The Brain-Stealers

14

The Things in their nests had a concept of civilization as a state it was desirable for their subjects to maintain. Civilization meant a large population of domestic animals, whether called men or other names. Animals too uncivilized to build homes could not provide soft nests for the Things to he in. Animals which did not possess fire could not keep them luxuriously warm. Animals which lived singly could not support the Things' gluttony. It was known to all the Things that in past ages their ancestors—themselves—had lived a precarious and uncomfortable life, full of hardships. They'd had to lay in wait for wild things, and sometimes they could subdue them by their transmitted thoughts and feed bestially, and sometimes long periods went by in which there was no food. No Thing wanted to return to those old ways of life. So civilization was a state it was desirable for their subjects to have.

Each Thing had the memories of its race. When, zestfully, they gorged themselves upon the very life-stuff of their victims, and when such gorgings were often-repeated and complete, they divided. One bloated individual grew extra limbs and extra sense-organs. Presently a line of cleavage appeared about its middle. The cleavage grew deeper, while the joined-twin Thing retained all its power to hunt and feed in its own peculiar fashion. Ultimately the last adhering patch of joined pinkish skin peeled away and there were two Things, each with all the memories and all the instincts of the one Thing they had been. Which, it may be, was in some sense a justification for their gluttony, because feeding satisfied not only the normal hunger of any living thing, but feeding was the means by which they reproduced.

They had intelligence of a sort, which was strictly applied to the business of existence. Since civilization among their domestic animals meant softer, warmer nests, and no need to repeat the toilsome hunting of the early days of the race, they preferred their domestic animals to be civilized. But they had no interest in civilization as such. They were supremely indifferent to anything beyond feeding, and warmth, and softness to lie upon.

To secure those luxuries they implanted a passionate loyalty and a tender affection among their subjects-emotions which to them were merely useful elements in the make-up of inferior races. They felt no loyalty, even to their own kind. But they had learned—or perhaps it was the single ancestor of all those who possessed civilized slaves who had learned—that cooperation among their kind was useful. Linked brains, however, had been useful even in the primitive days. Now they worked together because thereby they were safest and most sure of warmth and softness and the means of gluttony. But there was no affection between them, not even between newly-separated Things who before had been one individual. They knew envy and hatred and jealousy. They had every vice of which their kind was capable. But the memories of each one went back over thousands of years.

They knew that it was especially wise to cooperate as long as any of the animals called men were free of their control. When all men were enslaved, then there might be horrible conflicts among them for the means of gorging themselves. They might set their slaves to the kidnapping and theft of the slaves of other Things. They might struggle horribly to secure each other's destruction so that there might be more gloating feasts. They might send nibbling thoughts to lure away the slaves of other Things. But now….

Now they lay soft and warm. Some in crude boxes in the attics of farmhouses. Some in the boiler-rooms of city apartment-houses. Some in electrically-heated nests with thermostatic controls, lined with priceless furs. They were indifferent to beauty and quality and technical perfection, to cost and rarity and to regal state. They were parasites, like lice. They gorged upon the blood that flowed in human veins. Given warmth and softness and the nourishment they craved insatiably, they cared for nothing else but their own safety. Surely they cared nothing for the lives they preyed on...

So they had no civilization. They had no ruler, no laws, no ambitions, no science, no instinct to progress. But they had a deadly power which had taken them from the status of lurking hunters in the jungles of a single planet, to be the bloated, gluttonous masters of two solar systems far away. A space-ship of a thriving and venturesome race had touched upon their parent world. That space-ship had carried the ancestors of these Things back to its own home. Then other space-ships had carried other Things to yet other worlds which now sank back to barbarism while the Things that had mastered them fed and fed and fed.

And now there was Earth. The Things were here. They lay in their nests and sent out their thoughts. And humans adored them because they were commanded to, and served them because they were commanded to believe that the ultimate of bliss, and thought of them tenderly because that also they had been commanded to do.

And the Things fed and fed and fed.