Invasion of The Body Snatchers

Jack murmured, speaking to himself actually, shaking his head, as he stared down at the toy houses below. 'It just won't bear thinking about,' he said. 'How many of those things are down there in town right now? Hidden away in secret places.'

Mannie smiled. 'None,' he said, 'none at all,' and grinned as our heads swung to stare at him. 'Listen,' he said quietly, 'you've got a mystery on your hands, all right, and a real one. Whose body was that? And where is it now?' We were seated at his left, and Mannie turned his head to watch our faces for a moment, then he added, 'But it's a completely normal mystery. A murder, possibly; I couldn't say. Whatever it is, though, it's well within the bounds of human experience; don't try to make any more of it.'

My mouth opened to protest, but Mannie shook his head. 'Now, listen to me,' he said quietly. His forearms on his knees, cigarette in hand, the smoke curling upward past his dark tanned face, Mannie sat staring down at the town. 'The human mind is a strange and wonderful thing,' he said reflectively, 'but I'm not sure it will ever figure itself out. Everything else, maybe – from the atom to the universe – except itself.'

His arm swung outward, gesturing at the miniature town below us, brightening in the first morning sun. 'Down there in Santa Mira a week or ten days ago, someone formed a delusion; a member of his family was not what he seemed, but an impostor. It's not a common delusion precisely, but it happens occasionally, and every psychiatrist encounters it sooner or later. Usually he has some idea of how to treat it.'

Mannie leaned back against the wheel of my car and smiled at us. 'But last week I was stumped. It's not a common delusion, yet from this one town alone there were a dozen or more such cases, all occurring within the past week or so. I'd never encountered such a thing in all my practice before, and it had me stopped cold.' Mannie drew on his cigarette again, then stubbed it out in the dirt beside him. 'But I've been doing some reading lately, refreshing my mind on certain things I should have remembered before. Did you ever hear of the Mattoon Maniac?'

We just shook our heads and waited.

'Well' – Mannie clasped one knee between his interlocked fingers – 'Mattoon is a town in Illinois, of maybe twenty thousand people, and something happened there that you can find described in textbooks on psychology.

'On September 2, 1944, in the middle of the night, a woman phoned the police; someone had tried to kill her neighbour with poison gas. This neighbour, a woman, had awakened around midnight; her husband was at work on the night shift of a factory. The woman's room was filled with a peculiar, sweet-smelling, sickening odour. She tried to get up, but her legs were paralyzed. She managed to crawl to the phone and call her neighbour, who notified the police.

'The police arrived, and did what they could; they found a door unlocked, by which someone could have entered, but of course there was no one else around the house any more. A night or so later, the police got another call, and again found a partly paralyzed, very sick woman; someone had tried to kill her with poison gas. That same night, the same thing happened again, in another part of town. And when a dozen or more women were attacked in the same way on following nights, each sick and partly paralyzed from a sicklysmelling gas pumped into their rooms while they slept, the police knew they had a psychopath to find; a maniac, as the newspapers were calling him.'

Mannie plucked a weed, and began stripping the leaves from the stem. 'One night a woman saw the man. She awoke to see him silhouetted against her open bedroom window, and he was pumping something like an insecticide spray into her room. She got a whiff of the gas, screamed, and the man ran. But as he turned from the window, she got a good look at him; he was tall, quite thin, and was wearing what looked like a black skull cap.

'Now the State Police were called in, because in only a single night, seven more women were gassed and partly paralyzed. Reporters were in town too, from the press services, and most of the Chicago newspapers; you can find accounts of all this in their files. At night now, in Mattoon, Illinois, in 1944, cars patrolled the streets filled with men carrying shotguns; neighbours organized into squads, patrolling their own blocks in shifts; and the attacks continued, and the maniac wasn't found.

'Finally, one night, there were eight state squad cars in town, and a mobile radio unit. A doctor, prepared and waiting, was at the local Methodist hospital. That night, the police got a call, as usual; a woman, hardly able to speak, had been gassed by the madman. In less than a minute, one of the roving squad cars was at her house; she was rushed to the hospital and examined by the doctor.' Mannie smiled. 'He found absolutely nothing wrong with her; nothing. She was sent home, another call came in, and the second woman was rushed to the hospital, examined, and again there was nothing wrong with her. All night long that happened. The calls came in, the women were examined at the hospital within minutes, and every single one of them was sent back home.'

For a long moment Mannie studied our faces, then he said, 'The cases that night were the last that ever happened in Mattoon; the epidemic was over. There was no maniac; there never had been one.' He shook his head in puzzlement. 'Mass hysteria, auto-suggestion, whatever you want to call it – that's what happened to Mattoon. Why? How?' Mannie shrugged. 'I don't know. We give it names, but we don't really understand it. All we know for sure is that these things actually happen.'

I think Mannie saw, in my face and Jack's, a sort of stubborn unwillingness to accept the implications of what he was saying, because he turned to me and, voice patient, said, 'Miles, you must have read, in med. school, about the Dancing Sickness that spread over Europe a couple hundred years ago.' He looked at Jack. 'An astounding thing,' he said.' Impossible to believe, except that it happened. Whole towns began to dance: first one person, then another, then every man, woman, and child in it, till they fell dead or exhausted. The thing swept all Europe; the Dancing Sickness; you can read about it in your encyclopedia. It lasted an entire summer, as I recall, and then – it stopped; died out. Leaving people, I suppose, wondering what in the world had happened to them.' Mannie paused, watching us, then shrugged. 'So there you are. These things are hard to believe till you see them, and even when you do see them.

'And that's what's happened in Santa Mira' – he nodded at the town at our feet. 'The news spreads, semi- secretly at first. It's whispered around, as it was in Mattoon; someone believes her husband, sister, aunt, or uncle is actually an undetectable impostor, a strange and exciting bit of news to hear. And then – it keeps on happening. And it spreads, and there's a new case, or several, nearly every day. Hell, the Salem witch hunt, flying saucers – they're all part of this same amazing aspect of the human mind. People live lonely lives, a lot of them; these delusions bring attention and concern.'

But Jack was slowly shaking his head no, and Mannie said quietly, 'The body was real; that's what's bothering you, isn't it, Jack?' Jack nodded, and Mannie said, 'Yes, it was; you all saw it. But that's all that's real. Jack, if you'd found that body a month ago, you'd have recognized it for what it was, a puzzling, possibly very strange mystery, but a perfectly natural one, too. And so would Theodora, Becky, and Miles. You can see what I mean.' Leaning across me, he was staring at Jack intently. 'Suppose that in August, 1944, in Mattoon, Illinois, a man had walked through the streets at night carrying a spray gun. Anyone seeing him would have supposed, and correctly, that the man was going to spray his rose bushes next day, or something of the sort. But one month later, in September, that man with the spray gun might have had his head blown off before he ever had a chance to explain.'

Gently, Mannie said, 'And you, Jack, you found a body, of approximately your height and build, which isn't too strange; you're an average-sized man. The face, in death, and this happens often, was smooth and unlined, bland in expression, and' – Mannie shrugged – 'well, you're a writer, an imaginative man, and you're under the influence of the delusion that's loose in Santa Mira, and so are Miles, Theodora, and Becky. Me, too, undoubtedly, if I lived here. And your mind leaped for a connection, leaped to a conclusion explaining two mysteries in terms of each other. The human mind searches for cause and effect, always; and we all prefer the weird and thrilling to the dull and commonplace as an answer.'

'Listen, Mannie, Theodora actually saw – '

'Exactly what she expected to see! What she was frightened to death of seeing! What she was absolutely certain to see, under the circumstances. I'd really be astonished if she hadn't! Why, you two had her, and she had herself, completely conditioned and ready for it.'

I started to speak, and Mannie grinned at me mockingly. 'You saw nothing, Miles.' He shrugged. 'Except a rolled-up rug, maybe, on a shelf in Becky's basement. Or a pile of sheets or laundry; almost anything at all, or nothing at all, would do. You had yourself so worked-up by then, Miles, so hyper-excited, running through the