybody who believed the perfectly reasonable things that both the Things' slaves and Security had to say. The tale he had to tell was so preposterous that he'd doubted it himself. There was only one way to make anybody even begin to believe it, and that way wouldn't be easy. But he literally couldn't stop. He couldn't surrender. He couldn't make terms. He could blow his head off with the pistol he'd taken from a man he'd first intended to help and then turned over in his own place, or he could find a good deep pond and jump into it. There was no other way to end the hunt for him. But since he was finished anyhow, he might as well play it out.

He searched for a wire fence. It took him a long time to find a single-strand one. He came upon a hog-lot with a low woven fence about it, and took warning from it. He moved more cautiously after that. It was an hour before he found what he wanted—one of those single-wire barriers that formally marked off a boundary in woodland and perhaps served to hold back cattle or horses from wandering. He broke the wire and set to work.

He was hungry, and it annoyed him to be bothered by hunger when his life could be measured in hours, at most. It bothered him, too, that he had to make something out of wire with no tools but his hands, and that he could afford to take no chances at all,—that it must be unqualifiedly right He had the job halfway done when he saw a fatal flaw in the design. He had to start all over again. It had been late morning when he began, and noon came and he was irritatingly ravenous, but he forced himself to work with painstaking precision. He could not cut the wire save by repeated bendings until it broke. His hands grew raw. Blisters formed and broke. His fingers bled. He kept on doggedly. When at long last it was finished, with loose ends devised so he could twist them together and fasten it and nothing short of pliers would ever loosen it again, he went to a small stream and drank heavily.

Then he rested, looking rather grimly at his hands. He remembered, too, and used a still spot in the stream for a mirror, to see how convincing his wig might be. It was not too good. He trimmed it a little more and twisted odd strands of the hair under his iron-wire cap for still greater security against its slipping off.

Again he had to wait for dusk. It would make his story less likely, but he did not dare to risk close inspection. There were some factors in his favor, but this was a late hour at which to appear.... But he had to wait for dark so his wig wouldn't be looked at too closely.

He retraced his steps to the clearing he'd circled the night before. There was a farmhouse close by the main highway. He watched it for a long time. It was a prosperous farm for mountain country and poor land. The house itself was trim and neat and newly painted, and the barn was large. There was a flower-garden and a small building that could only be a garage. Decidedly this was a prosperous place. If there was a Thing here— and there must be—within half an hour of darkness his fate and probably that of the world would be decided.

The sun sank with an agonizing slowness, but as dusk drew near Jim moved cautiously along the edge of the clearing toward the farm-buildings. There were mountains all about him; great mounds of forest-clad stone, here and there broken by precipices of naked rock. There was a vast, serene dignity in the hills. Men had subdued their lower slopes, to be sure, but the mountains stood aloof from mens' petty doings. Still, their dignity would become scorn should men become subject to loathsome, shapeless, alien Things, who lay soft in warm nests and commanded humans to be their slaves and satisfy their gluttony....

Jim, however, thought of no such abstract ideas. He clung to the object he had made, and felt the smarting of his hands which were caked with dried blood, and he knew a monstrously irritating hunger. When dusk began to fall he risked much to creep out into the orchard and gather a dozen wind-fallen apples. He wolfed them, rotten spots and all.

Then night came, quietly and with a brooding peace-fulness. There was the sunset hush. There were all the minute, soothing sounds of ending day. Birds made drowsy noises and chickens cackled as they were fed in the farmyard.

Jim took off his coat and wrapped it with a vast care about the object he had made. It had to be done just so; to give an effect of enormous solicitude, and yet to be uncoverable instantly and used without the fraction of a second's delay.

He began to stumble toward the house with the air of a man at the very limit of his strength. He looked drugged and dazed by weakness and fatigue, and yet blindly obeying an implanted instinct of faithfulness. He seemed to be carrying a heavy object—though the thing he had made was not heavy at all—with all the tender and protective care one would give to a human baby.