The Brain-Stealers

24

The dawn came. Out the open doors of the vault and through the empty space that once had been the plate-glass-windowed frontage of a bank, Jim watched a gray light steal over all the world. There were the drowsy chirpings of small birds. The light grew brighter. Ruddy sunshine smote on dew-wet grass and glistening leaves, and seemed to find all earth a place of jeweled freshness. There were morning-spider webs that seemed to be made of threaded diamonds. There were spots of cobweb that looked like discs of silver on the grass.

Suddenly it was day. And Jim stood up, and loosened the absurd bonds that held his grotesque headgear to his shoulders, and walked out into the open. He put his hands to the metal baskets. He lifted them, very slowly and very cautiously at first. He took them off entirely, and seemed to listen with an intense and painful care. And then he tossed his protection away.

When Brandon opened his eyes—they were sane eyes now—Jim nodded to him, sitting bareheaded in the sunshine. Jim looked very, very tired.

"Head clear now?" he asked heavily. "Sorry, but you wanted to smash the transmitter."

"I'm all right," said Brandon. He essayed to move, and found out his bonds. "Hm.... You tied me up. Good idea. —It was pretty bad, Jim. I thought I was immune. And so I was, to everything they ever shot at me before. But they pulled a new one. They put so much power into whatever they did that even I had to fight it I held out a long time. It seemed centuries. And—I knew that if I ever stopped fighting they'd get me, and—the time came when I had to. And they did get me."

He lay still in the bonds in which Jim had tied him.

"They got everybody," said Jim. He sat quietly still.

Brandon's eyes widened suddenly.

"Hey!" he said sharply. "Where's your cap? That iron-wire cap!— Have they got you, too?"

"They haven't got anybody now," said Jim. He looked too weary to be elated. "They're licked. That's why I've thrown away my cap. It feels rather good to sit bareheaded and think that people are free. Even the ones who were conquered first of all."

Brandon's eyes were wide.

"What's that? How?"

Jim nodded listlessly at the transmitter.

"That did it. Awfully simple, after all. Remember when we were trying to make it work? I believed the transmitter was all right, but I couldn't make the modulator pick up any thoughts to feed to it. I didn't want it to retransmit the Things' thoughts! I wanted it to pick up my own. So I worked in the vault where the Things' thoughts couldn't come. And the modulator didn't pick up anything at all. Funny I didn't see it. It was so infernally simple!"

Brandon said blankly.

"I don't get it...."

"I wore a wire cap to keep the Things' thoughts out of my brain. You've got a metal plate in your skull which seems to work the same way. Remember? We put a metal cage around the Thing to keep thoughts from getting out of its brain. It just didn't occur to us that we'd the same thing around ourselves. My wire cap and your metal plate kept thoughts from coming in. They also kept thoughts from going out."

Brandon said, "Oh...."

"Our brains were in cages, the same as the Thing's.

So there wasn't anything in the vault for the modulator to work on. That's why it didn't work."

"But..."

"I'd taken the modulator all apart," said Jim, "and couldn't find anything wrong with it. I gave up. We got ready to take pictures. We let the Thing out. It was cocky. It tried to control us. It couldn't. We were protected. Then you stumbled against the transmitter. You caught it before it fell, and you turned it on in grabbing it. Remember we noticed it was turned on later? As soon as the transmitter went on, without modulation, the Thing got panicky. It got scared. It tried to run away. It ducked back into its cage. It was pretty tame. The transmitter did it."

Brandon, lying bound hand and foot, drew a deep breath.

"I'll take your word for it. I don't understand."

"It's just as simple as all the rest," said Jim indifferently. "Thought is the modulation of a field of force. Our brains don't make much of a field, outside our skulls, though they modulate it very well. That's why telepathy works only sometimes. The Things make a comparatively big field outside their skulls, and modulate it very well. So they can transmit thought. The transmitter yonder"—he nodded at the device—"isn't so very big, but it makes a monstrous field. And it doesn't modulate it at all."

He stopped. After an instant he shrugged and went on.

"Take a bass drum. Assume the drum-head's loose. You make a gadget that tightens it a little and taps it a little. Not much noise. Make another gadget that tightens it quite a lot and taps it pretty hard. You get a lot of noise. Then put a compressed-air line to the drum and pump in air until it's iron-hard. The air doesn't bang. But how much noise can the other gadgets make? Not much."

Brandon blinked.

"The Things make a field. They can modulate it," said Jim. "But the transmitter makes a field a thousand times as strong. The fields blend. And the Things can't impress a modulation on a field a thousand times as strong as they can make! They can't drive a modulation out of their own skulls, though their flesh, having liquid in it, is a conductor and the field stays on the surface without sinking in. The Things become just ordinary animals. Incidentally, human telepathy is out of the question now, too."

He got up and came slowly into the vault. He loosened the bonds that held Brandon helpless. Brandon said uneasily, "D'you think it's all right to let me loose yet?"

"I think so," said Jim casually. "Anyhow I'll shoot you if you go near the transmitter before I'm sure." Then he smiled faintly. "I'm having too much fun to want it to stop. I'm just picturing things to myself. Try it!"

He went out and sat down bareheaded in the sunshine again. He thought contentedly. But his thoughts were not like those of the Things. Not at all. He thought....

There were people in the mountain country who had a Little Fella in the attic. They waited for him to summon them, and to give them orders. Nothing happened. They received no orders. They were not summoned. They puzzled over it. Days passed. They ceased to wait for commands, without realizing that they ceased to wait. They grew stronger. They grew energetic. They came to dread a summons to the Little Fella. Still none came. Finally—after weeks, perhaps—someone went uneasily up to the attic. There was an evil smell there. The Thing was still in its nest. It moved eagerly as the human drew near. But it did not order the human to approach. The someone went down shuddering a little. The Thing was unspeakably repulsive... One didn't want anything like that in the house....

There was a Thing in the boiler-room of an apartment-house in a city. It ceased to command its slaves. They did not seek it out. Naturally! Days passed. It smelled evily. No one went near it. It stirred eagerly when there was movement in the cellar. But its nest was shunned. Ultimately, in desperation, it climbed out of the nest on its own feeble legs. Desperately, it lay in wait for a fur naceman. When he came, it advanced upon him, slavering. He received no commands and, shuddering, moved to avoid it. It moved desperately upon him. It sank its fangs ravenously in his ankle. In panic, he struck it fiercely with the coal-shovel.

He hit it. It tried to flee. He hit it again, suddenly raging. In a frenzy of revulsion he battered it to lifelessness.

A Thing came bumping down a flight of attic steps. It no longer glistened fatly. Its belly was flabby and the skin hung in folds. Its beady eyes were desperate. In the kitchen, the woman screamed a little. The Thing moved toward her, slavering. She ran out of the door into the farm-yard. The Thing followed. It bumped down the steps to the ground. A dog came toward it, bristling. The Thing was ravenous. It was starving. It fixed its beady eves upon the dog, which came closer, sniffing its foetid smell and growling. It slashed at the dog with its fangs.

The dog tore it to pieces, snarling.

A Thing lay in a nest of soft furs, in a nest of which the heat was thermostatically controlled. The woman who had ordered the expensive nest prepared grew restive. She complained to her husband of the smell. He had the nest thrown out. The Thing was a waif. It skulked in dark places, going mad with rage at its own helplessness and the utter lack of response of even small, feral animals to its will.

It tried to feed upon the kittens of an alley-cat. The alley-cat ripped it in maternal frenzy with long sharp claws. Suddenly blood jetted from some unprotected vein close to its thin and hairless skin. It struggled more and more feebly....

Things which were neglected. Things which were ignored. Things which were regarded at first dubiously and then disgustedly by humans who had been their slaves, and who became horribly ashamed that they had been slaves.... Things which were taken out-of-doors and shot because men were ashamed.... Things which were drowned because men hated to remember what they had done for those Things.... Things which had been greedy, and who were suddenly faced perhaps by the parents of a human which had been the victim of a Thing's gluttony, and those parents hated the Thing for what they had allowed it to do, took the Thing and tried with horrifying ingenuity to make it pay.... Things which were put into cages and dumped into trash-cans for garbage collectors to take away.

And, of course, Things who were carefully examined by scientific men who tried to understand the secret of their domination and its end. Things which were carefully killed and dissected.... Things which an animal-trainer tried to teach to do tricks, because he knew that they understood human speech, but which he had to kill because of their insatiable blood-lust.... Things which had not slaves and no civilization, and no science or art or knowledge, who had suddenly become mere animals unable even to communicate with one another. Which strayed or escaped from the places where they had been masters, and encountered each other and fought horribly for the pure purpose of cannibalism.... And Things which struggled with a desperate resolution to reach the place where their space-craft had landed, and found it surrounded by men who killed them ruthlessly....

And Things which were doled out small rations of the blood of slaughtered animals, given to them when they responded to the painstaking questions of scientists, and withheld when they did not.

It was two weeks before three Security cars drove carefully up to the place where there had once been a village, but where now was only the shell of a single brick building and certain mounds of rotted timbers overgrown with vines. Men in the uniform of Security officials got out. They came toward the brick shell in which the vault still stood.

Jim faced them, his hand on his revolver. But he recognized one or two of them from pictures. One in particular he recognized as the tired-faced, white-haired man who had helped make the first atomic bomb, some thirty years before, and had devoted his life ever since to the prevention of the use of other bombs and their equivalents. He was the director-general of Security, but he had none of the pomposity of his underlings.

"I think," said the white-haired man, "that you must be James Hunt You see, we improved our detectors. When we came to our senses our detectors showed a much stronger field than had ever been registered before, and we managed to trace it."

Jim said shortly, "Hm... You should. It isn't focused."

"Yes," said the white-haired man. "I've reviewed the file on you, Mr. Hunt. Your apparatus, which we seized, was very ingenious."

Jim said coldly, "I don't think that you came here to pay me compliments!"

The Director-General of Security said humbly, "In part I did. But also I came to tell you that you can turn off your transmitter now."

"You can turn it off," said Jim grimly, "after you kill me!"

The Director-General of Security smiled faintly.

"It doesn't matter. You see, we worked with the apparatus we seized from your laboratory. We worked out the principles involved. And we've built thirty more transmitters, all of which are working now. Yours alone took care of the Things, but it's hardly likely that all the others will go out of action at the same time. We made a large number for—security. Your vigil isn't necessary any longer. That's all."

Jim relaxed. Then he shrugged. He looked at the men who had gotten out of the three Security cars.

"I suppose," he said sardonically, "that I'm under arrest, now. I've a life sentence for breach of security, I'm charged with a murder I didn't commit, with two escapes from custody, and there's a hold-up you can bring against me. I did break the law in working on thought-transmission! But if I hadn't worked at it, I'd have had no idea how to stop it! But I did smash the Things! I've got that much satisfaction!"

Then he shrugged.

"All right," he said cynically. "I suppose I've accomplished enough for one man. I go to jail now and you can smash the transmitter if you like. I'll come quietly!"

The white-haired man smiled without mirth.

"I understand your attitude," he said gently. "But we did think we were doing the right thing. Now we know we weren't. But I did not come to arrest you, but to ask your help. We have found the space-ship in which the Things came here. They had rather manlike creatures in it with them—all dead, however. The controls were designed to be operated by those manlike creatures, and not by Things. We've forced some Things to explain, by signals. It appears that they control some nine planets in two solar systems, all of them inhabited by the same beings who had apparently built and navigated the spaceship, and on whom the Things apparently—fed."

Jim's lips tensed.

"If space-travel is possible," said the Director-General, tiredly, "Now we know that we have to have it. If Things such as came to earth control any other civilization, we have to end their empire. In short, we are going to build a space-fleet to destroy the menace the Things constitute, and it is probable that we will enter into friendly relations with the race or races we liberate from them. We are reversing our policy of—isolationism. We can do nothing else. But it may be hard for some of us to change our way of thinking." Jim said, "Well?"

"We'd like you to accept a post with Security," said the white-haired man humbly. "If not, we'd like you to advise us. We have to change our whole outlook to— well—nearly that of the people we have considered criminals. Also we will need to equip our fleet with adequate protection against transmitted thought. We have to learn—"

"I fought against Security because it tried to make us safe by not letting us find out anything that could be dangerous. But I think we can only be safe when we know how to handle anything that can be dangerous!"

The older man looked very, very humble.

"After thirty years of thinking otherwise," he said wryly, "I admit that you seem to be right. We have to reverse our position and encourage nearly everything we have forbidden. We have to live dangerously because safety appears not to be safe." Then he added almost wistfully. "It should be very fine to be a young man now, with a chance to take part in the conquest of the stars and the planting of human colonies on the Milky Way. You see, Mr. Hunt, I'm not offering you a reward for what you've done. I'm asking you for more help. We have so much to do and we need young minds! That's what I came here for!"

Jim tried to be dignified. He didn't quite make it. He grinned. He shook hands warmly. Then he said awkwardly; "Really, sir, an awful lot of what happened was just bull luck. I pulled some awfully stupid tricks. But if you can let me help a share in starting things off in a new direction—" He drew a deep breath. "Lord, yes! You ought to meet Brandon, by the way. Brandon! Come on out here!"

And to the Director-General of Security, who was of course the most powerful man in the world, Jim Hunt added explanatorily, "He's been keeping a sub-machine-gun on you from inside there. By the way, he isn't crazy."

Brandon came out of the bank-vault. And the Director-General of Security, the head of the organization which had the final word in all the affairs of men, murmured, "He's not crazy? That's at least refreshing."