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.
9
The thoughts which raced through the bright sunshine were shaken and raging and terrified. A completely unparalleled thing had happened. One of those who sent thoughts flickering about the hills had been killed. Forcibly, violently, horribly killed. Such a thing had not happened before in a thousand years! Panic filled the thoughts of the survivors. Each one had shared the screaming terror of their fellow as he realized that none of his subject animals—on this planet called men—would come to carry him to safety even at the cost of their own lives. Each one had felt the unprecedented hysteria of helplessness as their comrade shrieked his terror. Each had partaken of his crazy indecision as he looked down into the room which was a sea of flames below him. And each had felt what he felt when he tried, squealing, to climb down that ladder on quite insufficient limbs, to fall instead and bounce sickeningly, and know pain such as every member of their race had been protected from for millenia. And when the flames licked him, and when his hide shriveled and scorched, and when incandescent embers fell upon him, why—such a thing had never happened before! The Things in other soft warm nests, here and there in the mountains, felt their own hairless hides turn crisp and shrivel, and knew all the torment that Thing had known. They could shut out each other's ordinary thoughts, but not the silent pain-mad shrieks of the dying creature.
So that now it was over, the thoughts that raced through the bright sunshine were raging and terrified. The Things had experienced torture. They had experienced defiance. They had suffered agony and known defeat. Some seemed frightened into incoherence. Some seemed temporarily mad. And all had lost the zestful complacency and the placid absorption in their gluttony which had been the portion of their race for ages. Some even clamored for a return to their former home in the craft which had brought them here.
But that was plainly impossible. There were very, very, very many more than had landed. All could not crowd into the craft which had brought the original colonizers. And of course if men were included in the complement, to work the machines and feed the crew—why—not a fraction of their number could depart. So all fought venomously against any plan for safety from which they as individuals might be excluded.