There was a sudden increase in the sound of wind-tossed branches. He smelled earth and woodland. He felt branches flashing past him in the dark. Something lashed him cruelly, like a cat-o-nine tails. He struck violently in a pine-tree, and rebounded—but he thought he had broken ribs—and fell in a great, arching swoop, and suddenly he was drenched in a monstrous crashing of water all about him. Then abruptly, the parachute-harness no longer tugged at him and he was knee-deep in a pond or stream, and the sound of wind among trees was a booming sound, inextricably mixed with the swishing of many leaves. And it was overhead.
He felt savagely triumphant. Jim Hunt was dead. The Security Police would concede it without question. The future would take care of itself. But somehow he'd show them! The damned fat-heads! Security! Security! That was the watchword now! They said that science had gone too far. There were a dozen fields in which research might turn up instruments so deadly or principles capable of such monstrous applications that all research had to be supervised carefully. So the World Government was formed; really to protect humanity against the consequences of its own intelligence. Men were capable of such brilliance in dealing with the forces of the universe, and such stupidity in dealing with each other, that mankind had to be protected against itself. But unfortunately the World Government confused the hopes of the future with the real menaces to the safety of the present. Jim Hunt had been solemnly adjudged a menace to the security of humanity. He'd been on his way to a Security Custody reservation to spend the rest of his life in confinement. He'd have been gently treated, to be sure, and allowed even tools and the means of research if he chose —under constant, detailed supervision. But he was to be imprisoned for life.
Now though, he waded ashore in the darkness, pulling carefully on his parachute-lines. It took him a long time to get the billowing masses of cloth—some of it wetted— into a bundle that he could carry and ultimately hide. He neither saw nor heard any signs of human life. But he moved cautiously into utterly black forest, carrying the untidy bundle which had been the compact emergency-chute. He forced his way on at random until he realized that he might be moving in a circle.
Then he lay down to wait for dawn. He was not at ease. If there was the least suspicion that he had escaped, rather than plummeted to his death. Security would hunt him from aloft with infra-red scanners that could note the heat of his body from an incredible distance. There were so many things that could be done if his survival was suspected! And of course a man who was dangerous to Security would be hunted much more relentlessly than a mere murderer.
He could not sleep for a long time. Then he tried deliberately to relax. He would need all his strength and cunning presently. He made his taut, tense muscles relax. He made himself comfortable with parachute-silk under him on a bed of soft woods-mold, scraped together by groping fingers. He lay still and relaxed ... relaxed... Presently he knew gratefully that in a little while he would sleep....
Then there were little nibbling thoughts around the edge of his mind. Not his own thoughts. Alien, patient, insinuating thoughts that were not the product of his own brain.
"Nice...." said the thoughts. "Nice.... Everything is nice ... This is the nicest place in the world....
Everyone is happy This is nice......"
Jim Hunt made a convulsive gesture and sprang to alertness there in the darkness in an unseen forest. His hands clenched. His heart pounded horribly. Sweat poured out all over his body in streams. He hadn't sweated like this even when he jumped from the dirigible in the hope that while falling he'd be able to work himself into the harness of an emergency parachute. His heart hadn't pounded at this tempo when he was about to land, swept at breakneck speed across the surface of a forest he couldn't see.
He was panting, while his whole body turned cold from the sweat that had poured out over it. The forest was still save for the booming sound of the wind overhead. And now that he was aroused and awake and panicky, it was hard to detect the thing that had stirred him so. But he soothed himself by force of will. He waited, and he was just barely able to feel the nibbling, soothing, insinuating ideas.
"Nice....." came the thought, persuasive but very faint. "This is nice... Everything is nice. Everything feels good. Sleep is good.... Sleep is nice...."
A murderous rage surged up in Jim Hunt's whole body. The nibbling thoughts faded abruptly.
He sat grimly with his back against a tree. His eyes burned in the blackness. When dawn broke, his expression was grim and utterly formidable.
3
Some while after sunrise he found what might be termed a farmhouse—a log cabin, typical of mountain country where erosion kept cleared land poor and even cattle could not be raised with any great profit. It was not large, and there was a sagging porch and wasteful rail fences and poverty-stricken outbuildings. From hiding, Jim Hunt examined it keenly.
It was exquisitely ironic that he should have defied the Security Police, and been sentenced to life Security custody, because of his experimental work on the amplification and transmission of thought. He had dropped out of the sky in a thousand-to-one attempt at escape, and he'd run into those nibbling thoughts the night before— and they were what he'd been sentenced for. Transmitted thought.
Now he understood some of the Security Police testimony. It had been testified that after an official admonishment not to continue a certain line of experiment, he had attempted to carry on his work in secret. They swore that detectors proved that he continued, and that he had associates or confederates with whom he cooperated. And he knew that the testimony about the detectors was untrue, because his work had been done in a cellar lined with quarter-inch plates of high-hysterisis iron. Nothing his apparatus produced could get through that! No detectors could have caught his fields outside that barrier! So when Security Police gave evidence that he'd continued his work in secret, that was true enough. But when they swore that detectors showed his fields and that he had confederates in research, that wasn't true. He'd thought them liars.
Now he understood. Thought-fields weren't directional. He wasn't sure yet how they could spread out and concentrate again at a distance—and be present in between —and still give no indication of their point of origin. But you couldn't locate a transmitter by any sort of direction-finding device. He knew that. And he knew fully that there was danger in the development of the transmission of thought. But he'd felt that there was greater danger in its non-development.
Those small, nibbling, insinuating thoughts were proof that he was right. Somebody else was transmitting thought. Somebody else was using it for the one purpose that Security most feared—the implanting of beliefs and opinions in unsuspecting other persons. And because it was happening, and because Security had condemned him for studying the problem, and because all worth-while research was now driven underground—why —Jim Hunt was filled at once with a murderous rage and a chilly panic. Everything he believed in was endangered. Those small, sneaking thoughts on the very edge of sleep were not thoughts that the average person would recognize as alien, as directed, as not his own. They would seem to be his own thoughts. With skill, any thoughts could be suggested. He could believe this, or believe that, or that such-and-such was the case despite appearances, and all his will and all his intelligence would be applied to the defense or realization of the ideas he believed his own.