The Mind Thing

them upstairs, putting his clothes in them, packing his razor and other things from the bathroom. He was packing to leave, and permanently, since he was taking everything.

But he couldn’t; he had to be stopped, at any cost.

* * *

Doc Staunton carried the suitcases out to the station wagon and put them in the back, then returned to the house. He made one quick round of it, closing all the windows and making sure that the back door was locked. In the kitchen he hesitated whether to flick the switch that would shut off the gasoline engine and generator in the basement, and then decided not to. There was still food in the refrigerator and it wouldn’t spoil for a few days. And he’d be back, although not alone and not to stay here; but he’d certainly be showing the place to whoever would be in charge of the investigation. He might as well leave the current on.

That took care of everything except his fishing equipment, guns, and ammunition in the storage room. Using the creel to carry the boxes of cartridges and shells, he carried it and the other fishing equipment, including his high boots, out to the station wagon and then came back for the three guns—the pistol, the rifle, and the over-and-under shotgun. That was all, and he pocketed the pistol and held the two guns under one arm to give him a free hand to lock the front door behind him and pocket the key. Then he started for the station wagon.

He was almost there, just reaching for the door handle, when he saw the deer, a six-point buck. It was standing, with no attempt at concealing itself, about fifty feet away, at the edge of the woods, just past the point where the road started outside his yard. It stared back at him, then lowered its head and pawed the earth, readying itself for a charge.

Quickly he got inside the car and started the engine. He had a sudden hunch as to what was coming, but there was only one way to find out. He put the car in gear and started it. He’d have to drive right past the buck, within a few yards of it, to get away—if the buck would let him.

The buck wasn’t going to let him. It started its charge the moment the car started to move. He braked to a stop and even tried—but didn’t have time—to reduce the impact by getting the car moving in reverse. Head down, the buck was a two-hundred-pound missile that hit the radiator dead center, between the headlights, and then the buck was two hundred pounds of dead deer with broken antlers, broken skull, broken neck. The car had moved backward almost two feet and only Doc’s final split-second move of throwing himself down sidewise across the front seat saved him from having at least a sore neck from the whiplash effect he’d have experienced had he remained sitting upright.

He sat up slowly. The engine had died, or had been killed by the backward motion of the car while it was still in a forward gear. He turned off the ignition; he didn’t try to restart the car. He knew it would never run again until it had been towed to a garage and equipped, at the very minimum, with a new radiator and a new fan. It wouldn’t have surprised him if other damage had been done, possibly even a cracked block.

The rifle, being only a .22, would be useless, and even with a pistol and a shotgun he’d never make it afoot to town, or even to the nearest farmhouse that had a telephone, if a series of animal hosts was to be sent against him. Not past fields, on one side of the road, that contained cows and maybe even a few bulls drowsing in the shade of trees. And on the other side of the road, a long stretch of virgin woodland that certainly contained more deer, possibly even a bear or two, and wildcats. There was an even nastier possibility than any one of these: what if the enemy could find a human host taking a midday nap? What could he possibly do if Mrs. Kramer, say, or Mrs. Gross should come out to the road with a shotgun or rifle and start shooting at him? Shoot back? Of course it wouldn’t really be a sane Mrs. Kramer or Mrs. Gross doing the shooting—but even so, he knew he wouldn’t be able to shoot a woman. And no matter how many animals or humans he might succeed in killing on the way to get help, sooner or later someone or something would manage to kill him instead. He knew, or felt fairly sure, that there was only one mind against him—but it was a mind that could send a practically endless succession of attackers against him, more than he could hope to handle.

Well, he reflected, at least the cold war is over. The enemy—whatever it was—was no longer pretending. At least from him, Doc Staunton, it would make no further attempt to conceal its powers. It wanted to keep him here, and it could. He reached into the back seat for the creel and loaded the shotgun and the pistol, and stuffed all the extra cartridges for the former and shells for the latter into various pockets.

Strangely, he wasn’t scared at all. He was even more coldly calm, calmly analytical. And he knew that he would have to be if he was to stand a chance to win this war. If he was to win it, his mind would have to be his major weapon; firearms might win a battle, but never the war.

First, immediate survival. Would he be safer here in the car than back in the house? He thought he would be just as safe and much more comfortable, especially for an extended siege back in the house. The enemy had served notice that it would kill him to keep him from reaching help. But would the enemy try to kill him anyway, even if he accepted the state of siege and didn’t try to leave?

He couldn’t be sure, but one thing had been a strong indication that the enemy was not trying to kill him unless again he tried to leave. If the enemy wanted his immediate death, he’d probably be dead already. He hadn’t noticed the deer standing there until he had almost reached the car, but it had been watching him. It could have charged sooner than it did—and at him instead of at the car. And none of the guns had been loaded then.

So, the house. He got out of the car cautiously, the pistol in a pocket and the shotgun at ready, and looked about him. Nothing alive was in sight. Unless—

He looked upward. About a hundred feet in the air a wild duck was wheeling in slow circles—as a buzzard circles. A duck does not fly that way. Air attack? He hadn’t thought of that when he had been considering the dangers of trying to reach town afoot, but he saw now that a kamikaze attack from the air by any reasonably heavy bird would be fully as dangerous as, say, a charge by a maddened cow or horse. He kept a wary eye on the circling duck as he started for the house. Suddenly, when he was about halfway, it dived. He jerked up the gun ready to fire and then leap aside—but he didn’t have to. The bird wasn’t dive-bombing him, but a point in the yard a dozen or so yards away from him; it hit the ground with a sickening thud that raised a cloud of dust and probably made a dent in the hard-packed soil of the yard.

Thoughtfully, Doc let himself into the house and locked the door. No, the enemy was not trying to kill him, only to keep him penned here. The dive of the duck couldn’t possibly have missed him that much if it had been aimed at him. The enemy had done it merely to give him a demonstration of the futility of his trying to escape afoot by showing him, in case he hadn’t thought of it (as he hadn’t at first) one more deadly means of preventing his escape. The wild duck could as easily have dived at him as not; it had nothing to lose since it was making a suicidal plunge in any case. Therefore: the enemy did not want him dead, as long as it could keep him here instead.

He reloaded the upper barrel of the shotgun and leaned it against the window beside the front door. He emptied his pockets of the extra shells and cartridges and put them on the end of the sofa, in easy reach. Then he sat down on the arm of the sofa, facing the window and looking out.

Nothing moved outside. Was he imagining things? Would it be safe for him to leave and walk to town? No, if the deer hadn’t been proof enough, then the plummeting duck had been the convincer.

There was no attack now, and he didn’t think there would be, as long as he stayed here and made no attempt to leave. But why?

He started for the refrigerator to get himself a bottle of beer, but changed his mind and came back. Beer, in moderation, wouldn’t impair much his ability to think. Still, even a trifling impairment might make all the difference.

What was the nature of the enemy? Human, possibly mutant, with a hitherto undemonstrated psi ability of being able to take over other minds? Demon? Alien? Somehow, the last seemed least unlikely of the three; as Miss Talley had pointed out, there are billions of habitable worlds in the universe; why shouldn’t life and intelligence have developed on some of them? Why should Earth be unique? And why couldn’t some intelligent life form have developed some form of space travel? Why should human beings be the first to do so?

Yes, definitely it seemed more possible than the only alternatives he could think of—and more dangerous.

But why was he now being singled out for attack? Because he now knew and suspected enough to be dangerous to the enemy? Yes, he was; regardless of how the enemy (keep calling it that, he decided, regardless of what he or it really was) knew about it.