The Brain-Stealers

16

Jim did sleep, after all. An hour after he'd been ready to blow out the brains of the man who'd come up to look in the hidden car, he lay slumped and slumbering in his seat while his new companion stood guard for the two of them. But Jim twitched a little as he slept, from the effects of strain that could not yet be released. The jerkings and twitchings, too, were outward sign of dreaming.

In the dream his present waking companion was with him, and the two of them fled nightmarishly from pursuers of whom some carried Things in their arms. The rest were dead-white, stumbling human robots, any one of whom could be pushed over like a nine-pin. But they came by thousands and millions, feebly but with a terrible persistency. The two fugitives, it seemed to Jim, performed herculean feats of flight, and they carried things which weighted them down but which they would not abandon. And ever and again they reached some gray place in which it seemed they were safe and where they began desperately to put together the things they carried. But just as the object they planned to construct began to take form, the white, stumbling figures of the slaves of the Things came shambling toward them from the darkness all about Then, in the dream, they seized their burdens and fled again, because it was useless to try to fight off the bloodless hordes. And besides, there were the carried Things, who gnashed tiny sharp mandibles and drove on their cohorts with soundless shrieks of rage and blood-lust.

In the dream it seemed to Jim that he sobbed with fury as he fled.

"All we've got to do," he panted bitterly as they climbed a black precipice with a wave of weary robots climbing feebly but with blind persistence after them, "all we've got to do is set this thing up...."

And then, midway up the cliff, they saw a row of white faces looking down at them from the top. The Things and their slaves were waiting for them there.

Jim opened his eyes with a start. It was mid-afternoon. There was no sunlight. Heavy clouds overspread the sky. His companion was raising, by hand, the top of the car in preparation for coming rain. He nodded as Jim jerked his eyes about in instant wariness.

"You acted like your sleep wasn't too sweet," he said drily. "I sleep that way too, nowadays. I think we'll have a storm."

The first drops of rain fell as he spoke. He finished the job of raising the top. The patter of rain upon the forest roof rose to a clattering. Then there was a rushing sound, and the noise was a minor roar. The man with the scarred forehead climbed into the car as a downpour began.

"This," he said reflectively, "will wipe out the tracks of the car coming in here, but it'll double the depth of those going out."

"I don't think it'll matter," said Jim. He added suddenly, "Twice I've dreamed that I had the answer to the Things. It was something to be made; to be put together. I was messing with thought-transmission myself, you know. That's why Security sent me off for life custody. It seems to me that each time in my dream I was concerned with causing some effect, some interference with the thought-fields the Things make—something that would neutralize those thought-fields. I know all about it in my dream and know that it would work. But I can't remember it when I'm awake."

His companion said; "I've worked out business problems in dreams. Sometimes the answers were faintly reasonable. Once or twice they were sound. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, though, they're sheer gibberish when you look at them in daylight."

Jim's companion was a certain Miles Brandon. He had been to the city of the Things, downstate, on business. He found that some of his business associates were unwontedly pale and bloodless. One of them invited Brandon to stay at his home. All the family was pale and wore a strangely tranquil expression. After the first night of his stay there, there was an abrupt change in the manner of the family, at breakfast. They seemed to assume that Brandon knew all about something he'd never heard of. It concerned a "Little Fellow" of whom his host spoke reverently. It became alarming when all the family stared at him bewilderedly when he asked what they were talking about. But he was politely patient for a time, thought they plainly expected him to do something remarkable before he sat down to breakfast. It was something connected with the Little Fellow. But when they stared at him and plaintively asked him why he didn't go to the Little Fellow, since the Little Fellow wanted him, he lost his temper.

A doctor arrived—pale and bloodless like his host, and with the same queer expression of tranquility. He had been summoned for Brandon. Brandon, raging, started to leave. His host tried to keep him from leaving the house and the doctor insisted on giving him some injection that Brandon would not permit It all seemed lunacy. In the end Brandon knocked down his host and brushed aside the argumentative doctor and stamped out of the house, fuming. He breakfasted at a restaurant, registered at a hotel, and sent a porter for his belongings.

Then, at his first business appointment for the day, and while he still puzzled angrily over his host's behavior, the office door opened and a man in a white coat entered, with four policemen. They tried to soothe him and persuade him to come quietly with them to another doctor. It was preposterous. He went into a rage and knocked down the white-coated man. Then the police closed in—

And he woke up in a straitjacket. He was in the psychiatric ward of the local hospital and he was an object of vast curiosity. Doctors and nurses—with tranquil faces —looked at him sympathetically. There was extraordinary contentment all about him. Then he noted that some who at one time looked a little pale but approximately normal, at another time would be white and utterly listless and incredibly weak. And they asked him questions that did not make sense. They gave him ridiculous tests. Ultimately they X-rayed him from head to foot.

That was the turning-point. He'd been in an automobile smash-up years before and his skull had been shattered. There was a metal plate supplying the place of a part of the skull-bone which had to be removed. The X-rays showed it. Then the doctors seemed to be satisfied.

They told him that he would be operated on and a plastic plate substituted for the metal one. Then—

They were very kindly. They sympathized with him. They explained why they wanted to make him normal like themselves. The Little Fellows wanted everybody to share the happiness they brought. And because people who didn't know anything about that happiness wouldn't understand, of course nobody could be allowed to know until they did share it. And Miles Brandon had heard about it, while that strange metal plate in his head kept him—so it was assumed—from being able to share it. He should have waked in his friend's house very, very happy. When the plastic plate was substituted for the metal one, he would be very, very happy. Meanwhile, of course, he had been certified insane so he wouldn't talk about the Little Fellows who wanted to make him happy like everybody else.

There'd been a time in that straightjacket when he'd doubted his own sanity, just as Jim had done. But he came to the lustily healthful conclusion that if he was insane he preferred to stay that way. His escape was a combination of pure luck and cunning, close to the insanity he was accused of. He'd been at large for eight days now, and he was half-starved and close to despair when he came upon what he thought was an abandoned car—probably a stolen one. Now he counted on the car to get him to his home town, where certainly there would be no question of his sanity! He was a well-known citizen there. He belonged to all the leading organizations, from the Country Club on down. He'd use every cent he owned to fight this—

Jim Hunt puzzled over the dream-certainty that something could be done which would prevent the spread of the Things' dominion and end it where it existed. The rain drummed on the forest roof. Intermittent heavy splashings fell on the top of the car from branches overhead. The air became saturated with moisture, and the ground became wet, and little meandering tricklings of water ran here and there beneath the trees. The sound of the rain was enough to keep even the noise of traffic on the highway from being audible, though sometimes the whine of heavy truck-tires on wet pavement could be detected.

"I could do," said Brandon angrily, "with a couple of thick rare steaks and a mound of mashed potatoes and all the trimmings! But it's only a hundred and fifty miles to my home. When we get there…. But I shan't sleep until I've started some action against those Things! I know people in Security! I'll pull wires—"

Jim's thought clicked. Not on the device that would end the danger of the Things. On something else.

"I'm just wondering," he said softy, "what your family thinks? Your business started eleven days ago. They haven't heard from you. They must have made some inquiry!"

"Surely!" said Brandon vengefully. "And no doubt they've been told that I've gone off my head! I've been warned not to take chances of getting hit on the head again. They'll be told the plate got dented, and pressure on my brain has to be relieved. But when I come driving up to the door—"

"I wonder!" said Jim. "The story they've been told is pretty plausible. That danger did exist—of a blow on the head, for you. If they were told that you'd escaped while demented, and were wandering at large, they'd worry a great deal. But suppose you do turn up and explain indignantly that the doctors wanted to operate on you to make you the slave of Little Fellas? Little, non-human creatures who hide in boiler-rooms and attics and intend to rule all of humanity? What will your family think then?"

Brandon said indignantly; "But dammit, it's true! And you'll bear me out!"

"Surely!" said Jim with quiet bitterness. "But I'm classed as a homicidal maniac with at least one murder to my credit, and it would be considered at least an eccentricity that I insist on wearing a wire cap on my head! Will your family believe that not very plausable tale of yours, backed by an implausible person like me, as against the very plausible statement of very reputable physicians explaining that there's a dent in the plate in your skull? For that matter, don't you sometimes still suspect that it's the world that's sane and we're the crazy ones?"

Brandon ground his teeth. He was a big man, and he had been beefy, and he'd possessed all the self-confidence of a man who is an important citizen. But he had not won that importance by stupidity. He saw. He looked as if he were about to roar, in his frustration. But he said suddenly; "There's the Thing in the cage in the car-trunk!"

"Quite so," said Jim. "And the first thing any scientist on earth would do would be to get it out of the cage for examination. And it would instantly get in touch with its fellows, and they'd link their minds together for their common good. There's no distance-limit on thought! What then?"

Brandon pictured it. He and Jim had pooled their knowledge of the Things, and while Jim had gained only a little by the exchange, Brandon understood the implication of Jim's last question. He groaned.

"Then what the devil can we do?" he demanded.

Jim stared out through the rain-swept windshield of the little car, parked in a disused woods-road while the day passed.

"I've got an idea," he said slowly. "It means getting some electrical stuff. I was sentenced to life custody for fooling with transmitted thought. I know a little about it. Maybe I can do something—with certain parts. But we'll have to buy them, because if we tried stealing them we'd never find what we want, and we both need clothes and food and so we need money—or burglaries. I think it would be most efficient if we lunatics staged a hold-up tonight. It looks like it's necessary."