SOURCE: The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett (Space Stories  February 1953 )

DESCRIPTION: "...Vickrey sat up on the table and cried out -- a shrill-edged fluting call, infinitly strange to come from the throat of an Earthman...Again the desperate call, the unhuman cry for help. It set Comyn's nerves on edge, but it was not as bad as Vickrey's face--an ordinary face, an Earthman's face, but altered and made alien, the mouth distorted in the forming of that wild cry, the eyes...The eyes. Comyn was not an especially imaginative man, and he could not have said what it was about Vickrey's eyes that made them abnormal and frightening in a man's face. There was no menace in them and no madness...It was something else, something lacking. He caught their direct stare and it jarred him in a queer way that set the hairs to pricking on the back of the neck..." (The Big Jump by Leigh Brackett)

NOTES: Humans who have been exposed to the Transuranae and their transuranic elements have no control over themselves. living like beasts, worshipping the Transuranae in their temple-like hollow. Only by extreme effort can they regain their thinking minds. Their eyes flash with inner light. Even in death trans-infused humans still move, twitching uncontrollably.

HISTORY: Brackett used the idea of transformed humans and addiction earlier in "The Beast-Jewel of Mars" (Planet Stories Winter 1948 ) where humans are devolved by the process of Shanga.

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