The Mind Thing

by Fredric Brown

  He had the owl put him down in grass between the road and the farmyard fence and then fly several times around the farmhouse to reconnoiter and to choose a hiding place for himself. The house was dark and still. There seemed to be no dog on the premises, which eliminated one possible problem. And the best hiding place seemed to be under the wooden steps that led to the back door. It would have the additional advantage of being quite near the barn—before he tied himself up again by taking a human host, he would have a chance to study whatever animals might be in the barn. Thus far, except for dogs, all of his potential animal or bird hosts were wild ones; it might help on some future occasion —who knows what situation might arise?—to be able to use a domesticated animal as a host for some special purpose: As he had used the dog. There was nothing to lose except a little time that he could well afford.

  He had the owl come back for him, carry him over the fence, and put him down beside the back steps. Then it pushed him under them and as far back as it could, which was far enough to put him completely out of sight.

  That ended the usefulness of the owl, and he had it circle high and then put it into a power dive to have it kill itself against the side of the house, which would be harder than the ground. He knew the thud would probably awaken the occupants, but that wouldn’t matter; they’d go back to sleep sooner or later, and meanwhile he’d be able to use his sense of perception on the barn and whatever animals were inside it.

  At the last second of the owl’s dive, something went slightly wrong. Finding itself flying at a solid wall, the owl closed its eyes. It was an involuntary, muscular reaction, not a conscious one, and the mind thing didn’t have time to correct it; he could have if he’d concentrated on keeping the eyes open. He should have anticipated it, for the same thing had happened when he had crash-dived the crow into a Bartlesville street. But that he had hardly noticed because it didn’t matter. Now with the owl it mattered to the extent that, flying blind for the last second, it crashed through the pane of an upstairs window instead of hitting the outer wall of the house.

  It lay inside the house, still alive but slightly stunned and with a broken wing. A light switch flicked in the next room and the door opened, letting light into the room that almost blinded the owl—but not quite; it could still see. Siegfried and Elsa Gross stood in the doorway staring, both wearing cotton flannel nightgowns.

  “A damn owl,” Gross said. “Flew right through the window. I’ll get my gun and—”

  “Siegfried, why kill it? I mean, they kill mice and—”

  The owl gathered itself, managed to get to its feet ready to attack if it had to attack to get itself killed.

  The woman had taken a step toward it, but Gross said, “Back to bed, Elsa.” Quite firmly. And then, “It’ll claw or bite you if you try to pick it up. Them things can be vicious. Besides, look, it’s got a busted wing.”

  They both stepped back out of sight and a moment later the man was in the doorway again, this time with a twenty-two-caliber rifle in his hands. He aimed right between the owl’s eyes.

  The owl stood still for the shot.

  And the mind thing was back in his shell, but still watching what was happening—this time through his perceptive sense, which was a thousand times more efficient, within its range, than sight.

  Gross pushed the dead owl with the barrel of the rifle and then picked it up and dropped it outside through the broken window. He went back into their bedroom and put the rifle in a corner. His wife was already back in bed and he turned out the light and got in beside her.

  “Goddamn owl,” he said, “must of been crazy or something. Or else blind.”

  “But its eyes—”

  “People or animals can go blind and have their eyes look okay. ’Member the horse we had to shoot five years ago because he went blind. His eyes looked okay. Why not an owl’s?”

  “I guess so. Did you leave it there?”

  “Threw it out the window,” Gross said. “I’ll bury it in the morning. Damn,” he grumbled again. “Have to go in town for a pane of glass too.”

  “No hurry in this weather, Siegfried,” his wife said. “It can wait till we go in to shop next Saturday. I can tack some cheesecloth over it to keep out flies. If you had put a screen on it—”

  “Why should I, when we don’t use the room and the window can stay shut? Besides, the owl would’ve gone through the screen too and l’d’ve had that to fix besides. Happen to notice the time while we were up?”

  “Yah. A few minutes after midnight.”

  “Okay, go to sleep.”

  There was only silence in the bedroom and the mind thing withdrew the focus of his attention. Even if the man went to sleep right away, he wanted the woman to be sound asleep too so that, he hoped, the man could go downstairs without wakening her. He concentrated his attention in the direction of the barn.

  There was a pig pen along one side of the barn and a chicken house and runway on the other, but he ignored both. A pig, he knew, was unlikely to be of any value as a host and, besides, if he ever entered one it was almost certain to be penned and so completely useless to him. The same thing was true of chickens, and either type of creature, penned in, would have considerable difficulty committing suicide or getting itself killed. It was always annoying and sometimes dangerous to be in a host that was difficult to get rid of, once it had served its purpose.

  In the barn itself, besides a few mice, there were three cows, a horse, and a cat. He didn’t bother studying the mice; there was nothing an ordinary mouse could do that a field mouse couldn’t, and there were field mice everywhere, on farms as well as in the woods.

  The cows were a little better and he took time to study one. At least they had considerable physical strength. Intelligently directed, one should be able to get out of any barn, if not by using a horn to lift a door catch, then by butting a door down; if the door was too strong for that, it could kill itself in the process of trying, so there was nothing to lose. Also, if the occasion should arise, it would be a very efficient killing machine; intelligently guided, it would be more dangerous than a bull. And one would be even easier to use by day; it dozed often while grazing or slept soundly in the shadow of a tree. And few if any fences of the kind used on farms would withstand a determined charge by a cow.

  He studied the horse. It, too, could be useful in certain ways. Possibly more so than a cow. It could run faster than a cow, much faster, and it could jump a low fence or use its forefeet to batter down a higher one. And its hoofs could be as lethal as a cow’s horns.

  Last, the cat. As he studied it and (as he had with other animals) correlated his study with the knowledge of its characteristics and capabilities that he had learned in Tommy’s mind, he gradually realized that here, for one special and important purpose, was an almost perfect host.

  It could spy for him. It could go almost anywhere and hardly be noticed. It was fast and it could move silently. Its night vision was almost as good as that of an owl and, unlike an owl, it could see even better by day. Its hearing was excellent. And since there were dozens of cats between here and town and dozens more in the town itself, and since cats slept almost as much by day as by night, one would be an easy host for him to enter at any time.

  He decided that, since there was plenty of time, he would try one now to determine the real extent of its capabilities. He entered the mind of the cat sleeping in the barn.

  He opened its eyes. Yes, though its night vision was less than an owl’s, it could see fairly well even in the almost complete darkness of the barn, relieved only by faint moonlight coming in through one open window. He guided the cat to the window, jumped it up to the window ledge and then down outside. In the moonlight, faint though it was from the thin crescent of a new moon, it could see quite well.

  He ran it several times around the house, noting the silence with which it could run—scarcely a sound even on the gravel of the driveway—and checking its speed. He found that it could run very fast for short distances
; for a spurt it could outdistance a dog easily, although in a sustained chase a dog would probably catch it unless it found cover or climbed a tree.

  There was a tree behind the barn and he tested its climbing ability and found it excellent.

  From near the top of the tree, through a space between branches, he could see that there was a light in an upstairs window of the next farmhouse toward town. He hadn’t intended to keep the cat that long or take it that far, but here was an excellent chance to test its capabilities as a spying tool.

  He brought the cat down from the tree and trotted it across the fields to the other farmhouse. The cat moved like a shadow in the night.

  When he reached the farmhouse he saw that there were two windows lighted, both obviously windows of the same room, an upstairs corner room at the front of the house. The window he had seen from the tree on the Gross farm was the side one; the other was just above a front porch roof. There was a tree near the porch and the cat climbed it and jumped lightly from a branch to the porch roof, up its slight slope to the window and then to the outside window sill.

  Its eyes adjusted quickly to looking into the lighted room. A child was lying in bed, coughing hoarsely. A woman in a bathrobe and slippers was bending over the child and a gaunt man in rumpled pajamas stood in the doorway. From their conversation—audible to the cat even though the window was closed—the mind thing learned that the child had croup; the man was asking the woman whether she thought she could take care of it or whether he should phone for Doctor Gruen.

  The scene itself was of no interest to the mind thing, but he now knew that he had been right in assessing the value of the cat as a host perfect for spying, for fact-finding.

  Had it not been for his need to nourish himself he would have kept the cat as a host overnight and used it the next day to widen his knowledge of the other farmhouses, even sent it into the town, perhaps to follow the proprietor of the television repair shop home from work to find out where he slept. But feeding himself came first, and there was no dearth of other cats he could use later at leisure.

  His problem now was to get rid of this one. He’d been in it an hour now, longer than he’d intended. He examined the cat’s thoughts to find the quickest and surest way of getting it killed, and found a ready answer.

  On this farm there was a vicious dog that was kept chained in a corner of the barn. (Why, he wondered, would anyone keep a dog that had to be kept chained, which made it valueless as a watchdog? But that didn’t matter now.)

  He took the cat down from the porch roof by way of the tree, and ran it around the back to the barn. Again there was an open window. The dog started barking fiercely the moment the cat jumped up to the sill of the window. The cat waited a moment until its eyes became accustomed to the greater darkness inside the barn, until it could see the dog clearly. Then it jumped down inside, ran to the dog, and jumped lightly into the dog’s jaws.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The mind of the mind thing, back in his own body under the back steps of the Gross farmhouse, probed the house, this time carefully to make sure that there was no other living creature in the house besides Gross and his wife—such as a dog that might bark and wake the woman when Gross came downstairs. There was no dog; only a canary bird in a covered cage in the downstairs room that would be their living room or parlor. His host would not have to go into that room.

  In their upstairs bedroom Siegfried and Elsa Gross were both sleeping deeply.

  The mind thing entered Gross’s mind and again there was that terrible but brief struggle that always happened when he took over an intelligent entity. Disappointingly, it was briefer than had been the struggle in the mind of the boy Tommy. Was his new host even less intelligent than the boy who had failed a year of high school and who knew nothing and cared less about science, unless farming could be called a science? He’d hoped for more, from an older man, but it seemed that he’d been wrong. Gross, he saw at once, knew and cared even less about such things than Tommy Hoffman had. His education had stopped at the sixth grade and he knew little of anything outside his own farm. He didn’t even own a radio and his only reading was a weekly paper and one magazine on farming, both of which he read with some difficulty.

  The mind thing didn’t move his host right away; he had Gross lie still until he had oriented himself in Gross’s mind and had learned a few things he wanted to know before moving.

  He got the answers immediately to two important questions, and both were satisfactory. First, Elsa Gross was a sound sleeper; no noise less than the owl had made crashing through the window in the next room would be likely to waken her. In the kitchen, which was not under this room, he need use only normal precautions against making noise, and not drop anything. Second, there was a quart jar of soup stock in the refrigerator, also half a bowl of rich beef gravy. Mixed together and warmed slightly—which would dissolve the probably partly solidified gravy and also enable him to absorb nourishment more readily—they would make a perfect nutrient solution. If they had not been there, and if there were no reasonable equivalent in canned goods, he would have had to use meat of some kind and cook it an hour or two to obtain a broth that still would not have been as rich as the stock and gravy combination.

  That was all he needed to know for now, he decided; the rest whatever else of interest to him might be in Gross’s knowledge—he could examine at leisure later. He’d still be in the old man’s mind while his body absorbed nourishment for an hour or so from the nutrient solution.

  Under the mind thing’s direction, Siegfried Gross slid quietly out of bed and tiptoed barefoot to the door of the room. He opened it and closed it from the outside as quietly as he could, felt his way through darkness to the stairs, and went down them. He didn’t turn on a light until he was in the kitchen.

  Working as quietly as possible, he got the jar and the bowl from the refrigerator. He poured the soup stock from the jar into a pan, one large enough to hold the shell of the mind thing, scraped the gravy into it from the bowl, and stirred the two together. He used a match to light a burner of the butane gas stove and put the pan over a low flame. He stirred the mixture as it warmed, occasionally testing the temperature by taking a sip from the spoon.

  When the gravy was all dissolved and the temperature was right—quite warm, for the mind thing, protected by his shell, could stand quite a range of temperature, from fifty or more degrees below zero almost to the boiling point of water—he turned off the flame under the pan.

  He went outside, leaving the kitchen door open to give himself light, reached back under the steps and found the mind thing. He carried it inside and placed it carefully in the liquid in the pan.

  Then, after taking a look at the kitchen clock so he could time the operation, Siegfried Gross sat down to wait. While he waited, in Gross’s mind the mind thing sorted out his knowledge and his memories.

  What he learned was far from encouraging when he considered keeping his present host for any purpose other than his current one.

  Siegfried Gross, at sixty-five, was a bitter and lonely man. He was on civil terms with some of his neighbors and with some of the merchants in the town, but he had no friends. He loved no one and no one loved him, not even his wife; there had been no affection between them for many years. They had stayed together for the simple reason that they needed one another, for different reasons. Elsa had no relatives to whom she could go, no way of earning a living on her own; Siegfried needed her help to run the house and to do certain chores allotted to her around the barn. And they tolerated one another; there was no hatred.

  They had two children, one son and one daughter, but Siegfried had quarreled with both of them when, during their respective late teens, they had decided to leave the farm and go to the city. Each had written a few letters to Elsa, but Siegfried had forbidden her to answer them, and they no longer even knew where their children lived.

  His future looked black because for several years he had been slowly developing arthritis, and it
was progressive. He had no faith in doctors, and they probably would not have been able to help him much anyway. Already it was painful for him to do his work, and he knew that after a few more years of increasing pain he would have to give up working and sell the small farm. He owned it clear and would perhaps get enough for it to buy his and Elsa’s way into a home of some sort for the rest of their lives, but that was all he had to look forward to—that, and the slowly increasing pain which would eventually cripple him completely, if he lived that long.

  Part of the bitterness that had been with him all his life lay in the fact that he hated his country and its government. It was, in fact, only technically his country; he thought of himself as a German rather than as an American. His parents had brought him from Germany when he was only four years old. They had become naturalized citizens, for practical reasons only, which had made him a citizen too. But their true loyalty remained toward the old country, and so did his. He had spoken no English until he started to school at seven. He had been in his early twenties when the United States had entered World War I. They had tried to draft him and he had spent a miserable year and a half interned as a conscientious objector; actually he had no objection, conscientious or otherwise, to war. He had given that as his reason; but he had simply not wanted to fight on what to him was the wrong side.

  He had welcomed the renascence of Germany under Hitler and had become an ardent Nazi, although he had never joined a Bund or any other group. When the United States got into the second war his opinions and his expression of them became even more violent. By then he was in his middle forties and there was no question of his being drafted, but he was also by then more intransigent and less discreet than he had been in his younger days. There was talk of putting him in a concentration camp, but the authorities decided that, however verbally violent, he was harmless and was in no position to sabotage the war effort. Besides, if all Nazi sympathizers in Wisconsin had been put into a concentration camp it would have required one the size of a Wisconsin county to hold them.