They were right
Then thrashing sounds outside. Someone waded heavily through the underbrush. That person came to the open space which was the site of the ghost-town. He came, still stumbling, directly for the vault.
By the moonlight Jim saw who it was. Brandon. Stumbling like a drunken man. Walking with an hypnotic fixity of purpose like that of a sleep-walker. His clothes were torn by briars. He looked haggard and exhausted and dazed.
Jim stepped out into the moonlight.
"Brandon!" he said sharply. Doubt assailed him.
Brandon checked in his stride and stood swaying.
"Oh... Hello, Jim," he said in a sort of automaton-like precision. "You smashed it yet?"
"Smashed what?"
"That transmitter," said Brandon with the same unearthly precision. "It's got to be smashed, you know. The Little Fellas rule us now. Everybody's happy. Everybody's glad the Little Fellas tell them what to do. We have to smash everything that the Little Fellas don't like, and they don't like things that could harm them! So I came back to smash the transmitter. Maybe it couldn't harm them, but when we made it we thought it might" Jim stiffened.
"Funny we fought the Little Fellas," said Brandon tonelessly. "Wouldn't fight them now. I even fought them after everybody else loved 'em, Jim. But—but they kept after me.... —Let's smash the transmitter, Jim."
Jim plunged for him. But he stumbled, and Brandon seized him. And Brandon was a heavier man than Jim, and he was possessed by an hypnotic frenzy. They locked and struggled, and Jim felt bitterly that he would have to shoot his former friend, and was struggling to reach one of the pistols he had taken from his guards, when he felt Brandon tearing at the fastenings of the baskets, which held them firmly over his head.
"Listen to the Little Fellas!" said Brandon fiercely. "You're a fool to fight them! They've made everybody happy—. Look at me! When I've smashed that transmitter I'm going to find a Little Fella and tell him about it...."
Then maniacal strength came to Jim. When he came to himself he was panting, and Brandon lay unconscious on the ground.
Jim dragged him into the vault and tied him fast with cords made of his own clothing. Then he took the transmitter carefully out into the open air. He turned it on. Exactly as it had been turned on at the moment they planned to take photographs and the captive Thing had suddenly turned craven and panicky.
He turned it on. That was all.
24
The dawn came. Out the open doors of the vault and through the empty space that once had been the plate-glass-windowed frontage of a bank, Jim watched a gray light steal over all the world. There were the drowsy chirpings of small birds. The light grew brighter. Ruddy sunshine smote on dew-wet grass and glistening leaves, and seemed to find all earth a place of jeweled freshness. There were morning-spider webs that seemed to be made of threaded diamonds. There were spots of cobweb that looked like discs of silver on the grass.
Suddenly it was day. And Jim stood up, and loosened the absurd bonds that held his grotesque headgear to his shoulders, and walked out into the open. He put his hands to the metal baskets. He lifted them, very slowly and very cautiously at first. He took them off entirely, and seemed to listen with an intense and painful care. And then he tossed his protection away.
When Brandon opened his eyes—they were sane eyes now—Jim nodded to him, sitting bareheaded in the sunshine. Jim looked very, very tired.
"Head clear now?" he asked heavily. "Sorry, but you wanted to smash the transmitter."
"I'm all right," said Brandon. He essayed to move, and found out his bonds. "Hm.... You tied me up. Good idea. —It was pretty bad, Jim. I thought I was immune. And so I was, to everything they ever shot at me before. But they pulled a new one. They put so much power into whatever they did that even I had to fight it I held out a long time. It seemed centuries. And—I knew that if I ever stopped fighting they'd get me, and—the time came when I had to. And they did get me."
He lay still in the bonds in which Jim had tied him.
"They got everybody," said Jim. He sat quietly still.
Brandon's eyes widened suddenly.
"Hey!" he said sharply. "Where's your cap? That iron-wire cap!— Have they got you, too?"
"They haven't got anybody now," said Jim. He looked too weary to be elated. "They're licked. That's why I've thrown away my cap. It feels rather good to sit bareheaded and think that people are free. Even the ones who were conquered first of all."
Brandon's eyes were wide.
"What's that? How?"
Jim nodded listlessly at the transmitter.
"That did it. Awfully simple, after all. Remember when we were trying to make it work? I believed the transmitter was all right, but I couldn't make the modulator pick up any thoughts to feed to it. I didn't want it to retransmit the Things' thoughts! I wanted it to pick up my own. So I worked in the vault where the Things' thoughts couldn't come. And the modulator didn't pick up anything at all. Funny I didn't see it. It was so infernally simple!"
Brandon said blankly.
"I don't get it...."
"I wore a wire cap to keep the Things' thoughts out of my brain. You've got a metal plate in your skull which seems to work the same way. Remember? We put a metal cage around the Thing to keep thoughts from getting out of its brain. It just didn't occur to us that we'd the same thing around ourselves. My wire cap and your metal plate kept thoughts from coming in. They also kept thoughts from going out."
Brandon said, "Oh...."
"Our brains were in cages, the same as the Thing's.
So there wasn't anything in the vault for the modulator to work on. That's why it didn't work."
"But..."
"I'd taken the modulator all apart," said Jim, "and couldn't find anything wrong with it. I gave up. We got ready to take pictures. We let the Thing out. It was cocky. It tried to control us. It couldn't. We were protected. Then you stumbled against the transmitter. You caught it before it fell, and you turned it on in grabbing it. Remember we noticed it was turned on later? As soon as the transmitter went on, without modulation, the Thing got panicky. It got scared. It tried to run away. It ducked back into its cage. It was pretty tame. The transmitter did it."
Brandon, lying bound hand and foot, drew a deep breath.
"I'll take your word for it. I don't understand."
"It's just as simple as all the rest," said Jim indifferently. "Thought is the modulation of a field of force. Our brains don't make much of a field, outside our skulls, though they modulate it very well. That's why telepathy works only sometimes. The Things make a comparatively big field outside their skulls, and modulate it very well. So they can transmit thought. The transmitter yonder"—he nodded at the device—"isn't so very big, but it makes a monstrous field. And it doesn't modulate it at all."
He stopped. After an instant he shrugged and went on.
"Take a bass drum. Assume the drum-head's loose. You make a gadget that tightens it a little and taps it a little. Not much noise. Make another gadget that tightens it quite a lot and taps it pretty hard. You get a lot of noise. Then put a compressed-air line to the drum and pump in air until it's iron-hard. The air doesn't bang. But how much noise can the other gadgets make? Not much."
Brandon blinked.
"The Things make a field. They can modulate it," said Jim. "But the transmitter makes a field a thousand times as strong. The fields blend. And the Things can't impress a modulation on a field a thousand times as strong as they can make! They can't drive a modulation out of their own skulls, though their flesh, having liquid in it, is a conductor and the field stays on the surface without sinking in. The Things become just ordinary animals. Incidentally, human telepathy is out of the question now, too."