The Brain-Stealers

18

The reason for the vault was that Security had detectors of thought-transmission and had believed that Jim was not the only experimenter, and had hunted—perhaps still did—for the sources of the thought-fields its detectors could demonstrate but could not analyze. The suspicions of Security officials tended to fix themselves upon persons known to be interested in basic psychology problems. Three professors of experimental psychology were arrested and their encephalographs seized by Security agents anxious to distinguish themselves in the eyes of higher-ups by zeal. A behavioristic-study laboratory was wrecked by Security police because of apparatus whose functioning was just cryptic enough to be included in high-level orders for the tracking-down of thought-transmission apparatus as dangerous to the public safety. Jim's former friends, in particular, were cajoled and threatened and their possessions searched and their private papers examined for clues. Security had found Jim Hunt defying it—and Jim Hunt was dead, of course—but the phenomena went on even after he was disposed of. So Security hunted for other experimenters who might be defying it. But the Things who did transmit thoughts were not defying Security. They were ignoring it, They lay in warm nests and gorged themselves, and grew ever more bloated and obscene. And they continued to divide and divide—and their greed increased as the changes went on—and their numbers increased, and ever more humans were subjugated to supply them with the means of gluttony

Jim worked in the vault. It was of heavy steel, built solidly into steel-reinforced masonry, and its value as junk would not have begun to pay for the cost of taking it apart. In thirty years the building above it had rotted and the roof had collapsed, but the massive concrete about the vault had kept its shape. The great, foot-thick combinatinon door could not be closed, now, but the thinner inner doors remained. They were rust-pitted and bent, but they could be shut so that when Jim's apparatus was complete and in operation, no single trickle of its product could escape to alarm Security further.

He assembled the parts Brandon had bought for him. The transmitter itself would be relatively simple. Since a thought-field is more nearly like an electrostatic or a magnetic field than anything else, its generation is not difficult. A magnetic field, for instance, can and does extend to infinity. An electrostatic field does the same, save where it is nullified by some accidental Faraday Cage effect. But those fields cannot convey intelligence unless they are modulated. Unmodulated thought-fields are equally without effect; in fact they are not thought-fields, because thought is the modulation of a field. But in any case, a transmitter, as such, was simple.

The tricky part of Jim's intended device was the modulator. It would have to receive thoughts, amplify them, and impress their modulations with much greater power on the field the transmitter was to produce. And a mechanical device to receive thought is not easy to make.

Jim talked it out with Brandon as he worked. Brandon, of course had no technical training. While he waited for Jim to succeed or fail he made rabbit-snares, found small fish in a trout-stream nearby, and revolved grim schemes of his own. Sometimes he talked of those schemes. They had to do with a one-man war he proposed against the Things, if Jim's attempts should fail. He knew that they loved warm places—attic spaces hard by chimneys, boiler-rooms, and the like. He devised tricks for introducing deadly substances into those enclosures. A favorite was a simple squib of gunpowder and powdered sulphur which a furtive figure could toss into a room with its fuse lighted. It would flare suddenly into a strangling fog of sulphur-smoke in which no Thing could live. He could always tell when a Thing was present by the stench that surrounded them....

But he listened as Jim talked, as much to himself as to Brandon. Talking a thing out helps to clarify one's notions.

"The field acts like high-frequency current in a wire," he explained, vexed with himself because he could not phrase it simply. "They don't travel inside a wire, but on its surface—what's called the skin effect of high-frequency conduction. A thought-field doesn't go into metal. It stays on the surface. Except iron. But it doesn't go into iron, even, unless there's iron at the focus of the field."

He waved his hand exasperatingly as he fitted two small parts together with meticulous care.

"That sounds crazy! That focus business. A thought-field is a wave-mechanics phenomenon. It acts like a wave, and it acts like a solid particle, and it probably isn't either. Like an electron, it has no position that can be fixed. There's only a probability of position. You can say that an electron is a wave-motion that's in phase with itself and is real only at one place, but you can never know where that place is. You can say a thought-field is a wave-motion that's in phase with itself at two places; where it originates, and where it's focused. In between you can know it exists, but you can't tell where it's in phase with itself, any more than you can tell where an electron is! Has that got any meaning in it at all?"

Brandon smiled rather mirthlessly.

"Damn little," he admitted.

"I'm saying you can prove there's thought being transmitted, but you can't tell where from or where to," said Jim, irritably.

"Too bad!" said Brandon. "Security would have hunted up the first of those Things to turn up—wherever they came from—if they could have tracked it down. They insisted you were talking to your friends with your gadgets, didn't they?"

"They did," said Jim savagely. "And they were sweetly reasonable and told me that if I'd snitch on my supposed confederates the conditions of my imprisonment would be a lot easier. I'd have told on the Things, all right, if I'd known about them! In fact, if I'd been let alone a little while longer I'd have had something that would handle them!"

Brandon said nothing. They'd been at the ruins of the ghost-town for days, and Jim was growing nerve-racked and jumpy as he seemed to get nowhere. His means for experiment were so primitive as to be ludicrous. The transmitter was complete except for the modulator which would give it something to transmit. The modulator would supply both the "message" and the directive which determined the second point where the message would be real. But Jim had not achieved a workable modulator which would duplicate the results he'd had before Security stepped in. He was in the position of a man with a splendidly equipped broadcasting station with no scanner or microphone to give the signal meaning. No matter how much power was put into its tubes, no meaning could be had from its signal, Jim's transmitter would send thought, but the instrument which would supply it with thought to send, in a usable form, would simply not function.

There's nothing supernatural about the Things," said Jim, bitterly. "We send thoughts occasionally. Telepathy works sometimes. Erratically, but past the possibility of chance. You might say that we transmit at low voltage. Very low voltage. When conditions are just right, something gets through. But the Things transmit at high voltage. Like electric eels." Then he added, "There's an illustration! We make electric currents in our brains. Encephalographs pick them up and record them. They're only minute fractions of a volt. Electric eels can make up to eight hundred volts. It's no higher quality electricity than ours, just as the Things' thinking is probably no better than ours if as good. It's just high-pressure. And we can electrocute an electric eel if we want to, by using a dynamo. We should be able to wrap these things about their own beastly bellies by putting some power on the job. But—"

He went grimly back to his task.

"Exactly what are you trying, then?" asked Brandon. "Put it in words of one syllable, won't you?"

"I'm trying," said Jim bitterly, "to beat them at their own game! There was a girl named Sally. She was the slave of a Thing that I killed, later. She'd been told that she loved me, and I think she did, but she'd also been told that first of all she had to be loyal to a Thing. So she died.... And I talked to a farmer and his wife. They weren't young any more, and they were the only people in their house. I stole their car and the Thing in the cage that lived on them. They'd been told to be loyal to the Thing and to serve it. And they did. It was greedy and they expected to die for their loyalty, but they kept on being loyal. I want," said Jim almost shrilly, "I want to broadcast thoughts to the Things themselves! I want to tell them that they're the slaves of men! I want them to grovel like whipped puppies to the people they've ruled before—before—"

Brandon blinked at him.

"Before what?"

"Before," raged Jim, "they think of something I've thought of! There's a trick they can pull off to end everything—like that!" He snapped shaking fingers. "If it occurs to them, they can subjugate every living human being, and probably us included, in seconds flat! Damn them, they'll be invulnerable if they—think of that trick before I can beat them—"

Then, panting with fury, he went back to his work. But fury does not lead to clear thinking, nor to meticulously accurate work with inadequate equipment. Jim worked on. His results-There weren't any.