The Brain-Stealers

3

Some while after sunrise he found what might be termed a farmhouse—a log cabin, typical of mountain country where erosion kept cleared land poor and even cattle could not be raised with any great profit. It was not large, and there was a sagging porch and wasteful rail fences and poverty-stricken outbuildings. From hiding, Jim Hunt examined it keenly.

It was exquisitely ironic that he should have defied the Security Police, and been sentenced to life Security custody, because of his experimental work on the amplification and transmission of thought. He had dropped out of the sky in a thousand-to-one attempt at escape, and he'd run into those nibbling thoughts the night before— and they were what he'd been sentenced for. Transmitted thought.

Now he understood some of the Security Police testimony. It had been testified that after an official admonishment not to continue a certain line of experiment, he had attempted to carry on his work in secret. They swore that detectors proved that he continued, and that he had associates or confederates with whom he cooperated. And he knew that the testimony about the detectors was untrue, because his work had been done in a cellar lined with quarter-inch plates of high-hysterisis iron. Nothing his apparatus produced could get through that! No detectors could have caught his fields outside that barrier! So when Security Police gave evidence that he'd continued his work in secret, that was true enough. But when they swore that detectors showed his fields and that he had confederates in research, that wasn't true. He'd thought them liars.

Now he understood. Thought-fields weren't directional. He wasn't sure yet how they could spread out and concentrate again at a distance—and be present in between —and still give no indication of their point of origin. But you couldn't locate a transmitter by any sort of direction-finding device. He knew that. And he knew fully that there was danger in the development of the transmission of thought. But he'd felt that there was greater danger in its non-development.

Those small, nibbling, insinuating thoughts were proof that he was right. Somebody else was transmitting thought. Somebody else was using it for the one purpose that Security most feared—the implanting of beliefs and opinions in unsuspecting other persons. And because it was happening, and because Security had condemned him for studying the problem, and because all worth-while research was now driven underground—why —Jim Hunt was filled at once with a murderous rage and a chilly panic. Everything he believed in was endangered. Those small, sneaking thoughts on the very edge of sleep were not thoughts that the average person would recognize as alien, as directed, as not his own. They would seem to be his own thoughts. With skill, any thoughts could be suggested. He could believe this, or believe that, or that such-and-such was the case despite appearances, and all his will and all his intelligence would be applied to the defense or realization of the ideas he believed his own.

Which was dangerous. Which could be fatal. Even the Nazis, thirty years back, had had no such infallible system for the implanting of false ideas. It was that danger which had made the Security Laws forbid all experiment with amplified thought-transmission.

"The law read: "An Act to amend an act ... to amend an act entitled, 'An Act to Regulate and License Study and Research and Various Sciences' ... Sec. IV. Part 3, Bar. (c). "The amplification of the physical factors involved in thought, awareness, perception, aperception, reason, knowledge, memory, or any of the phenomena included in human or animal consciousness is forbidden save in official Security experimental zones and under first-priority supervision. The violation of this provision shall be a first-degree offense against Security and may be punishable by death or such lesser penalty as the court may decree.'" First-priority supervision required that a proposed experiment be described in minute detail and submitted for approval, and that if it was approved it should be performed by Security scientists only, with the proponent advised of the results only if (a) the official Security scientists considered it safe and/or desirable to perform it, (b) if they found the time to do so, and (c) if they felt like passing on the information gained. Actually, restricting a line of research to first-priority supervision meant simply that no research was done, Jim Hunt had been sentenced for violation of the law. And it was too late to prevent the danger. Security had detectors which could show up the existence of thoughtfields, and their intensity. But Security wouldn't allow experiment to develop thought-transmission, because the practice could be desperately dangerous.

But thought-transmission was a fact. It was being used. And Security had prevented the discovery of ways to control it. In all the world only Jim Hunt knew of this specific gap in the Security system which claimed to protect men against their own abilities. But that gap was enough to wreck all of civilization. It was ironic that the only evidence so far was the intrusion of tiny, nibbling thoughts into the brain of one man on the edge of sleep, and that man a criminal for having learned to recognize it.

Now he lay at the edge of a small clearing and watched a log cabin and the languid movements of the family which inhabited it. In three hours he learned that there were two adults and seven children living there. There was a grown girl and two gangling boys in their teens, and the rest ranged down to a baby whom he hadn't seen, but had heard wailing.

All seemed languid to the point where it was unnatural. All were apathetic, as if they were weak. The children of an age to play sat down on the bare earth outside the cabin and fumbled with clumsy toys or talked. They did not run. One of the adolescent boys sat on the edge of the porch and looked vacantly into space. That was all. Toward noon the man of the family went slowly to a nearby field and hoed in it without energy. He stopped often to rest.

Jim Hunt absorbed every movement and every action that he could see. These folk looked unwell. They looked as if they might be chronic sufferers from hookworm. But the farm, though poor and slovenly enough, at least appeared as if there had been work done on it in the past. Yet it was difficult to believe that this lackadaisical, unenergetic family could earn a living on rocky hillside land.

At noon he felt sure that whatever the decision had been on the Cinquoin as to his fate, and whatever or whoever was responsible for the sly small thoughts he'd picked up, he would be in no danger from this family.

They had surely no thought of trying to hunt down a fugitive from a Security ship. They had not the energy.

And if the thoughts he'd picked up had not been directed at him, but had been picked up simply because he was in the neighborhood of their focus, they wouldn't know of his existence at all. They surely weren't responsible for those thoughts, and in any case he had not much fear that his own reaction to them had been noted.

The transmission of thought is difficult enough. To receive clearly from a chosen, unamplified individual consciousness, with other consciousnesses present, should be impossible. So that the transmitter of those soothing ideas of happiness very probably was unaware of his existence.

Still

He wormed his way back into the wood and brushed himself off carefully. He went through underbrush and trees to where a trail led to the farm. He marched confidently ahead. Presently he came out into the clearing. He cast his eyes about as if seeing it for the first time. He walked toward the house.

The children, sitting in the dirt, turned their heads and stared at him. The adolescent on the edge of the porch raised his eyes and looked at him dumbly. The father of the family, off in a nearby field, stopped and leaned on his hoe.

"Howdy," said Jim Hunt, whose crime had been a desire to push back the boundaries of scientific knowledge. "I'm trampin'. Got any grub for a fella that'll work for it?"

The adolescent boy said listlessly, "Y'll have to ask Paw. That's him out in the field. Right lot o' work to do, though."

Jim turned to look at the man who leaned on his hoe. As he looked, slowly and as if with infinite effort that man straightened from his leaning and came toward the house.

"He's coming now," said Jim. "I'll wait."

He sat on the porch. He regarded the children, who stared at him blankly. He began to feel queer. He looked at the gangling boy, and felt queerer. Presently there were slow footsteps and the grown girl came out on the porch. He looked at her and felt very much queerer still. He felt an odd chilliness at the back of his neck. These people, children and all, had an odd expression which was compounded of equal parts of an unearthly tranquility and a settled exhaustion. The net result was something to chill the blood.

They weren't alarming in themselves, but he thought of the sly, soothing thoughts in the night. But for that experience, Jim might have considered this family merely as unusually pale and sickly-looking. Even now he had no real reason to couple their appearance with the terrifying surmises those nibbling thoughts had roused. Reason, indeed, insisted that there was no connection. But the feeling of connection was there.

The grown girl looked at him. She could have been pretty, had she been less pale and thin. She said listlessly, "How-do, Stranger. My, you look strong!" Then she paused, her eyes abstracted. "We don't see many strangers here. Where' you from?"

"Trampin'," said Jim Hunt, remembering to drop the final g. "Just trampin'. You get kinda hungry, trampin', too. I thought I'd try to earn a meal."

The man from the field came slowly up to the house. His face was seamed and weatherbeaten. He had the craggy features of the mountaineer. He had that queer expression of tranquility overlaying exhaustion, too, but in his face there was also an odd content of bewilderment.

Jim Hunt stood up.

"Howdy," he said. "I stopped by to see if I could do some work for some grub."

The farmer looked at him with lack-lustre eyes. He opened his mouth to speak. Then he turned and raised his eyes skyward. On the same instant Jim Hunt heard, too. It was the queer, whispering roar of a jet-rotor. There was a helicopter somewhere near. Which would be Security Police, looking for Jim Hunt's body or some indication of his escape.

The helicopter drifted into sight above the treetops with the Security symbol painted on its side. It came overhead with a swift, dragon-fly-like movement. It halted. The farmer shaded his eyes and stared up. Jim Hunt looked upward, too, with his hand placed to shade his eyes and conceal his face besides. But he was conscious only of an enormous, despairing calm. He was caught. Worse, they'd never believe—.

"We are Security Police," barked a voice aloft, through an amplifying loud-speaker. "A man jumped from a ship overhead, last night. Have you seen or heard of any strangers around?"

Jim Hunt waited to be revealed. The sudden completeness of his disaster numbed him. He felt practically no emotion. It was too sudden. But he did notice a strange new tensity in the people about him.

Thoughts came yammering into his head. Agitated, angry, raging thoughts.

"No ... No ... No Strangers ... Nobody at all ... No....No...."

The farmer cupped his hands and shouted: "Ain't seen no strangers. Ain't seen nobody but my own kinfolk for a week!"

The amplified voice from the helicopter said, "He didn't have a parachute. If you find his body, there's a reward."

The helicopter moved on above the treetops. It was gone. There was silence. The farmer lowered his gaze and looked bewilderedly at Jim Hunt.

"Now—why'd I say that?" he asked in a weak irritation. "Why'd I tell 'em there wasn't no strangers around when there was him right here?"

The grown girl said quickly, "You was told, Paw. I was scared you wouldn't ketch it. You was told!"

The farmer shook his head, his forehead creased.

"Maybe ... maybe," he said helplessly. "Seems to me like I'm goin' crazy sometimes. Things come to me, an' I do 'em, an' afterwards seems like I don't know why— an' then I do...."

Jim Hunt swallowed.

"I know why," he said. "It's like a voice speaking in your mind. Mostly it says, "Nice ... this is nice ... that is nice....' Isn't that so?"

The farmer stared at him.

"How'd you know, Stranger?"

Jim smiled very grimly. He knew that he was deathly pale, from the nearness of his capture by Security. But he rather suspected that there was at least as much danger here, trying to be free, as in the defiance of Security.

"Some people," said Jim, "just take that voice for granted. Some people don't. That's all." Then he said deliberately. "How about me working with you long enough to earn some food to carry along with me—" he tried not to let his voice vary by the fraction of a semitone—"and a pot to cook it in?"

The farmer stared at him again. He had been stirred up and enormously stimulated in some fashion. Now the stimulus was wearing off. He said weakly, "All right ... You get somethin' to eat an' then come out in the field. Bring a hoe with you... But I don't understan'."

He went feebly back to the place where he had been working. The grown girl spoke softly. Jim turned with a start. She was no longer listless. Her eyes were wide and intent. She smiled at him warmly.

"Come in the house, Stranger," she said softly. "We'll give you somethin' to eat an' you can help Paw later." Then she said in an amused, confidential tone, "Paw's funny. The Little Fella don't like Paw much. He'll like you, though..." Then she said in an eager voice, "Maybe he'll want you to say here. For good! That'd be nice..."

Jim Hunt felt his spine crawling as he went into the house. He wasn't sure, of course. He was in a turmoil of emotion, now, and emotion—particularly rage—tends to block out such things as transmitted thoughts. It was the means he'd used to defend himself the night before. But it seemed to Jim that ideas were trying gently and ever so smoothly to worm their way into his mind. And it seemed to him that something was trying to make him think: "Nice.... This is nice.... It would be terrible to go away from here ... This is nice ... It will be good to stay here...."

A surge of fury swept over him. Someone was trying to control him with the very thing Security had condemned him to life custody for trying to understand.

Transmitted thought. But fury was an excellent defense against it