The Mind Thing

could do and might as well do. He had a pair of excellent binoculars with him. The moment he let the cat out of the door he’d take them upstairs. From the window of one or another of the rooms up there he’d be able to follow it quite a distance, no matter which direction it went. If it headed toward the Kramer farm, he’d probably never see it again; if it went any other direction he might. If it stayed around the immediate vicinity, just wandering in the yard, it would be almost certain to come back in if he called it at feeding time.

Looking out, he saw that a light drizzle had started and wondered if a real rain was coming. If so, the cat probably wouldn’t go out at all; cats hate water. But the drizzle lasted only ten or fifteen minutes, just enough to lay the dust and moisten the ground a bit.

At ten o’clock exactly—might as well keep his promise on the dot, he thought; he’d said the middle of the morning—he went into the living room past the cat on the sofa and to the front door. He opened it wide and said, “Well, Cat, want out a while?”

The cat understood the action if not the words. It got down from the sofa, stretched itself leisurely and unhurriedly, and then padded past him through the open doorway.

Quickly he got the binoculars and went upstairs with them. He tried the window of the front bedroom first and it turned out to be the right one; the cat was about halfway across the front yard, heading for the place where the road dead-ended. It was neither hurrying nor dawdling, walking unconcernedly at the pace of a cat that knows where it’s going but is in no hurry to get there.

Probably heading back to the Kramers’, he thought. Well, if that’s what it wanted that was all right, and maybe all to the good. The Kramer woman’s attitude in giving it to him had shown him that it might not be as easy as he had assumed for him to find a home for it later. And, since he certainly wouldn’t abandon an animal, he might have to take it back to Boston with him, and that would be a confounded nuisance.

But when it reached the dead end of the road, the cat stopped. It turned its head and stared back at the house it had just left. Doc stepped hastily back from the window, but kept the cat in the field of the binoculars. Was it looking back in indecision as to whether it wanted to go home, after all? Or was it watching to see if he was watching it? He didn’t think it had seen him, or that it could see him now that he’d stepped back from the window.

It stayed there half a minute, either making up its mind or making sure that it wasn’t being watched. Which?

Then it started again, going a little faster this time, and not down the road that would take it to the Kramers’. It went right across the end of the road instead, into the woods. He could follow it only a few yards after that.

Doc put down the binoculars and scratched his head. After all, its behavior was probably perfectly normal, but—

Then he remembered the drizzle that had fallen a while half an hour ago. Because of that, it would be leaving paw prints. And why shouldn’t he follow them a while, for as far as he could, and see if he could find out where it was going? After all, he had nothing else to do right now that had to be done today, and a walk would be as pleasant a way of filling in the time as any other.

He started at once, delaying only to put on a hat and to hang a raincoat over his arm, in case the rain might start again. The cat’s paw prints were clear across the yard and once he bent down and studied a few prints to memorize their size and shape; he didn’t want to end up tracking some other small animal instead.

It was harder going when he got to the woods, for the prints didn’t show in grassy areas, nor did they show at all clearly under trees; the rain hadn’t been hard enough to work its way through the leaves and under every tree was a completely dry circle.

Then it got easier again when he realized that the cat, wherever it was going, had been traveling in an almost perfect straight line.

After that, Doc was able to make better time; he simply walked in a straight line himself across any grassy or dry areas and didn’t have to cast about on the other side to pick up the trail; it would be right at the place he himself came out.

He was at least a mile and a half into the woods when the trail ended. Suddenly, at the edge of a small stream of water that wasn’t over four feet wide at this point. Had the cat jumped across it? He jumped across it himself and tried to pick up the trail on the other side. It simply wasn’t there. The ground for several feet on either side of the stream was bare and moist; the cat’s prints leading down to the water were as clear as any he’d found. But the cat hadn’t jumped across or its prints would be just as clear as the ones leading to the stream.

Not quite daring to allow himself to think as yet, Doc followed the stream along the far side. Downstream, of course. The current was slow.

It took him only about twenty paces to see what he had been afraid he would see, ever since he reached the stream. In the water, drowned, one small gray cat.

It was even more obviously a suicide than the dog that had run in front of his car, the owl that had flown through a window, the field mouse that had attacked Tommy Hoffman, or the other cat that had attacked a vicious dog ten times its size.

And it had lived with him for days. It had refused his gambit with the pistol, it had not tried to starve itself or to bring about its own death in any other way.

It had waited till it could commit the act unobserved, so deep in the woods that—if he had not still had a residue of suspicion and the advantage of that brief drizzle that had made it trackable—its body would probably never have been found.

Had it, after all, understood every word he’d said to it and intelligently decided, when he promised to let it go this morning, that it would stand less chance of giving itself away by waiting that long than by making any attempt to die sooner?

But—suicide is no end in itself. What was the purpose?

The cat had been an ordinary cat once; he’d traced its origin. The dog Buck had been an ordinary dog until it had run away from its master only a short time before it had found death under the wheels of a car.

Was something using animals, each for some mysterious purpose, and then getting free of them by causing them to kill themselves?

What had been in the mind of that cat, all the time it had been with him?

And what of the human beings, Tommy Hoffman and Siegfried Gross? Had something been using them, controlling their minds, causing them to commit some action too difficult for an animal host, and then causing them to kill themselves?

But what? And why?

He remembered stroking the cat and enjoying its purring under his hand. What had he really been stroking?

He shuddered. The slight scare he’d had the night the cat had hidden from him—had that been only Tuesday night?—was nothing now. It had been based on nothing more than hunch or intuition.

Then he’d been only guessing. Now he knew.

But what did he know? Only that he was frightened.

He found a stick and maneuvered the small body to the edge of the water where he could reach it. He picked it up gingerly and carried it back with him to the house. He wrapped it in an old blanket and put it in the back of the station wagon. To take it to the laboratory in Green Bay and have it autopsied? He hadn’t decided yet, but the body was there now if he should decide to take it in. But what could he tell them to check for? There was certainly no remote suspicion of rabies this time; the cat had been—or seemed—completely normal when he had let it out less than an hour before.

He smoked a pipe and thought a while and then realized what was the first thing he must do. He got the envelope with the copies of the statement he had dictated to Miss Talley and drove to town with them. He should have mailed them sooner; now he’d get them in the mail as soon as he could add the story of the cat to what they already contained and dictate the covering letters.

Miss Talley was not at home. There was a note on her door, “Back about 3 p.m.” It was time for lunch anyway, so he drove back to the downtown district and ate, then killed time at the tavern drinking a few beers. He had several chances to get into conversation, but he didn’t feel like talking. He could hardly bring up suddenly now what he was thinking about; there was too much to tell all at once to anyone with whom he hadn’t talked before.