Come Into My Brain!

By Alexander Blade

Fitted with the new thought-helmet, Dane Harrell plunged into the venomous brain of the alien. It was a fast way to commit suicide!...

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy June 1958 Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Dane Harrell held the thought-helmet tightly between his hands and, before putting it on, glanced over at the bound, writhing alien sitting opposite him. The alien snarled defiantly.

"You're sure you want to go through with this?" asked Dr. Phelps.

Harrell nodded. "I volunteered, didn't I? I said I'd take a look inside this buzzard's brain and I'm going to do it. If I don't come up in half an hour, come get me."

"Right."

Harrell slipped the cool bulk of the thought-helmet over his head and signalled to the scientist, who pulled the actuator switch. Harrell shuddered as psionic current surged through him; he stiffened, wriggled, and felt himself glide out of his body, hover incorporeally in the air between his now soulless shell and the alien bound opposite.

Remember, you volunteered, he told himself.

He hung for a moment outside the alien's skull; then, he drifted downward and in. He had entered the alien's mind. Whether he would emerge alive, and with the troop-deployment data—well, that was another matter entirely.

The patrol-ships of the Terran outpost on Planetoid 113 had discovered the alien scout a week before. The Dimellian spy was lurking about the outermost reaches of the Terran safety zone when he was caught.

It wasn't often that Earth captured a Dimellian alive and so the Outpost resolved to comb as much information from him as possible. The Earth-Dimell war was four years old; neither side had scored a decisive victory. It was believed that Dimell was massing its fleets for an all-out attack on Earth itself; confirmation of this from the captured scout would make Terran defensive tactics considerably more sound.

But the Dimellian resisted all forms of brainwashing until Phelps, the Base Psych-man, came forth with the experimental thought-helmet. Volunteers were requested; Harrell spoke up first. Now, wearing the thought-helmet, he plunged deep into the unknown areas of the Dimellian's mind, hoping to emerge with high-order military secrets.

His first impression was of thick grey murk—so thick it could be cut. Using a swimming motion, Harrell drifted downward, toward the light in the distance. It was a long way down; he floated, eerily, in free-fall.

Finally he touched ground. It yielded under him spongily, but it was solid. He looked around. The place was alien: coarse crumbly red soil, giant spike-leaved trees that shot up hundreds of feet overhead, brutal-looking birds squawking and chattering in the low branches.

It looked just like the tridim solidos of Dimell he had seen. Well, why not? Why shouldn't the inside of a man's mind—or an alien's, for that matter—resemble his home world?

Cautiously, Harrell started to walk. Mountains rose in the dim distance and he could see, glittering on a mountaintop far beyond him, the white bulk of an armored castle. Of course! His imaginative mind realized at once that here was where the Dimellian guarded his precious secrets; up there, on the mountain, was his goal.

He started to walk.

Low-hanging vines obscured his way; he conjured up a machete and cut them down. The weapon felt firm and real in his hand but he realized that not even the hand was real; all this was but an imaginative projection.

The castle was further away than he had thought. He saw this after he had walked for perhaps 15 minutes. There was no telling duration inside the alien's skull, either. Or distance. The castle seemed just as distant now as when he had begun and his 15-minute journey through the jungle had tired him.

Suddenly demonic laughter sounded up ahead in the jungle. Harsh, ugly laughter.

And the Dimellian appeared, slashing his way through the vines with swashbuckling abandon.

"Get out of my mind, Earthman!"

The Dimellian was larger than life and twice as ugly. It was an idealized, self-glorified mental image Harrell faced.

The captured Dimellian was about five feet tall, thick-shouldered, with sturdy, corded arms and supplementary tentacles sprouting from its shoulders; its skin was green and leathery, dotted with toad-like warts.

Harrell now saw a creature close to nine feet tall, swaggering, with a mighty barrel of a chest and a huge broad-sword clutched in one of its arms. The tentacles writhed purposefully.

"You know why I'm here, alien. I want to know certain facts. And I'm not getting out of your mind until I've wrung them from you."

The alien's lipless mouth curved in a bleak smile. "Big words, little Earthman. But first you'll have to vanquish me."

And the Dimellian stepped forward.