He was hungry, and it annoyed him to be bothered by hunger when his life could be measured in hours, at most. It bothered him, too, that he had to make something out of wire with no tools but his hands, and that he could afford to take no chances at all,—that it must be unqualifiedly right He had the job halfway done when he saw a fatal flaw in the design. He had to start all over again. It had been late morning when he began, and noon came and he was irritatingly ravenous, but he forced himself to work with painstaking precision. He could not cut the wire save by repeated bendings until it broke. His hands grew raw. Blisters formed and broke. His fingers bled. He kept on doggedly. When at long last it was finished, with loose ends devised so he could twist them together and fasten it and nothing short of pliers would ever loosen it again, he went to a small stream and drank heavily.
Then he rested, looking rather grimly at his hands. He remembered, too, and used a still spot in the stream for a mirror, to see how convincing his wig might be. It was not too good. He trimmed it a little more and twisted odd strands of the hair under his iron-wire cap for still greater security against its slipping off.
Again he had to wait for dusk. It would make his story less likely, but he did not dare to risk close inspection. There were some factors in his favor, but this was a late hour at which to appear.... But he had to wait for dark so his wig wouldn't be looked at too closely.
He retraced his steps to the clearing he'd circled the night before. There was a farmhouse close by the main highway. He watched it for a long time. It was a prosperous farm for mountain country and poor land. The house itself was trim and neat and newly painted, and the barn was large. There was a flower-garden and a small building that could only be a garage. Decidedly this was a prosperous place. If there was a Thing here— and there must be—within half an hour of darkness his fate and probably that of the world would be decided.
The sun sank with an agonizing slowness, but as dusk drew near Jim moved cautiously along the edge of the clearing toward the farm-buildings. There were mountains all about him; great mounds of forest-clad stone, here and there broken by precipices of naked rock. There was a vast, serene dignity in the hills. Men had subdued their lower slopes, to be sure, but the mountains stood aloof from mens' petty doings. Still, their dignity would become scorn should men become subject to loathsome, shapeless, alien Things, who lay soft in warm nests and commanded humans to be their slaves and satisfy their gluttony....
Jim, however, thought of no such abstract ideas. He clung to the object he had made, and felt the smarting of his hands which were caked with dried blood, and he knew a monstrously irritating hunger. When dusk began to fall he risked much to creep out into the orchard and gather a dozen wind-fallen apples. He wolfed them, rotten spots and all.
Then night came, quietly and with a brooding peace-fulness. There was the sunset hush. There were all the minute, soothing sounds of ending day. Birds made drowsy noises and chickens cackled as they were fed in the farmyard.
Jim took off his coat and wrapped it with a vast care about the object he had made. It had to be done just so; to give an effect of enormous solicitude, and yet to be uncoverable instantly and used without the fraction of a second's delay.
He began to stumble toward the house with the air of a man at the very limit of his strength. He looked drugged and dazed by weakness and fatigue, and yet blindly obeying an implanted instinct of faithfulness. He seemed to be carrying a heavy object—though the thing he had made was not heavy at all—with all the tender and protective care one would give to a human baby.
13
It was early night. Lantern-light streamed out of an open door in the barn. He stumbled to the light and stood there blinking, with the coat-wrapped bundle cradled tenderly in his arms. He made his face seem to work with exhaustion and his breath to come in gasps.
"Listen!" he panted. "You—you got a Little Fella here? I—got to show him somethin'! I—I—"
The farmer was an oldish man with an expression of vast patience—and of course unearthly peace. He was milking a cow. He looked around slowly, somehow with the manner of a man to whom any exertion at all is enormously difficult.
"What's that?"
"I was with—gang huntin' that fella," panted Jim. He seemed to sob with exhaustion. "I wasn't—strong. I— caved in. Couldn't do what my Little Fella told me! Couldn't! I fell down an' couldn't get up.... Passed out ... Fainted, I guess. When I come to I was lost.... Tried to find the gang... Found a dead fella layin on the ground. He'd been carryin' this Little Fella..."
A flicker of emotion passed over the lined, thin, patient face of the man on the milking-stool.
"Carryin' a Little Fella?"
"Yeah....The Little Fella's sick!" panted Jim as if in a frenzy. "He's—he's alive! I know that! But he—can't tell me nothin'.... He just lays there...."
He moved the coat-wrapped object.
"I don't know what to do!" he cried in seeming panic.
"I picked 'im up an' wrapped 'im warm. V been carryin' him ever since, tryin' to find somebody ... Nobody but another Little Fella'll know what to do! Y'can't let a Little Fella die!"
The patient eyes looked at him wearily but without doubt. Jim's tale was so unheard-of that there could be no question of plausibility. And it called upon every commanded instinct of loyalty and devotion that the Things had infused into their victims.
"I was lost!" cried Jim again, desperately. "I couldn't get here no quicker! I'm from th' city! I don't know how to find my way around out here in the sticks! Quick! I got to take him to another Little Fella who'll tell me what to do!"
The farmer half-rose, and then settled back again as if the exertion was too great.
"Ma'll show you where the Little Fella is," he said heavily. "Our folks are all off watchin' in case that killer's still around an'—our Little Fella is mighty greedy... She'll tell you..."
Jim turned and stumbled toward the house. A fierce hope stirred in him. An apology for weakness. Possibly only two people in the farm-house. But of course! The man who served the Things would reason that if Jim were a maniac as they'd been commanded to believe, he might have disguised a victim as himself only to stop all search so he might commit further crimes in the same area. After all, the evidence that he was in the city was not conclusive—merely a cryptic telephone-call. So the search could still be going on up here in the hills while the city was also combed with exhaustive care. And if the people of this house were still hunting him, with only two humans left to serve and feed the Thing—why—they might be so enfeebled that he'd be allowed to go up to the Thing alone. Because the Thing was greedy. And that would make it unnecessary for him to kill these people....
He climbed heavily up the steps outside the kitchen.
He stumbled inside. A woman sat there, her flesh almost transparent with bloodlessness. She opened her eyes.
"I—got to tell the Little Fella somethin'," said Jim in the same panting desperation. "You husban' said you'd tell me-"
Disloyalty and therefore danger to a Little Fella was unthinkable to a subject. The woman, with vast exertion, pointed. A narrow stairway to the attic. Jim bounded up it, carrying the coat-wrapped object as if it were heavy and infinitely precious.
The attic was dark and hot and still. There was a smell in it, subtly horrible to Jim's nostrils. It was not the healthy, lusty smell of an animal kin to man. It was somehow the pungent odor of filth.
An infinitesimal stirring somewhere. It was the almost noiseless movement of rags and cloth. Jim's hair tried to stand on end beneath the cap that kept him sane and free.