The Brain-Stealers

7

Flight became a release for all his panic, and he ran like a madman through the trees. He fled crazily until an unseen obstacle caught him across the middle and threw him to the ground. He gasped in fear, and then realized that a single strand of wire had been stapled from tree to tree to form the rudest possible enclosure of a boundary-line. He had run into it full-tilt.

Panic came back. When Sally got home and told the Little Fella, if all the Little Fellas knew and concentrated upon him a concentrated intensity of thought-field, he would stop in his tracks. He would suddenly feel very, very glad that he was going to be subject to the Little Fellas. He would be inordinately happy about it. And Sally might reach home at any instant.

He put his hand on the wire to vault it. Then he realized. He began to work with maniacal haste. He found the nearest stapled place of the wire. He twisted it frantically back and forth and back and forth until it broke. It seemed ages before he had a loose end in his hand. But instantly thereafter he was coiling it feverishly as he moved toward the next point of stapling. His hands shook. He panted in an ecstasy of terror,—not only for himself but for other humans yet unaware. He wound the wire in a close flat spiral, working with more desperate haste than any man in all the world had ever worked before.

He had the spiral big enough Fifteen-twenty yards of wire were coiled into an untidy disk some twelve inches across. Then came a soundless thought in his mind.

"Not nice.... Not nice to hate the Little Fellas ... Little Fellas are nice ... It is not nice to judge them.... It is wrong to think of hating them without seeing one to know what he is like...."

Jim Hunt sobbed. This was no tentative, insinuating thought that would creep unnoticed into a man's brain and twist and warp his judgment while he knew of nothing going wrong. This could not be thrust away. This could not be shut out, though he fought it desperately. He tried to continue to make his disk of iron wire. He stumbled.

The thoughts were suddenly stronger. Much stronger.

"The right thing is to see a Little Fella.... Yes.... Of course ... It will be wise and nice and good to see a Little Fella..."

Then, suddenly, the thoughts were overwhelming.

"... IT WILL BE TERRIBLE TO WAIT....IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO WAIT ... A LITTLE FELLA MUST BE SEEN AT ONCE ... NOW ... IT IS URGENT...."

These thoughts were the forefront of his consciousness. He could not think of anything else. They were his thoughts. They were his only thoughts. They were all his mind contained....

He tripped and fell. A sharp branch stabbed his cheek dangerously close to his eye. The pain drove out everything else for the fraction of an instant. And in that morsel of time pure panic returned to him and he clapped the flat plate of wire over his head and pulled it down, stretching it until it covered even his ears....

He stood still, trembling. He had made a disk-shaped spiral of iron wire, and when he pulled it down over his head it stretched into a sort of bird-cage. It was a ridiculous sort of cap. But iron absorbed the thought-field. It weakened it enormously. He could still feel the nagging, compelling thoughts. They hovered about him, trying to take over his brain. But they were only whispers now.

"Little Fellas are friendly.... Little Fellas are nice.... It will be good to see a Little Fella and ask him to explain..."

Jim Hunt vomited quietly. Then he set to work to free himself from the yet unbroken end of the wire, of which only one end had been coiled into this eccentric headgear.

When he'd broken the wire once more, he fastened the cap firmly in place with a strand of wire under his chin. Then he broke the fence and began to make a second cap. A much more complete one, containing many more turns of wire and much more closely spaced in many more turns.

He made the exchange with great caution and desperate haste ... But the Little Fellas couldn't read his thoughts. They couldn't know what he was doing. They lay quietly, greedily, in nests which human beings had made for them. They thought, and their thoughts went out and focused, and they waited placidly for the person to whom they were directed to obey...

This second cap shut out the thoughts completely. They were no longer even whispers. So, very composedly, Jim made two more. One of the extras he would put on Sally's head. One he would force on her father who would not have the physical strength to resist, no matter what commands the Little Fella gave him. And once his mind was freed of control by the iron cap, he could be made to understand, and he and Jim would go and kill the Thing which lay in a soft nest up in the attic by the chimney. And then they would equip other men with caps of wire and—.

It seemed very simple and very sure. A gratified, deadly vengefulness rose in Jim. Things—mere Things!— from some unknown hell would take over human beings as domestic animals, would they? They'd tell humans what to do? They'd tell them when to love and when to hate? They'd mate them as cattle are mated? They'd—they'd—.

Jim Hunt ground his teeth and cursed the Thing he had not yet seen. Their method was clear now. A certain number of them could join to overwhelm the minds of human beings. Once overwhelmed and once conditioned by irresistible powerful suggestion, a human could never defend himself again. One Thing could then control many humans. Perhaps dozens. Maybe hundred. Now the Things controlled this tumbled, mountainous country. Their expansion was secret and piecemeal and irresistible. They had subjugated a countryside and a village, certainly. There was no reason why they should not control a city. A nation. A world! And all without violence, and all without purpose other than that the Things should lie soft and warm and have human beings serve them and be the food of which they were so greedy....

Pure human vanity was outraged at the bare idea that mankind could be subdued to be the cattle, the livestock only, of non-human creatures.

So that Jim was filled with blazing wrath when he set out to put into action the plan which seemed so sure. But it had taken a long time to make the second cap, and the two extra ones. He'd made them very carefully so that not even a whisper of outside thought could penetrate to control a mind whose normal defenses—if any—had been destroyed. He had left the farm in the early morning. He started back two hours before sunset.

He did not try to retrace his steps exactly. He essayed to go back to Sally's home in a direct line. Perhaps two miles from it, he heard the creaking of a farm-wagon, He stopped short. He had almost blundered out upon a hill-country road which seemed filled with country-people.

But there were only men. Most were visibly armed with shotguns or rifles. They were spread out in a long, irregular procession. Most looked pale and thin and sickly. Some few seemed stronger. All wore expressions of unearthly tranquility, save when they spoke. Then they seemed to rage. Jim heard voices.

"... Scoundrel!" said a voice bitterly. "Come outa the woods an' said he was hungry, an' they fed 'im, an' bedded 'im, an' he courted Sally...

Another voice, angrily; "Even the Little Fella didn't know—"

Other voices said "Hush!" and there was a pause.

"But, by Gawd!" rumbled the first voice furiously, "When him an' Sally started for town to git married, an' he-"

Somebody came spurring back from the front of the line. There were forty or fifty men. There was one wagon. There were half a dozen horses. There were many guns.

"Keep y'eyes open!" commanded the man on horseback. "Maybe he don't know he's been found out yet. He's brash enough to show himself, thinkin' we don't know yet what he done. Try an' ketch him alive if y'can, but don't take no chances on him gettin' away!"

Jim Hunt's eyes flared, ten yards away in the thick underbrush. The sound of his movements had not been heard only because these people made too much noise themselves.

A voice asked harshly; "She's sure 'nough dead?"

The man on horseback snapped; "What're we takin' the wagon for? Buryin' tomorrow down to Clearfield! She got back to the house an' told 'em what the fella done, an' she died. He kilt her. He prob'ly don't know we know it yet. He don't know how we git told things. Keep y'eyes open!"

The grumbling, trudging, small-sized mob moved on along the road. Presently it would reach the trail that led up to the farm of Sally's family. It would turn aside there.

Jim remained very still, except that he trembled a little with an icy passion.

He was clear-headed enough though. He knew—now, —the mistakes he had made. The idea that thought-transmission could be accomplished only by human beings had died hard. When Sally'd told him that the Little Fella was something else than human; something that was carried; something that stayed in a soft warm nest; something that was greedy of the life that flowed in human veins—even then Jim had not really grasped the fact. Without thinking it out specifically, he'd assumed that Sally wouldn't be punished for something she could not help. That when she fled back to her home and gasped heartbrokenly that Jim, whom she loved, had threatened to kill the Little Fellas, that her loyalty to that Little Fella would move him at least to mercy in return.

It wasn't so. Sally was dead. And Jim knew quite surely how she'd died. All the family was weak and exhausted and drained of all energy, and she'd said the Little Fella was greedy. If Sally had failed to carry out his commands, what would be more likely than that he'd indulged his greed without restraint?

There is a limit to the capacity of a human being for rage and grief and hatred. Jim had reached that limit. He was numbed. To all intents, Jim Hunt was wholly calm. He could think quite sanely of quite indifferent things. But somehow he did not happen to think of anything but ways to kill, and kill, and kill the Things he had not even seen.