They had intelligence of a sort, which was strictly applied to the business of existence. Since civilization among their domestic animals meant softer, warmer nests, and no need to repeat the toilsome hunting of the early days of the race, they preferred their domestic animals to be civilized. But they had no interest in civilization as such. They were supremely indifferent to anything beyond feeding, and warmth, and softness to lie upon.
To secure those luxuries they implanted a passionate loyalty and a tender affection among their subjects-emotions which to them were merely useful elements in the make-up of inferior races. They felt no loyalty, even to their own kind. But they had learned—or perhaps it was the single ancestor of all those who possessed civilized slaves who had learned—that cooperation among their kind was useful. Linked brains, however, had been useful even in the primitive days. Now they worked together because thereby they were safest and most sure of warmth and softness and the means of gluttony. But there was no affection between them, not even between newly-separated Things who before had been one individual. They knew envy and hatred and jealousy. They had every vice of which their kind was capable. But the memories of each one went back over thousands of years.
They knew that it was especially wise to cooperate as long as any of the animals called men were free of their control. When all men were enslaved, then there might be horrible conflicts among them for the means of gorging themselves. They might set their slaves to the kidnapping and theft of the slaves of other Things. They might struggle horribly to secure each other's destruction so that there might be more gloating feasts. They might send nibbling thoughts to lure away the slaves of other Things. But now….
Now they lay soft and warm. Some in crude boxes in the attics of farmhouses. Some in the boiler-rooms of city apartment-houses. Some in electrically-heated nests with thermostatic controls, lined with priceless furs. They were indifferent to beauty and quality and technical perfection, to cost and rarity and to regal state. They were parasites, like lice. They gorged upon the blood that flowed in human veins. Given warmth and softness and the nourishment they craved insatiably, they cared for nothing else but their own safety. Surely they cared nothing for the lives they preyed on...
So they had no civilization. They had no ruler, no laws, no ambitions, no science, no instinct to progress. But they had a deadly power which had taken them from the status of lurking hunters in the jungles of a single planet, to be the bloated, gluttonous masters of two solar systems far away. A space-ship of a thriving and venturesome race had touched upon their parent world. That space-ship had carried the ancestors of these Things back to its own home. Then other space-ships had carried other Things to yet other worlds which now sank back to barbarism while the Things that had mastered them fed and fed and fed.
And now there was Earth. The Things were here. They lay in their nests and sent out their thoughts. And humans adored them because they were commanded to, and served them because they were commanded to believe that the ultimate of bliss, and thought of them tenderly because that also they had been commanded to do.
And the Things fed and fed and fed.
15
When the sun rolled up as an angry red ball, next morning, Jim was two hundred miles away. In the first direct sun-rays the grass and the tree-leaves and even the concrete roadways were wet and sparkling with dew. The webs of morning-spiders looked like jeweled veilings hung upon the bushes. The air was fresh and very fragrant, and it was such a morning as should make any man very happy to be alive.
But Jim had driven all night long, stopping only once to refuel the little car. He was very weary, but he felt that he would never be able to sleep again. Still, with the coming of dawn it was wisest for him to hide. A glance into the back-view mirror, at daybreak, convinced him that daylight driving would be impossibly dangerous. His clothes had been taken from another man, to begin with, and did not fit him properly. The wig he'd gotten from a display-dummy did not match his hair by half a dozen shades, and his wire cap was no such snug fit as he could have made with tools and a mirror to fit it by. His head was not shaped right, with the cap on it and the wig on top of that. So he'd passed quick inspection in dim light, but daylight driving was out of the question.
He hunted for a hiding-place. He drove along a broad, six-lane highway which seemed to stretch indefinitely before him through sheer forest. A single heavy truck hove in sight, moving in the opposite direction. Its aluminum hood and body glowed readily in the dawnlight. It hummed past him and dwindled to the rear. It was gone, and the road was empty again. A rabbit darted awkwardly out of the forest and onto the highway. Jim swerved automatically to avoid it. It seemed paralyzed with fear when it discovered his approach. He was wakeful, but unbelievably tired.
He saw a tiny woods-road, seemingly unused. It had been cut across by the highway and now it was growing up swiftly in saplings and underbrush. He was past it before he realized its perfection as a hiding-place. Then he braked. It was his instinct to stop, and back up, and then drive into it. He was in the act of backing along the highway when the logical course occurred to him. He sighted carefully. If another vehicle came along now, he could not risk it. But—
He backed and swerved on the concrete to the most nearly perfect line he could manage. He backed off onto the grassy shoulder, holding the steering-wheel fixed. He backed in a long smooth curve to the exit of the disused road. He backed into it. He got out once to be sure of the way. He backed the little car completely out of sight from the highway.
The Thing quivered in its covered-over cage beside the driver's seat. Jim knew with savage satisfaction that it raged. Its iron-wire cage was not luxurious. This Thing did not lie soft and warm! The iron wires would be both cold and hard. They would be harsh and uneven. The Thing would be uncomfortable and it would be bewildered, too. All during the night it must have been sending its instructions in a frantic rage, commanding its instant rescue. But the iron wires of the cage nullified all its efforts. Probably, in the end, the Thing had merely gone into a panic, far-fallen from the complacency of a creature who possessed domestic animals called men to serve it and on whom it fed, and who had lain softly in a padded nest stinking of its own beastly odor.
Jim inspected the cage with grim care. He saw little spots of dried foam where the Thing had tried to use its sharp mandibles on the iron, to cut its way out. That sign of desperation pleased him. His eyes were cold and hard as he made very, very sure that the Thing had been able to do no damage to the security of its cage.
He debated, and moved the cage to the trunk-space of the car. Locked inside there, there would be an extra barrier of iron to the broadcast of its thoughts. When he drove on again, too, there would not be even the softening effect of a seat-cushion under the cage. It should suffer such discomfort as it most hated.
He locked the trunk-space and separated the key to it from the driving-key which controlled the car. If anything should happen— But now he went back toward the highway. He raised and set upright the saplings that had been bent over by the car. Those that had been broken, he leaned toward the road. If anyone examined the tracks outside minutely, they could tell that the car had backed in. But most men would read the trail to the highway as that of a car which had come out of a disused woods-trail and onto the highway, instead of the other way about.