The Brain-Stealers

20

It would not work. The modulator in the vault simply would not pick up thoughts to enhance and impress upon the transmitter-field. Had Jim been less wrought up; less hag-ridden by a frantic feeling of urgency, he would have seen the completely simple reason for it. But as it was he tested and re-tested his equipment, and tried every possible re-arrangement, and was forced to the bitter conclusion that some small part bought for the device was subject to a factory defect.

He was made physically ill by the conclusion that nothing could be done. He looked at Brandon, the ashen taste of defeat in his mouth. He felt ashamed, because he had taken nearly a week to make something that was no good at all—though before his arrest by Security, exactly similar apparatus had worked admirably.

"It's tough!" said Brandon. "So now you go to Security?"

Jim nodded.

"I sent them full information once," he said hopelessly, "and the local office was under the control of the Things. So nothing happened. That may be the case again. Maybe all the higher-ups are under control. I don't know. I just have to gamble."

"As a business man," observed Brandon, "I'd say you have the wrong approach. You plan to walk into a Security office, tell them and prove to them that you're an escaped Security offender, tell them you've a Thing in a wire cage, and try to tell them what it can do—"

"Yes," said Jim bitterly. "And maybe they'll let it out only in a vault, with at least some of them wearing iron caps, maybe they'll simply let it out to examine it, and it will communicate instantly with the other Things, and they'll link their minds to it and—it'll take over!"

Brandon said reflectively, "What you need is an advance publicity campaign. You're going there to sell them an idea. What you want is for them to be trying to get some information from you. Let's see what we can do to bring that about."

Jim was morosely skeptical. He felt that the transmitter he had made should work, and that the modulator should operate without difficulty. But it didn't. The fact had knocked all the self-confidence out of him. He was going ahead with the last chance he had, but there was pure panic in the back of his mind.

"I'm going to give myself up," he said grimly, "on the off-chance that I can convince them that they were right all along and that thought-transmission is dangerous. I'm not making any sacrifice. They'll put me in prison for life, but if I stay out of prison I'll spend all my life hiding with a wire cap on my head. I'd rather take the chance of accomplishing something. If you can suggest something to improve that chance, I'll take it!"

Brandon thoughtfully laid out a plan of campaign. The most horrible part of it would be letting the Thing out of its cage, but Jim agreed, savagely. In the vault it should be as much cut off from its fellows as in the cage itself, and both he and Brandon were safe against its power.

First, though, Brandon had to make a trip into the nearest town. He came back with a camera and film and writing materials. He brought back a newspaper, too— and something was happening. There were scarehead headlines.

PLAGUE SUSPECTED IN DOWNSTATE CITY!

It appeared that newsreel photographers had taken pictures of some news event in the city from which both Jim and Brandon had made precarious escapes. When the pictures were shown in the state capital, physicians noticed alarming oddities in the appearance of a considerable number of the people on the screen. The color films, of course, were completely faithful in their reproduction of flesh-tints, and doctors considered that they detected an amazing prevalence of extreme anemia —bloodlessness—among the people on the streets. In one of the newsreel shots a woman was observed to faint, and the passersby paid no attention to her at all, as if such an occurence were so common as not even to arouse interest. State health authorities saw the pictures and called the health department of the city. The official who answered the call was himself apparently in a grave physical condition, though he denied it vehemently. Examination of the health-records filed with the state health authorities had showed a sharp and sudden rise in the death-rate. But those figures were now challenged by the very men who had made them. They now insisted that the figures were wrong. They showed signs of panic.

The newspaper account said that state health officials hinted of suspicions that some not clearly identified malady had become rife in the downstate city and that its existence was being concealed. A check with recent visitors to the city in question revealed that some had noted the same condition, but that some—themselves in extremely debilitated state—denied indignantly that anything was wrong. Those who showed excessively low blood-counts were most emphatic in insisting that conditions in the downstate city were wholly normal. They had not been known to be ill before their visits to the suspected city, though, and in spite of their infuriated protests they had been removed to hospitals where bacteriological tests were in progress.

"That," said Brandon triumphantly, "looks good! Our friends the Things are going to be unmasked, eh? We'd better go on with our job, but—"

"It looks bad!" said Jim flatly. "Very bad! The state will send some men down to look things over. They'll be shown everything, including a Little Fella. And they'll come back swearing there is nothing wrong. The bad part will be that the Things may get uneasy."

"Let 'em!" said Brandon. "I'm wishing them lots worse than that!"

But Jim clamped his jaws. There was something the Things could do, if they thought of it, which would make all human effort vain. He went to the car and drew his revolver. He unlocked the car-trunk. He was savagely ready to shoot if by any chance the Thing had gotten free of its cage.

It hadn't. The trunk-space reeked horribly of the foetor the Thing exuded. Jim was nauseated by the stench, but he reached in and caught hold of the cage. Then he swore.

The Thing had slashed at his fingers with its sharp fangs. Then it slavered horribly at the scent of blood. Jim shook with rage. He muffled the cage in his coat and carried it into the vault. In the open air his errand and his surroundings combined to make a strange effect. It was near to sunset and all the world was green and fresh and fragrant, and everything seemed clean and wholesome. So that the Thing raging in its cage, and its smell, and all the implications of the Thing's existence, seemed doubly horrible.

Inside the rusted vault, Jim and Brandon closed the inner doors, and the Thing became walled in on all sides with solid plates of steel. Then Jim untwisted the wires that held the cage shut.

The Thing came out, snarling voicelessly.

It was revolting to look at, even though it no longer glistened fatly with the sustenance it had drawn from human veins. Its bloated belly had shrunk. The pinkish, hairless skin was flabby now. It hung in sickening folds. The Thing had two tiny, malevolent eyes. It had a host of tiny members to serve for legs. It had small, sharp, deadly fangs. And it glared at them.

It was not quite so large as a football, but it was not afraid of them. It regarded them with an extraordinary, impatient arrogance. It hated them, to be sure, but it was the hatred a man might feel who had been temporarily at the mercy of lower animals, at the moment he prepared to reassert his mastery. The Thing had even an air of conscious, raging power!

Brandon moved suddenly. He bumped into the useless transmitter Jim had made. It started to topple, and he caught it nervously. He set it upright and said shakily; "The damned Tiling thinks it can control us!"

Jim's eyes burned. Things like this held humans in bondage to be fed upon. The fury he felt would have been some protection in any case, but he deliberately loosened his wire cap. He consciously and carefully let down his guard. The Thing looked at him. Stared at him. But no thoughts hammered at him or even tried insidiously to worm their way into his consciousness. The Thing was not transmitting thought. Not to him—and because of the vault's iron walls, not anywhere.

"You won't talk, eh?" said Jim with sardonic humor. "Too bad!"

Then the Thing quivered. Its defiance suddenly melted. Its pose changed. It seemed suddenly to go into a panic. It scuttled desperately here and there on legs that were too feeble to carry it with either agility or speed. It approached the closed thin iron doors. Jim contemptuously kicked it back. The tiny fangs snapped at his shoe and pierced the leather. He shook it loose and it fled before him. It fled into its cage and shrank against the farthest end.

"I think," said Jim, "that we can handle it. You get set. When you're ready I'll shake it out of its cage again."

Brandon had not actually seen a Thing before and he turned sick. As a matter of fact, the two of them at that moment were the only human beings who had ever seen a Thing without becoming subject to it, and therefore they were the only human beings to feel the instinctive repulsion, compounded equally of horror and disgust, which is the normal human reaction to a Thing. Jim had seen this one, by match-light, an instant before he rammed down the cage upon it. He had seen another, encircled by flames of his own kindling, before it died. He felt deadly hatred, but Brandon's hands shook as he set up the camera-and-flash-bulb combination he'd gone to town to get.

They took pictures. Many pictures. The Thing seemed stunned and dazed now, though they could not guess the self-evident reason. It had flashes of hysterical fury, but on the whole it was amazingly quiescent They photographed it from every angle, at a distance and close-up, showing every detail of its body and its similitude of a face with a mere breathing-orifice in place of a nose and its unspeakably revolting apparatus for feeding....

Jim booted it scornfully back into its cage.

"Plenty tame when it's helpless!" he said contemptuously. "How do the pictures look?"

Brandon was unrolling them from the camera. He'd used self-developing, self-reversing film because it would be easier to take extra shots than to make duplicate prints for their purposes. He nodded in satisfaction.

"I think they'll do!" he told him. "Nobody can look at these and think they're faked, or that the Thing that's pictured belongs on earth! Where d'you think they came from, Jim?"

"From hell," said Jim sourly. "And I want to send 'em back there."

He vengefully refastened the fastenings of the cage. He tightened the twisted wires with pliers. He felt contempt for the Thing now, which was not wise. He underestimated its intelligence and he wholly missed the actual situation in which the Thing had found itself. But he made thoroughly sure that it was as securely caged as before, and then took it out to the car-trunk again. He and Brandon lived in the vault, which was at least weather-tight.

"I'll write those letters," Jim said grimly when he came back, "whether they do any good or not."

With the tiny light at his disposal he began. There were a good number of them, and Brandon partly dictated one or two. When he was finished, he was simply doggedly resolved.

"Probably not a bit of good," he said coldly, "but I've got to try everything... The devil of it is, those Thing's will be worrying about being discovered, and that's bad! Hello! The transmitter's turned on. You probably threw the switch when you almost toppled it." Then he added bitterly, "Might as well smash it!"

But he didn't, though the impulse to do so was strong. And it was rather odd that he slept soundly that night. Not, of course, because he no longer had any hope. Not even because he knew how the Things could complete the conquest of all humanity if they only happened to think of something that had occurred to him.

In perspective, it seems odd that he could have gone calmly to sleep after realizing that the transmitter had been turned on while the photographs were being taken.