The Brain-Stealers
BY MURRAY LEINSTER
1
The space-craft landed. Silently. Gently. In deep forest. Within it there was venom and dissension. Silent venom. Soundless dissension. Thoughts. Only thoughts. A thought of bitter reproach—for gluttony. A thought of furious defensiveness. Angry, soundless accusations and counter-accusations. Then a cold, hard thought, reporting fact. The air outside the ship was good and the temperature bearable. There would be animals. Because of—the thought was icily savage, and meant gluttony—they would have to move of themselves, rather than be carried as was more convenient. But half a dozen of them should be able to handle any single animal on a strange world. There must be, though, no—again the savage thought of gluttony—until they had learned the nature of life on this world. Until they had some idea of its more intelligent and useful forms.
The craft that had landed was not large. Where it rested amid huge forest patriarchs, the branches had swerved aside and closed above it. It was hidden from above. But speckles of moonlight penetrated the leaves. They showed, presently, a circular slab in the ship's side in the act of unscrewing. It was a door.
Presently the moonlight shone upon movement. Upon movements. Creatures in awkward, unaccustomed self-locomotion. They were very small, compared to men, and their appearance was extremely improbable. They hobbled painfully in a compact group. At first they did not communicate even with each other, as if they strained whatever senses they possessed in the effort to savor the nature of this strange planet. Then the thoughts began. They expressed disgust. Disdain.
Then the icy, cold, clear thought that here the ground was firm and the vegetation worn away, is if by the passage of many animals.
The hobblings went along the path. Presently there was a light. An artificial light. There was tumultuous interchange of thought at ground-level among the struggling, painfully un-adept pedestrians. They moved forward. A dog barked furiously and rushed at them.
The small creatures stood still. The dog slowed, and stopped, and then curled up and lay snoring on the ground. The improbable things inspected him. There was fury in the thought-exchanges. But the icy, factual thought came again. This creature's paws were not adapted to the making of artifacts, such as the building yonder, nor the handling of tools required to make artificial lights. So that they should examine the building.
The tiny, loathsome creatures hobbled painfully toward it. Presently...
Men carried them back to the craft in which they had come. The men walked with the curious gait of sleepwalkers. And when the men had gone away again the craft that had landed in the forest was filled with rejoicing. Silent rejoicing. Soundless glee. Glee which rose to the status of rebellion. Mutiny took place, with every member of the crew a mutineer and joyously resolved to remain upon this planet for always.
The icy, factual thought again. No gluttony. Not yet.
The intelligent life on this planet was highly-developed.
If alarmed, it might be dangerous. But if the whole thing were carefully planned and properly carried out….
2
The guard's flashlight played on Jim Hunt for a bare instant before he let go and fell like a stone into the blackness under the dirigible. He felt a raging triumph even as the ship's huge, elongated form shrank swiftly and was blotted out against the stars. The light had played on him at just the right instant and from just the right angle. The guard would swear that he'd been empty-handed, that he'd jumped to his death from the Security patrol ship Cinquoin in the darkness and at fifteen thousand feet, rather than submit to recapture. And that was what Jim Hunt wanted.
But the odds were great that the guard would tell the exact truth. As he fell, he had the seat-pack, to be sure. After breaking out of the prison cab, he'd taken it from the crew's cabin of the ship in a desperate stealthy foray down from the maze of braces and wires and billowing, sluggish balloons within the framework of the monster airship. But he'd allowed himself to be cornered and sighted up near the bow, as if he'd been trying in the ultimate of desperation to find some hiding-place in which to conceal himself against search. With honest testimony, now, that he'd leaped to his death unequipped, it might be that the theft of the seat-pack from the other end of the ship wouldn't be noticed. It might be weeks or months before one seat-pack, emergency, type whatever-it-was, was missed and finally surveyed as expended or lost in the normal operations of the Security Patrol Ship Cinquoin. And by that time Jim Hunt would either be safely hidden—or it wouldn't matter.
Falling with the mounting velocity of a dropped stone and trying desperately to wriggle into the seat-pack's straps, he grew savagely sure that it wouldn't matter. He fell thirty-two feet the first second, and sixty-four the second, and ninety-six the third and a hundred and twenty-eight the fourth. He had one arm through one of the seat-straps, but no more. At the tenth second, he had dropped two thousand feet and was falling at the rate of a mile every sixteen seconds. At the fifteenth second the wind screamed about him as he hurtled earthward. He found himself grimacing savagely, falling through space like a meteor. The wind of his fall ran up the sleeve of his shirt and burst it. And he fought the wildly vibrating seat-pack which trailed behind him. In a nightmare of perpetual falling and blackness he knotted his hand in the strap he could not adjust and heaved....
There was a violent jerk. The pilot-chute was out and tending to check his fall. Another jerk, more violent. The first descent-chute. Then, at two-second intervals, the four horrible wrenching heaves that were the others. Seat-packs, being designed for emergency use in the most literal possible sense of the term, do not contain one large parachute, but five small ones. They open successively, making five lesser wrenchings at a man's body instead of one overwhelming yank which could snap his neck.
At twenty-five seconds after his drop into sheer blackness from the Security ship, Jim Hunt dangled below a swiftly-descending series of parachutes in the midst of a tangible darkness in which no star shone. He should, he believed, be over solid ground. But the Cinquoin might have made a detour for some unguessable reason. He might descend into icy black salt sea, or into a lake or even a pond which would serve as well to drown him as the ocean itself.
There was a faint, faint radiance above him. The Cinquoin was playing searchlights below. That was quick work, considering. Had he been able to adjust the seat-pack as quickly as its manufacturers claimed, while falling, his drop would have been checked a long way back. The searchlight beams would have caught him above the cloud-bank which now hid him. Either the ship itself would have followed him to the ground, or members of the Security Police would have jumped, too, delaying the opening of their chutes so they'd reach ground before him. Then he'd have been lost.
The radiance, dim at best, grew fainter still and died. The officers of the Cinquoin would have the honest statement of the guard that he'd simply jumped. The seat-pack had been hidden behind his body, and he was considered rebellious enough and desperate enough to have committed suicide rather than live the rest of his life in Security Custody. There was no sign of a chute beneath the ship. Everything pointed to his death. The odds were—and he neither saw nor heard anything to lessen them—that the ship had simply gone on to its destination, reporting him a suicide.
He dropped through darkness. Presently a sound like gentle surf upon a beach came up from below, but it came from a wide area. It was a wind of some force, beating upon trees. He set his jaws. He had an excellent chance of being killed in this landing. Or of losing his parachute-string when he struck—to be sighted from overhead when a routine patrol-plane search was made for his body. They wouldn't really expect to find it, unless buzzards guided them, but chutes caught in a tree-top would tell them entirely too much.