He returned to the driver's seat. He made sure that he had his looted pistol handy—ready to draw and use instantly. He settled back to try to rest during the daylight hours and more especially to plan his next move. He had tried to make plans all during the night. His only conceivable hope, of course, was to use the captive Thing to persuade Security of the danger facing men. Once Security was convinced, the matter would be handled with inexorable efficiency. Wire-capped Security police could land from patrol-ships near Clearfield. They could raid and search the farmhouses. The slaves of the Things, of course, would resist in passionate loyalty to their obscene masters, but a single Thing found slavering and raging in fury in its nest would prove Jim's report to the uttermost. And then—
The rest of it would be grim business, naturally. They'd have to make terribly sure that no Things remained alive to make slaves of men. The Things' subjects would fight despairingly, in the impassioned belief that they fought of their own will. But the Things could be destroyed, and then—sardonically—the tyranny of Security would be justified for all time because of the overwhelming peril from which it had saved humanity. Jim himself could hope for no reward. The freedom of research for which he had fought would be gone forever. The only gain would be that men would be tyrannized over by other men instead of alien monstrosities. But even that—
Jim realized the irony of the fact that he was trying to concoct a plan by which he might make Security forever invulnerable and revered. But there was simply nothing else to do.
He sat quietly in the car, weary and bitter but unable even to think of sleep while he waited for night to come again. He heard the humming of vehicles going past on the highway a hundred yards off. Traffic was beginning to roll, now that morning had come. In an hour there would be a continuous droning of turbine-motors along all the highway's length. Had he been only a little later in finding his hiding-place, he could not well have hoped to conceal himself unseen.
It was very quiet. Leaves whispered overhead. Now and again he heard small, abrupt rustling in the dry stuff on the ground. Tiny hopping birds. Squirrels, perhaps. He heard insects and bird-songs...
He heard something else. Sustained movements. Something or someone moving along the overgrown woods-road. He tensed and put his hand very, very quietly to the pistol in his pocket. The movement stopped, and Jim stayed motionless. There had been no more than two feet in motion. It was not a four-footed animal. It was human. It paused, surveying the car. Of course the car was motionless and looked deserted. But if this figure grew suspicious because he could tell that it had been backed into position; if he started to go away at a run....
The rhythmic movements came closer. With infinite care, Jim slid himself down toward the floor-boards. His pistol was in his hand now. If he had to shoot, maybe the cars on the highway would think someone was taking a pot-shot at game out of season....
Hesitating, uncertain movements. Then the figure came close. It peered into the car.
And into the muzzle of Jim's revolver.
"If you make a noise," said Jim conversationally, "I'll kill you."
He meant it. His tone carried conviction. The eyes staring into his first blazed, and then focused on the gun-barrel, and then stared back very savagely at Jim. Above those eyes, just under the hair-line, there was a long, knife-edged scar. Then a defiant voice said furiously; "You'll have to shoot, my friend! If you damned slaves want to make sure why I'm immune to your damned Little Fellows, you'll have to try your tricks on my corpse! Go ahead and shoot, or I'll break your damned neck......"
16
Jim did sleep, after all. An hour after he'd been ready to blow out the brains of the man who'd come up to look in the hidden car, he lay slumped and slumbering in his seat while his new companion stood guard for the two of them. But Jim twitched a little as he slept, from the effects of strain that could not yet be released. The jerkings and twitchings, too, were outward sign of dreaming.
In the dream his present waking companion was with him, and the two of them fled nightmarishly from pursuers of whom some carried Things in their arms. The rest were dead-white, stumbling human robots, any one of whom could be pushed over like a nine-pin. But they came by thousands and millions, feebly but with a terrible persistency. The two fugitives, it seemed to Jim, performed herculean feats of flight, and they carried things which weighted them down but which they would not abandon. And ever and again they reached some gray place in which it seemed they were safe and where they began desperately to put together the things they carried. But just as the object they planned to construct began to take form, the white, stumbling figures of the slaves of the Things came shambling toward them from the darkness all about Then, in the dream, they seized their burdens and fled again, because it was useless to try to fight off the bloodless hordes. And besides, there were the carried Things, who gnashed tiny sharp mandibles and drove on their cohorts with soundless shrieks of rage and blood-lust.
In the dream it seemed to Jim that he sobbed with fury as he fled.
"All we've got to do," he panted bitterly as they climbed a black precipice with a wave of weary robots climbing feebly but with blind persistence after them, "all we've got to do is set this thing up...."
And then, midway up the cliff, they saw a row of white faces looking down at them from the top. The Things and their slaves were waiting for them there.
Jim opened his eyes with a start. It was mid-afternoon. There was no sunlight. Heavy clouds overspread the sky. His companion was raising, by hand, the top of the car in preparation for coming rain. He nodded as Jim jerked his eyes about in instant wariness.
"You acted like your sleep wasn't too sweet," he said drily. "I sleep that way too, nowadays. I think we'll have a storm."
The first drops of rain fell as he spoke. He finished the job of raising the top. The patter of rain upon the forest roof rose to a clattering. Then there was a rushing sound, and the noise was a minor roar. The man with the scarred forehead climbed into the car as a downpour began.
"This," he said reflectively, "will wipe out the tracks of the car coming in here, but it'll double the depth of those going out."
"I don't think it'll matter," said Jim. He added suddenly, "Twice I've dreamed that I had the answer to the Things. It was something to be made; to be put together. I was messing with thought-transmission myself, you know. That's why Security sent me off for life custody. It seems to me that each time in my dream I was concerned with causing some effect, some interference with the thought-fields the Things make—something that would neutralize those thought-fields. I know all about it in my dream and know that it would work. But I can't remember it when I'm awake."
His companion said; "I've worked out business problems in dreams. Sometimes the answers were faintly reasonable. Once or twice they were sound. Ninety-nine times in a hundred, though, they're sheer gibberish when you look at them in daylight."
Jim's companion was a certain Miles Brandon. He had been to the city of the Things, downstate, on business. He found that some of his business associates were unwontedly pale and bloodless. One of them invited Brandon to stay at his home. All the family was pale and wore a strangely tranquil expression. After the first night of his stay there, there was an abrupt change in the manner of the family, at breakfast. They seemed to assume that Brandon knew all about something he'd never heard of. It concerned a "Little Fellow" of whom his host spoke reverently. It became alarming when all the family stared at him bewilderedly when he asked what they were talking about. But he was politely patient for a time, thought they plainly expected him to do something remarkable before he sat down to breakfast. It was something connected with the Little Fellow. But when they stared at him and plaintively asked him why he didn't go to the Little Fellow, since the Little Fellow wanted him, he lost his temper.