The Brain-Stealers

13

It was early night. Lantern-light streamed out of an open door in the barn. He stumbled to the light and stood there blinking, with the coat-wrapped bundle cradled tenderly in his arms. He made his face seem to work with exhaustion and his breath to come in gasps.

"Listen!" he panted. "You—you got a Little Fella here? I—got to show him somethin'! I—I—"

The farmer was an oldish man with an expression of vast patience—and of course unearthly peace. He was milking a cow. He looked around slowly, somehow with the manner of a man to whom any exertion at all is enormously difficult.

"What's that?"

"I was with—gang huntin' that fella," panted Jim. He seemed to sob with exhaustion. "I wasn't—strong. I— caved in. Couldn't do what my Little Fella told me! Couldn't! I fell down an' couldn't get up.... Passed out ... Fainted, I guess. When I come to I was lost.... Tried to find the gang... Found a dead fella layin on the ground. He'd been carryin' this Little Fella..."

A flicker of emotion passed over the lined, thin, patient face of the man on the milking-stool.

"Carryin' a Little Fella?"

"Yeah....The Little Fella's sick!" panted Jim as if in a frenzy. "He's—he's alive! I know that! But he—can't tell me nothin'.... He just lays there...."

He moved the coat-wrapped object.

"I don't know what to do!" he cried in seeming panic.

"I picked 'im up an' wrapped 'im warm. V been carryin' him ever since, tryin' to find somebody ... Nobody but another Little Fella'll know what to do! Y'can't let a Little Fella die!"

The patient eyes looked at him wearily but without doubt. Jim's tale was so unheard-of that there could be no question of plausibility. And it called upon every commanded instinct of loyalty and devotion that the Things had infused into their victims.

"I was lost!" cried Jim again, desperately. "I couldn't get here no quicker! I'm from th' city! I don't know how to find my way around out here in the sticks! Quick! I got to take him to another Little Fella who'll tell me what to do!"

The farmer half-rose, and then settled back again as if the exertion was too great.

"Ma'll show you where the Little Fella is," he said heavily. "Our folks are all off watchin' in case that killer's still around an'—our Little Fella is mighty greedy... She'll tell you..."

Jim turned and stumbled toward the house. A fierce hope stirred in him. An apology for weakness. Possibly only two people in the farm-house. But of course! The man who served the Things would reason that if Jim were a maniac as they'd been commanded to believe, he might have disguised a victim as himself only to stop all search so he might commit further crimes in the same area. After all, the evidence that he was in the city was not conclusive—merely a cryptic telephone-call. So the search could still be going on up here in the hills while the city was also combed with exhaustive care. And if the people of this house were still hunting him, with only two humans left to serve and feed the Thing—why—they might be so enfeebled that he'd be allowed to go up to the Thing alone. Because the Thing was greedy. And that would make it unnecessary for him to kill these people....

He climbed heavily up the steps outside the kitchen.

He stumbled inside. A woman sat there, her flesh almost transparent with bloodlessness. She opened her eyes.

"I—got to tell the Little Fella somethin'," said Jim in the same panting desperation. "You husban' said you'd tell me-"

Disloyalty and therefore danger to a Little Fella was unthinkable to a subject. The woman, with vast exertion, pointed. A narrow stairway to the attic. Jim bounded up it, carrying the coat-wrapped object as if it were heavy and infinitely precious.

The attic was dark and hot and still. There was a smell in it, subtly horrible to Jim's nostrils. It was not the healthy, lusty smell of an animal kin to man. It was somehow the pungent odor of filth.

An infinitesimal stirring somewhere. It was the almost noiseless movement of rags and cloth. Jim's hair tried to stand on end beneath the cap that kept him sane and free.

"The man outside," said Jim unsteadily, "told me to come up here to you."

The Things could not read men's minds. They could not even know of the nearness of a man save by their own senses. Men had to come to them and report the Things the Little Fellas wished to know. But of course all men save one were slaves, so—

Jim moved toward the sound. His flesh crawled all over. He knew that the Thing was commanding him to come close. The Thing would. And it could not tell that its commands were being absorbed by Jim's cap of wire instead of by his brain. He fumbled his way toward the sound—and it was at his feet. Maybe the Thing could see in the dark. He couldn't. And he couldn't delay and he must act with the speed of thought. Faster than the speed of thought The Thing must not be able to send out even one flashing concept of alarm—

The match in his hand flared into flame. He had an instant's awareness of yellow-lit slanting rafters, of the attic, of a trunk or two and boxes of stored possessions; of the trimly-laid brick chimney going up to the roof. And there was a box at his feet. A quite ordinary packing-box, lined with soft and shredded rags. And in it—!

Jim thrust savagely downward with the object he had made, his coats flung away by the movement. He knew an instant of the most unholy fear that any man ever experienced, when the mouth of the woven-wire trap seemed to catch on something soft and hideously yielding. He thought he'd missed. But then he flung down his whole weight, and felt the trap shake and quiver with the violent struggles of the Thing inside it. Then he worked desperately with cold sweat pouring out all over his body, until the Thing was fastened in.

When it was done he felt a horrible nausea. Of course if iron wire closely spaced could keep out the transmitted thought of even groups of Things with their minds linked together, it should keep in the transmitted thought of a single one. And this Thing was in a cage of closely-woven wire with a cover which Jim had fastened tightly with savage twistings of the wire-ends left for the purpose. It moved about in a beastly, raging panic. The cage quivered with its strugglings. And Jim sweated all over as he struck a second match to make assurance doubly sure.

He could make out the nearly shapeless blob within the wire. He examined the fastenings and twisted them more fiercely still, and then twisted even the twistings together. Once his fingers came close to the woven wire, and tiny fangs lashed out and blood dripped from his finger. But that—like the frenzied battling of a cornered rat—somehow reassured him. The Thing had not uttered a sound. Perhaps it could not. But the oozing blood-drops made him feel a normal, human superiority.

"You understand talk," he said softy. "Now remember this. I've got a pistol. None of your damned friends can control me! And if I'm stopped by their slaves the first thing I'm going to do is put a bullet through this cage I've got you in! Picture that, my friend! A bullet through that beastly body of yours! So if you managed to tell your friends of the fix you're in before this cage closed on you—why—that's what is going to happen to you for reward!"

His clothes felt clammy from his past fear, but now he felt a curious certainty of escape.

He picked up the cage and draped his coat about it again in the dark. He fumbled his way back to the narrow stairway, guided by the faint glow that came up it. He went downstairs, and when he came out into the kitchen he carried the cage with its ghastly occupant as if it were something very precious, to be guarded with an anxious tender care. He remembered to speak with the same exhausted urgency—even greater urgency, now.

"The—Little Fella upstairs says I got to—take him to Clearfield—quick!" panted Jim. "Where c'n I get a car?"

The ghostlike woman sitting in the kitchen nodded weakly toward the door.

"Y'mean ask y' husban'?"

But Jim did not wait for an answer. He stumbled hastily out, with the same enormous pretended solicitude for the object in his arms.

The man in the barn looked heavily up at him.

"I—got to take the Little Fella to Clearfield," panted Jim again. "Your Little Fella told me— A car—"

The patient eyes turned meditative. Then the farmer said heavily, "He just—fed. He don't bother much then. I guess that's why he didn't tell me. But if he told you..."

He summoned strength. He stood up. He could barely walk, but he led the way with the lantern to the small building Jim had suspected was a garage.

"Car's inside," said the patient man, with an effect of uncomplaining grimness. "Here's the keys. I—hoped he'd tell you to stay here. There's only Ma an' me an'—he's greedy. I don't guess we'll last till the folks get back..."

Jim clamped his lips tightly on reassurance. He took the keys and unlocked the garage. The car was a small fuel-oil-turbine job, easy to run. He put his package— which quivered a little—on the seat beside the driver's. He got in and backed out of the garage.

"Which way's Clearfield?" he demanded feverishly.

The farmer said tiredly, "Turn right an follow the road. Don't take the left-hand fork you'll come to 'bout a mile down. That leads upstate. Go straight ahead."

"Right!" said Jim. He let his voice crack, as if frantic with anxiety over a helpless and presumably unconscious Little Fella.

He put his foot heavily on the throttle. The little car leaped ahead. He drove swiftly out to the highway where the bus from town had dumped him. He turned right. But he didn't drive straight on when he came to the left-hand fork. He took that He headed upstate.

Miles away, he said conversationally to the quivering Thing in the iron-wire cage beside him—the Thing that had lain so long in a soft warm nest and lived on the life of subject humans, "You beasts are damned stupid! You'd only two humans to feed on, so you weakened them until they could hardly walk and couldn't think straight at all! That's why I got away with this! If you weren't so beastly greedy you might have had a chance....."

He spoke partly to reassure himself. He clung to the thought that the man and woman who had been barely able to totter about, and who had expected to die to gratify the Thing's gluttony. He clung to the thought that they mightn't die now. It would be a long time before they went up to attic without being summoned. Maybe days. With no commands imposed on them, with no greedy drain upon the fluid in their veins, they might gain some strength. Maybe, indeed, they'd be free of all servitude to any Little Fella at all, for a while.

But that was too much to hope. And his own task had just begun.