The Thought-feeders

Written by: R.R. Winterbotham
Provided by: Project Gutenberg

High in the stratosphere the two pilots
encountered the living clouds and found out
what it meant to eat your words—literally!

The inventor, Dr. Kempster Duerkes, was in his best spirits, which made him nearly as sparkling as a sphinx. His new airplane, the stratosphere scout, had risen from the ground eight miles in the air.

"It works!" he beamed in ecstasy, watching the altimeter.

"It's a neat job," admitted the pilot, Captain Lewis Hawes, condescendingly. Inventors were nice, but they were vastly over-rated. The men who flew the planes, not the men who built them, made all the discoveries in aviation.

"Neat job?" Dr. Duerkes frowned at the understatement. "My boy, it's perfection! The ship is faultless as the logic of the universe!"

Dr. Duerkes regarded pilots as being mentally under-aged people who did their best to retard aviation by regarding all new inventions and refinements as crackpot ideas.

With this gulf of disrespect lurking between them it was strange that these two men should have become companions. However, they did have a few things in common. Although Dr. Duerkes called Captain Hawes a boy, there was scarcely any difference in actual ages—with exception noted for Dr. Duerkes' idea of the captain's mental age. Besides, both men had a high regard for the stratosphere and the stratosphere scout formed a bond between them. It was a strange companionship, but stranger things were about to happen.

"If I tried to imitate the logic of the universe," the captain retorted, "I'd never be able to do a thing. The only real logic in the universe is man's. He invented the sport of making one and one equal two."

"Nonsense!" Dr. Duerkes replied stiffly. "The universe is an orderly thing. It obeys fixed laws. It never varies in its course. The universe is one thing we can depend upon."

"If you ask me," Captain Hawes said, sending the plane up another thousand feet, "anything can happen."

The heating equipment and the artificially sustained atmosphere of the plane's cabin made the men quite comfortable as the craft skimmed along at close to 45,000 feet.

Dr. Duerkes clasped his hands over his knees and beamed. He was about to say something, but he never got the words out of his mouth. For at that moment the plane lurched.

"Ump!" grunted Dr. Duerkes.

"Air pocket," Captain Hawes explained.

"There are no air pockets here," the doctor retorted. "We're in the stratosphere—the region of weatherless atmosphere. There might be winds, but no air pockets."

"Air pocket anyhow!" Captain Hawes insisted. "This ain't a textbook. This is the real thing."

If Dr. Duerkes had flown as many ships as the captain, he'd know how it felt to bump through an air pocket. Captain Hawes would not be surprised if he found air pockets in the moon's nonexistent atmosphere.

"Strange!" the inventor murmured. He gazed out of the window. He saw something stranger still.

It was a curiously shaped cloud, colored green.

"Umph!" Dr. Duerkes grunted again. "Who'd expect a cloud this high?"

Captain Hawes looked away from the controls and gasped. He strained against his safety belt as he put the ship through a series of intricate gyrations. A smooth, well-modulated stream of cuss words broke from his lips.

"By the wings of Pegasus!" the captain cried. "That wasn't an air pocket! Some idiot A. A. gunner is shooting at us!"

Even as he spoke a second green cloud appeared beside the first and the ship lurched again, even as a faint pop, like a distant explosion, came to the fliers' ears.

Captain Hawes switched on the radio and called to the ground crew.

"Is there a war down there?" the pilot asked. "If there ain't, tell that gun crew to cease firing. If there is, tell 'em to stop anyhow, because we ain't an enemy ship!"

"No one's firing, sir!" came the radio operator's voice. "There must be some mistake."

"Mistake—hell!" the captain roared. "I know anti-aircraft bursts when I see them!"

Dr. Duerkes made a mental note that a minute before Captain Hawes had called them air pockets.

The ship lurched again, then it bounced upward like a rubber ball. The whole craft seemed to be enveloped in a greenish cloud. A familiar, yet unidentifiable odor assailed the captain's nostrils. The motor coughed and died.

"Unloosen your safety belt," the captain ordered. "Get ready to bail out as soon as we get down where the air's thick enough to breathe."

The captain tried to start the motor again, but something was wrong with the supercharger.

"Must have been hit," he said.

There was a tinkle of glass and the air seemed to be sucked out of the cabin. Captain Hawes turned to see the cabin window falling out, but it wasn't that that made him turn pale.

Through the broken opening a greenish cloud was creeping into the plane. A long arm of vapor was extending itself toward the two men.

Dr. Duerkes screamed as the cold, sticky moisture of the vaporous cloud closed about him. Hawes felt himself jerked out of his seat and he struggled helplessly as he was dragged through the window of the plane.

Below, he saw the bomber spinning crazily to earth. But neither man fell. Instead, they remained suspended in air, held fast by the billowing, green cloud.

An odd, cold feeling swept over Hawes. Oxygen was sucked from his lungs. He gasped for breath, wondering if this was the end of everything. As the light of day faded from his eyes he felt convinced that it must be. A world of silence closed in about him.

As the chill of the stratosphere seemed to freeze the pilot's veins, he recognized the familiar odor he had smelled on the plane. It was ozone, oxygen exposed to the influence of electrical discharge, an allotropy of oxygen known to exist in the stratosphere.

For a time, all that remained of Captain Hawes' consciousness was a dim sense of awareness. From this tiny spark something grew. It enlarged until it swept over and mastered his entire being.

Suddenly Captain Hawes saw, but not through his eyes. He heard gentle whisperings about him, but not through his ears. The soft velvet of the green cloud pressed against his body, buoying it in the air, but he did not actually feel it. His nose no longer scented ozone, yet he was aware of the odor.

His senses were gone; in their place was a single, all-inclusive sense—an awareness of things first hand.

The limits of his weak, fallacious human signal system of neurones had been pushed aside and Captain Hawes and his companion stood in direct contact with the external world—possibly the first human beings ever to do so.^[1]

No longer did Captain Hawes have to touch a thing to feel it. He knew the nature of the rocks on the moon as well as he knew the texture of his clothing. Without looking, he could tell Dr. Duerkes' movements as he opened his eyes and he knew that his own countenance was in no less degree bewildered and amazed.

Captain Hawes did not seem to exist within his body, but on the outside of it. His body was there, but it existed purely as a power plant for his omnipotent self.

"It's a man!" said something excitedly.

It was not exactly a voice Hawes heard. Instead, it was a thought, not expressed in words, but in translatable impulses.

"They're both men," came another impulse.

Captain Hawes was aware of a number of small greenish clouds sweeping down on all sides. Then, for the first time he saw that the stratosphere was far different than any human description had made it.

Around him arose a weird city. There were broad streets and buildings, vaporous, tenuous structures, but real as a single sense perceived it. The thought occurred to Hawes that this is what an American city would look like if it were stripped of noise, all tangible objects, all smells and things that could be perceived by the five senses. He knew that there was much more to a city than is ever seen by any man.

The cloud that bore the two human beings was floating through the streets toward a massive, rainbow building that rose like a palace in the center of the metropolis.

A wail, like an ambulance siren, rose from the cloud. It was purely a mental wail, but the other clouds scurried out of the way to let the vapor bearing the men pass.

The building into which the men were taken rose like an eerie dream on the nothingness of its foundations.

"Great Scott!" whispered Duerkes. "What sort of a nightmare is this!"

"It's an unclassified part of your orderly universe," replied Captain Hawes. He suddenly discovered that he was not really speaking, nor was Duerkes talking through his mouth. The two men were communicating ideas by a sort of telepathy that went beyond their understanding.

A low murmur of excited ideas swept into the captain's perception as they entered the chamber. More poignant than all, a single, commanding thought arose from a pretty little turquoise cloud in the center of the room. The thought swept all others into silence and beat its way into the consciousness of the two human beings.

"You are welcome here, beings of the lower regions!"

"Thanks!" said Captain Hawes.

Dr. Duerkes was too busy thinking to reply. The doctor apparently had forgotten that his thoughts no longer were secret and that what he was thinking was perceptible to every person present.

"Am I alive? I do not breathe, yet I feel that I am absorbing ozone through my skin. I cannot be dead, for I possess consciousness. If I am neither, what am I doing here?"

"Your friend is disturbed, Captain Hawes," said the turquoise cloud.

"He has never been formally introduced to a green cloud before," the captain apologized. "Come to life, Doc! Meet the headman here!"

Mental laughter swept the room. Even the turquoise cloud joined.

Dr. Duerkes started. "Oh! Excuse me! I am happy to meet you, sir!"

"I must apologize for our appearance," said the turquoise cloud. "We appear as clouds, because we are a race of philosophers and we have too much work to do to waste our energies on the creation of beautiful figures. We might appear in any form we choose, but cloud-like forms are simple and easy to manage in the stratosphere. I must correct your impression, Mr. Hawes and Mr. Duerkes, that I am a man. I am not...."

As the cloud's thoughts impressed themselves on Captain Hawes' mind, it underwent a slow transformation. It dwindled in size and changed from turquoise to a beautiful olive shade. Its form swiftly became that of a human being. Then, before Hawes and Duerkes, stood a woman of dazzling beauty. She was dark complexioned. Her hair and eyes were dark. She was dressed in a cirrus mist of rainbow color.

Captain Hawes' thoughts were akin to a gape.

Dr. Duerkes looked with his mind stunned into a blank.

"Poor men," she said. "I pity you. You thought you were the highest form of life on the face of the earth, yet you are no further advanced in comparison to the Green Clouds than fish are in comparison to you."

She did not open her mouth but she spoke in waves of thought. Without her saying so, Captain Hawes knew her name was Loetta and somehow, as she spoke, Hawes perceived that in spite of this creature's claims to superiority, she needed man. Hawes and Duerkes had been brought here for a purpose. There was a problem to be solved and only man could solve it.

"Our lives lie one step in evolution beyond yours," Loetta went on, as though she were trying to erase the thoughts that crept into Hawes' mind. "First life on earth was plant life. It lived on the inanimate elements in the sea and rocks. Then came animal life, living in the sea and devouring the plants. Larger animals came to eat the small ones and life emerged from the sea onto the land. Man developed to eat the animals. We, the Green Clouds, are the next stage. Our food is thought—the mental imagery of lowly man."

The problem, at least, was down-to-earth. Even a creature that lived in the clouds had to have food.

"I should have known," Dr. Duerkes' thoughts staggered from his confused brain. "It is perfectly plausible. Everything is plausible, if one studies it long enough. It is inevitable that life should move some day into the stratosphere, just as it once moved out of the sea onto the land."

"Primitive thoughts," rebuked the woman. "We would not feed such slop to our half-wits." She turned to the aviator. "And what is the best you can do?"

Hawes was feasting his eyes on the cloud woman. "If I weren't sure I was awake, I'd say you were a nightmare," he began. "But you can't be a nightmare—nightmares are hideous—" he stopped abruptly.

Loetta smiled. "I liked that," said she.

"What?" Captain Hawes blushed mentally.

"What you did, just then. You pressed your lips against mine and made a loud smacking noise."

The flustered captain stammered: "But I—I didn't. Not really."

"In your mind you did," Loetta said. "It was a swell idea. A perfect feast."

"You mean that's what you live on?"

"Thought is our food and drink," she said. "We cannot eat our own thoughts, for that would be cannibalism. The wild crop that we collect at random over the earth is neither satisfying nor dependable. That is why we seek to cultivate our own foodstuffs. You two human beings will supply us with food. In time you will be mental giants."

"You made no mistake when you picked me," Dr. Duerkes beamed. "Already my thoughts are pretty well advanced."

"Your thoughts are quite obvious," Loetta retorted. "You simply have a knack of guessing the right answers and for most things there is more than one right answer. I'm afraid that we'll have to depend on Hawes to supply us with the staple foods. You can give us the lighter stuff—desserts and pastry—"

"Hawes! Why he never had a deep thought in his life!" Duerkes exclaimed.

"His thoughts are rather cute. Very simple, tender and digestible." She sighed. "It is funny none of us Green Clouds ever thought about kissing before."

Loetta took a step forward, threw her arms around Captain Hawes and planted a deep, fervent kiss on his lips.

"I think," Captain Hawes said, as he and his companion were led to a little garden of clouds, "that I am well enough stimulated to win a grand championship as a mental milch cow."

"Bah!" Dr. Duerkes snorted. "This is no superior race!"

The Green Clouds insisted that their food be of the highest quality. But their standards were their own. Noble philosophy was carted away by the scavengers scarcely nibbled, while thrilling, exciting thoughts were bolted ravenously.

"Deep thoughts are too near our own," Loetta explained one day when she visited Hawes. "We find action stimulating, for life is rather dull up here."

She explained that exertion was almost unheard of in this land. People obtained food without a great deal of effort and there was really nothing to work for.

"We find Dr. Duerkes' thoughts hard to digest," she said, "but perhaps they will be better flavored in time."

Because life was so effortless, Hawes wondered how the people of this country escaped complete boredom. It was a nation where everyone was unemployed, for there was nothing to do. To build a house, one had merely to create it from thought. Thought also was food and the medium of exchange.

"Man misses a great deal," Loetta went on. "His five senses completely overlook the most worthwhile things of life."

"There are all kinds of men. Have you ever really studied them?"

"I know all about them," replied Loetta. "That is why I can imitate men so easily. I can eat their food, just as you do. I drink their drinks. I have watched men die and I have lived as they lived. But it is too primitive."

Captain Hawes smiled as he recalled a few lines of Kipling:

"I have eaten your bread and salt,

I have drunk your water and wine,

The deaths ye died I have watched beside,

And the lives that ye led were mine."

"Yes," Loetta said, reading his mind, "I have even read Kipling. And I like it."

As days passed, Captain Hawes became more and more impressed with the power of thought. He found himself conjuring up fancy motor cars from nothing. He could dream of wealth and awaken surrounded by chests filled with gold and precious jewels. Thought had become a tangible substance, and as material as a piece of cheese. His thoughts became so prolific that the people of this land grew fat and comfortable.

But continual thinking is not a pleasant occupation for a man of action. The first weeks in the land of the Green Clouds had been full of novelty. Beyond that, only Loetta's presence made the place endurable. But there were times when Loetta was busy and Captain Hawes was left alone to produce thoughts. Life became boring.

Thinking no longer was an easy task. When he considered escaping, no one complained of the thought, for it was good food. The only difficulty was that the green clouds devoured his escape plans as fast as he made them.

Anyhow, the escape looked impossible. Hawes' and Duerkes' parachutes had been taken away from them and a drop to the earth, eight miles straight down, would be quite fatal.

Even if the men survived the fall, there was the difficulty of getting started. Gravity seemed absent here as far as the earth was concerned. True, if one jumped up toward the sky, gravity worked as it always had. But if one tried to dive toward the earth, he was pulled back to the clouds just the same.

"Anyway, it's a slick arrangement," Hawes decided.

Dr. Duerkes shuddered. "How can these people like your hashy thoughts?" he asked. "This mystery would startle the world of science and you dismiss it with the words, 'slick arrangement.'"

"Well, maybe it ain't so slick. I'm sort of tired of it. I'd give a lot for a ham sandwich, with mustard."

In front of Hawes' eyes a ham sandwich on rye bread, dripping with mustard, appeared. Hawes reached out to grab it, but a green cloud swooped from behind a bush and seized it.

"Tut, tut!" chided the green cloud. "You mustn't eat your own thoughts. That's cannibalism."

"But I'm hungry," said Captain Hawes.

"Then have a ham sandwich on me," said the cloud.

In the air in front of Hawes appeared another sandwich, exactly like the first. Hawes reached and seized it. He tasted it. It had a slightly sour taste, as if it were impregnated with ozone, but it was better than nothing.

"Swell!" said the captain.

"I can't understand it," Duerkes, who also was supplied with a sandwich, moaned. "It's beyond comprehension. This is a different world from ours. There isn't a single law of the universe applicable to it."

"It looks pretty logical to me," Hawes said. "These people think concrete thoughts, instead of abstract ones." He turned to the green cloud. "Could you think up an airplane—a stratosphere ship, like the one we rode to get here?"

"Easily," the green cloud said.

Standing before them was a ship, an exact duplicate of the stratosphere scout.

Not a word passed between the two human beings as they got into the ship. It wasn't necessary to think in order to know what should be done.

"Hey!" cried the green cloud. "Come back here. You can't go away—"

The green cloud ran toward the ship, but it could not destroy it, for to do so would have been murder. One's own thoughts are not to be destroyed by one's self. Hawes realized this. He had tried several times to build a plane, but it always was eaten by a green cloud the second he got it finished. But the green clouds could not eat their own thoughts.

The motor whirred.

"Just a minute, before we leave," the captain said. He closed his eyes. He thought hard of Loetta.

The figure of Loetta appeared in the control cabin beside him.

Captain Hawes touched the controls and the ship soared away.

"I hope you can learn to eat solid food, Loetta," the captain said.

Loetta sighed. She turned her head.

Captain Hawes turned his head also. Trailing from the ship, hanging like a chain of daisies, was a whole string of Loettas. One hung onto the wing, while the one below her clasped her ankles.

"Gosh!" Captain Hawes said. "I didn't realize I had been thinking of you all the time."

"Don't worry," said Loetta.

As she spoke a green cloud flashed out of the heavens and calmly began eating her sisters.

Captain Hawes put his ship into a dive toward the earth.

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