The Brain-Stealers

8

He lay in hiding next morning and watched Sally's family leave the cabin for Clearfield. They moved very silently, like ghosts. Sally's father and mother, and her two gangling brothers, and the younger children. Sally's mother carried the baby. They filed away into the woodstrail that would lead down to the highway. They looked pale and weak and sickly. It seemed improbable that they could walk the six miles to Clearfield. But possibly a wagon would have been sent up for them. The armed mob that had come up here before was proof that human beings had not ceased to be human, even under the control of the Things. They had emotions of indignation, and surely they would feel compassion and pity, too. Unless they were told not to.

But there was reason for public tumult to be encouraged among humans. The Things, so far, were all-powerful only within their own quite secret domain. Outside, Jim had heard no hint of any strangeness in this part of the world. Security, too, with vastly more information of every sort, could have had no inkling of the enslavement of human beings to non-human Little Fellas. The merest breath of such a suspicion would have had this place swarming with agents of Security. Some would doubtless have been overwhelmed and enslaved by the Little Fellas. But surely some uneasiness would have gone undispelled. The least hint of experiment with atomic energy or bacteriological mutation—X-ray apparatus which could produce mutations was now used only in the presence of a Security representative—invariably led to investigation so exhaustive that all the world dreaded it. And thought-transmission would surely lead to action, if Security got a hint of it. Jim had reason to know that!

So there was reason to have a public excuse for any action which might become known outside the Things' dominion. A wanton and brutal crime resulting in the death of Sally had been invented and was firmly believed in. If Jim were caught, it was even possible that all his questioning would follow all the forms of law. But behind it would be the Little Fellas.

He watched the funeral party of Sally's family file into the woods and go away. Sympathy would go out to them, and fury would rise, and the folk who attended Sally's funeral would turn to and hunt Jim down with a vengeful industry. They had a perfectly adequate motive in the tale they believed of the death of Sally. And nothing would happen to put the rest of the world on guard. Only—Jim had other ideas.

The party of mourners vanished. The world grew silent and still. There still were sounds, of course. The shrilling of insects and the cries of birds, and at long, irregular intervals the plaintive whistle of a bob-white quail. There was bright, warm sunshine. But the tree-branches stirred hardly at all, and the chickens in the farmhouse yard pecked languidly, and the pigs in the pig-pen rooted and grunted without real energy.

Jim watched. And watched. And watched. He was very calm. He knew what he needed to do. It would be infinitely simple, the essential part of it, but he took no chances.

Mostly he watched the trail of smoke from the farmhouse chimney. The whole family had left. Jim had counted them. That should have left the house empty save for the Little Fella. But Jim had his doubts.

He was right to disbelieve. Half an hour after the disappearance of the family along the trail, the thin and steady line of ascending smoke was disturbed. The smoke thickened. Someone had put a log in the fireplace inside.

Half an hour later, a man came out. He carried a rifle. He chopped wood. While Jim was at large and inexplicably immune to the commands of the Little Fella, there must be a guard. Over every Little Fella. This man chopped a little and rested, and chopped a little more and rested. He went slowly back to the house with wood. He came out again and got his rifle. He went wearily into the house again.

Jim moved forward. He'd had plenty of time in which to spy out the land. There was a little rise which would hide him, if he crawled, until he could get the barn between himself and the house. He reached the barn. He was taking a desperate chance, but surely the scene of a supposed crime would be the last place where either the Little Fellas or the humans of this neighborhood would expect him to appear. People and Things alike would expect him to try flight at the top of his speed, to get as far as possible from this place.

Presently he wormed his way out of the bottom half of a door at the far end of the barn. He was behind the chicken-house. It was old and tumbledown. He found a wide plank, partly rotten at the bottom, which could be pulled away. He went inside without showing himself to the house.

There was no alarm. A beady-eyed, abstracted hen sat on a nest. There were other laying-nests about. He crept to the door. Presently a hen entered. He caught her in a sudden snatch. A single squawk and she was still. Minutes later, another hen. A third hen got off a nest and essayed to cluck triumphantly. He caught her.

He was ready. A strip torn from his shirt tied one foot of each hen to one leg of each of the others. He put the three fowl down and crouched inside the door, watching the house through a crack.

The hens squawked. They tried to walk and could not. They scolded each other furiously. They waxed hysterical. They created a sustained, outrageous din, fluttering crazily this way and that as first one and then another succeeded momentarily in imposing her hen-mindedness on the others. It sounded exactly as if some small animal had gotten into the chicken-house and was wreaking havoc among the hens.

It was such a noise as no farm-bred man could hear without investigating. After minutes, a man came slowly out from the house. He carried a rifle, and he walked exhaustedly. He was pale and thin and he wore—Jim saw— an expression of unearthly tranquility. But he came out to see what was scaring the hens.

He pushed open the henhouse door and stepped in. Perhaps he expected to see the darting brown body of a fox go fleeing for the hole by which it had entered.

He found oblivion. Jim swung ruthlessly with a broken hoe-handle he'd picked up in the barn. The pale, thin man collapsed. When he came to, he was trussed up like a turkey. And there was a queerly uncomfortable cap made out of wire upon his head. Jim had his rifle.

"Listen," said Jim quietly. "With that cap on your head, the Little Fella can't tell you anything. Notice?"

The man gaped, looking at the muzzle of his own gun held unwaveringly at his head.

"Who else is in the house?" asked Jim as quietly as before. His tone wasn't consciously menacing, but actually it was much more frightening than any attempt at threat could have been.

"One man," gasped his captive. "He's—"

"You're going to call him," said Jim gently. "I won't kill him or you, if you do as I say. But you're going to do it! The Little Fella can't stop me. He can't make me do anything. But I can make you do anything, because I'll kill you if you don't."

His face was stone and his eyes were hard as granite.

The bound man cried out hoarsely.

"Again," said Jim softly.

The other man came out, puffing. As he entered the chicken-house, Jim hit him savagely. Presently he came to, bound like his companion and with another wire cap on his head.

"These caps," said Jim somberly, "are for your own good. So you won't hear anything the Little Fella tries to tell you. Believe me, you should be grateful to me for that!" He paused and added softly, "I'm the man who came out of the woods and asked Sally's father to feed me. I didn't kill Sally. The Little Fella did that. Being greedy! You won't want to have the Little Fella telling you things for a while...."

He walked openly toward the house, carrying the first man's rifle. Two guards would be plenty for the Little Fellas, and more than two would have showed themselves somehow, in the hour or more he'd watched from the edge of the clearing.

His calculation was right. The house was empty. He went casually inside and helped himself to what food was ready-cooked. He made a search, and found a writing-tablet and pencils. He hunted further, and found faded envelopes. One was a ready stamped envelope. He put them in his pocket. Overhead, in the attic, there was a soft nest close by the chimney. In it there was a small, greedy Thing which had killed Sally, and was one of other Things which were not human and yet dared to subjugate man as domestic animals, for service and use and—food.

Jim did not hurry. He even looked for extra shells for the rifle in the coats of his two prisoners, flung aside within the house. Then he went composedly to the fireplace and took coals and brands from it. He spread them carefully about the building. Some places caught fire readily. Others were not easy to set alight. Clothes and blankets helped though to spread the fire. And the place filled with such a volume of acrid smoke that he was coughing when he went outside.

He waited. Flames rose. They crackled. They purred. Then they roared. Once, Jim shifted the queer cap of iron wire on his head. Very slightly, and very cautiously.

He smiled, with burning eyes. He stood outside a window and looked in. There was not so much smoke inside the house now, but flames were everywhere. The heat was almost unbearable but he stared in hungrily. In the ceiling of the main room there was a little hatch with a ladder going up the sidewall to it. Sally had fainted once, after coming down that ladder. The Little Fella had been very greedy....

Then he saw the Little Fella. He had not seen it teetering in frantic indecision at the edge of the hatchway. He had not even seen it trying dreadfully to use its almost useless limbs to climb down the ladder.

What he did see was a roundish, pinkish, hairless ball, nearly without features, which fell out of the smoke-cloud at the ceiling and plopped on the floor. It bounced once and then lay quivering. Then it struggled desperately up and it was encircled by flames. It scuttled horribly here and there, screaming soundlessly. Every way of exit was barred by flames. It retreated, shaking, shriveling, flinging itself crazily about Jim watched.

He felt no faintest impulse to mercy, but he was not ill-pleased when a partition fell. Incandescant joists and burning embers covered the place where the Thing had stood at bay amidst the fire. And it seemed to Jim that the fallen stuff quivered a little as if something moved convulsively beneath it, and he imagined that even through the protection of his iron-wire cap there came a sensation like a noiseless, long-continued shriek.

But it ended.

Jim Hunt went composedly away in the hills. He had a gun and some ammunition. He had food. Rather more important in his own eyes, though, was the fact that he had tablet-paper and a soiled stamped envelope and a pencil. A letter to Security, dropped in a rural mailbox, could be made demonstrably convincing that he, Jim Hunt, had survived a fifteen-thousand-foot drop and was hidden somewhere in these hills. And he could explain that the people of this area were thin and anaemic and bloodless, and that the cause would be found to be thought-transmitters hidden in the attics of their homes. But those transmitters could be nullified by iron-wire caps for Security agents.

Again the defeat of the Things who enslaved humans and fed upon them seemed very simple and quite easy and very sure.

It wasn't.