The Puppet Masters (20 page)

This I felt sure of without being inclined to test it by visiting a launching platform. I had once set up such a trap in the Constitution Club; no one who entered it had escaped.

I had noticed a vendo-printer for the
Kansas City Star
on the last corner I had passed. Now I swung around the block and came back to it, pulled up, and got out. I shoved a dime in the slot and waited for my paper to be printed. It seemed to take unusually long, but that was my own nervousness, I felt that every passer-by was staring at me.

The
Star’s
format had its usual dull respectability-no excitement, no mention of an emergency, no reference to Schedule Bare Back. The lead news story was headed PHONE SERVICE DISRUPTED BY SUNSPOT STORM, with a subhead
City Semi-Isolated by Solar Static
. There was a 3-col, semi-stereo, trukolor of the sun, its face disfigured by cosmic acne. The pic carried a Palomar date line, as did one of the substories.

The picture was a good fake—or perhaps they pulled a real one out of the paper’s library. It added up to a convincing and unexciting explanation of why Mamie Schultz, herself free of parasites, could not get her call through to Grandma in Pittsburgh.

The rest of the paper looked normal. I tucked it under my arm to study later and turned back to my car…just as a police car glided silently up and cramped in across the nose of it. A cop got out.

A police car seems to condense a crowd out of air. A moment before the corner was deserted—else I would never have stopped. Now there were people all around and the cop was coming toward me. My hand crept closer to my gun; I would have dropped him had I not been sure that most, if not all, of those around me were equally dangerous.

He stopped in front of me. “Let me see your license,” he said pleasantly.

“Certainly, officer,” I agreed, “It’s clipped to the instrument board of my car.” I stepped past him, letting it be assumed that he would follow me. I could feel him hesitate, then take the bait. I led him around to the far side, between my car and his. This let me see that he did not have a mate in his car, a most welcome variation from human practice. More important, it placed my car between me and the too-innocent bystanders.

“Right there,” I said, pointing inside, “it’s fastened down.” Again he hesitated, then looked—just long enough for me to use the new technique I had developed through necessity. My left hand slapped down on his shoulders and I clutched with all my strength.

It was the “struck cat” all over again. His body seemed to explode so violent was the spasm. I was in the car and gunning it almost before he hit the pavement.

And none too soon. The masquerade broke as suddenly as it had in Barnes’s outer office; the crowd closed in. One young woman clung by her nails to the smooth outside of the car for fifty feet or more before she fell off. By then I was making speed and still accelerating. I cut in and out of oncoming traffic, ready to take to the air but lacking space.

A cross street showed up on the left; I slammed into it. It was a mistake; trees arched over it and I could not take off. The next turn was even worse; I cursed the city planners who had made Kansas City so parklike.

Of necessity I slowed down. Now I was cruising at a conservative city speed, still watching for a street which would carry me to some boulevard wide enough for an illegal take-off. My thoughts began to catch up with me and I realized that there was no sign of pursuit. My own too-intimate knowledge of the masters came to my aid. Except for “direct conference” a titan lives in and through his host; he sees what the host sees; receives and passes on information through whatever organs and by whatever means are available to the host.

I knew that. So I knew that it was unlikely that any of the slugs at the corner had been looking for that particular car other than the one inhabiting the body of a policeman—and I had settled with it!

Now
, of course, the other parasites present would be on the lockout for me, too—but they had only the bodily abilities and facilities of their hosts. I decided that I need treat them with no more respect, or only a little more respect, than I would give to any casual crowd of witnesses, i.e., ignore them; change neighborhoods and forget it.

For I had nearly thirty minutes of grace left and I had decided what it was I needed as proof; a prisoner, a man who had been possessed and could tell what had happened to the city. I had to rescue a host.

I had to capture a man who was possessed, capture him without hurting him, kill or remove his rider, and kidnap him back to Washington. I had not time to pick a victim, to make plans; I must act
now
. Even as I decided, I saw a man walking in the block ahead. He was carrying a briefcase and stepping along like a man who sees home and supper ahead. I pulled alongside him and said, “Hey!”

He stopped. “Eh?”

I said, “I’ve just come from City Hall. No time to explain—slide in here and we’ll have a direct conference.”

He answered, “City Hall? What are you talking about?”

I said, “Change in plans. Don’t waste time. Get in!”

He backed away. I jumped out of the car and grabbed at his hunched shoulders.

Nothing happened—nothing, save that my hand struck bony human flesh, and the man began to yell.

I jumped back into the car and got out of there fast. When I was blocks away I slowed and thought it over. Could it be that I was wrong, that my nerves were so overwrought that I saw signs of titans where there were none?

No
! For the moment I had the Old Man’s indomitable will to face facts, to see them as they were. The toll gate, the sun suits, the swimming pool, the cop at the vendo-printer…those facts I
knew
—and this last fact simply meant that I had hit the double-zero, rolled boxcars, picked the one man in ten, or whatever the odds were, who was not yet recruited. I speeded up, looking for a new victim.

He was a middle-aged man watering his lawn, a figure so bucolic and out-of-this-century that I was half a mind to pass him by. But I had no time left—and he wore a heavy sweater which bulged suspiciously. Had I seen his wife on the veranda I would have gone past, for she was dressed in bra and skirt and so could not have been possessed.

He looked up inquiringly as I stopped. “I’ve just come from City Hall,” I repeated. “You and I need a direct conference right away. Get in.”

He said quietly, “Come in the house for it. That car is too public.”

I wanted to refuse but he had already turned and was heading for the house. As I came up by him he whispered, “Careful. The woman is not of us.”

“Your wife?”

“Yes.”

We stopped on the porch and he said, “My dear, this is Mr. O’Keefe. We have some business to discuss. We’ll be in the study.”

She smiled and answered, “Certainly, my love. Good evening, Mr. O’Keefe. Sultry, isn’t it?”

I agreed that it was and she went back to her knitting. We went on inside and the man ushered me into his study. Since we were both keeping the masquerade I went in first, as befitted a visitor being escorted. I did not like turning my back on him.

For that reason I was half expecting it. He hit me near the base of the neck. But I rolled with it and went down almost unhurt. I continued to roll and fetched up on my back.

In training school they used to slap us with sandbags for trying to get up, once down. I recall my
savate
instructor saying in a flat Belgian accent, “Brave men get up again—and die. Be a coward—fight from the floor.”

So I was on my back and threatening him with my heels as soon as I hit. He danced back out of range. Apparently he did not have a gun and I could get at mine. But there was an open fireplace in the room, a real one, complete with poker, shovel, and tongs. He circled toward it.

There was a small table just out of my reach. I half rolled, half lunged, grabbed a leg and threw it. It caught him in the face as he was grabbing the poker. Then I was on him.

His master was dying in my fingers and he himself was convulsing under its last, terrible command when I became aware of nerve-shattering screams. His wife was standing in the doorway. I bounced up and let her have one, right about her double chin. She went down in mid scream and I returned to her husband.

A limp man is amazingly hard to lift; it took me longer to get him up and across my shoulders than it had to silence him. He was heavy. Fortunately I am a big husky, all hands and feet; I managed a lumbering dog trot toward the car. I doubt if the noise of our fight disturbed anyone but my victim’s wife, but her screams must have aroused half that end of town. There were people popping out of doors on both sides of the street. So far, none of them was near, but I was glad to see that I had left the car door open. I hurried toward it.

Then I was sorry; a brat who looked like the twin of the one who had given me trouble earlier was inside fiddling with the controls. Cursing, I dumped my prisoner in the lounge circle and grabbed at the kid. The boy shrank back and struggled, but I tore him loose and threw him out—straight into the arms of the first of my pursuers.

That saved me. He was still untangling himself as I slammed into the driver’s seat and shot forward without bothering with door or safety belt. As I took the first corner the door swung shut and I almost went out of my seat; I then held a straight course long enough to fasten the belt. I cut sharp on another corner, nearly ran down a ground car coming out, and went on.

I found the wide boulevard I needed—the Paseo, I think—and jabbed the take-off key. Possibly I caused several wrecks; I had no time to worry about it. Without waiting to reach altitude I wrestled her to course east and continued to climb as I made easting. I kept her on manual across Missouri and expended every launching unit in her racks to give her more speed. That reckless and illegal action may have saved my neck; somewhere over Columbia, just as I fired the last one, I felt the car shake to concussion. Someone had launched an interceptor, a devil-chaser would be my guess—and the pesky thing had fused where I had just been.

There were no more shots, which was good, as I would have been a duck on water from then on. My starboard impeller began to run hot immediately thereafter, possibly from the near miss or perhaps simply from abuse. I let it heat, praying that it would not fly apart, for another ten minutes. Then, with the Mississippi behind me and the indicator way up into “danger” I cut it out and let the car limp along on the port unit. Three hundred was the best she would do—but I was out of Zone Red and back among free men.

Up until then I had not had time to give my passenger more than a glance. He lay where I had slung him, sprawled on the floor pads, unconscious or dead. Now that I was back among men and no longer had the power for illegal speeds there was no reason not to go automatic. I flipped on the transponder, signaled a request for block assignment, and put the controls on automatic without waiting for permission. A block control technician might curse me out and even note my signal for a citation, but they would fit me into the system somehow. I swung around into the lounge and looked my man over.

He was breathing but still out. There was a welt on his face where I had clipped him with the table, but no bones seemed broken and I doubted that he would be unconscious from that cause. I slapped his face and dug my thumbnails into his ear lobes but I could not rouse him.

The dead slug was beginning to stink but I had no way to dispose of it. I let him be and went back to the control seat.

The chronometer read twenty-one thirty-seven Washington time—and I still had better than six hundred miles to go. At my best speed on one power plant, allowing nothing for landing, for tearing over to the White House and finding the Old Man, I would reach Washington a few minutes after midnight. So I had already failed to carry out the letter of my orders and the Old Man was sure as the devil going to make me stay in after school for it.

I took a chance and tried to start the starboard impeller. No dice—it was probably frozen solid and needing a major overhaul. Perhaps just as well, as anything that goes that fast can be explosively dangerous if it gets out of balance—so I desisted and tried to raise the Old Man by phone.

The phone would not work. Perhaps I had jiggered it in one of the spots of exercise I had been forced to take that day but I had never had one fail me before. Printed circuits, transistors, and the whole works being embedded in plastic made those units almost as shock resistant as a proximity fuse. I put it back in my pocket, feeling that this was one of those days when it was just not worthwhile to get out of bed. I turned to the car’s communicator and punched the emergency tab.

“Control,” I called out. “Control! This is an emergency!”

The screen lighted up and I was looking at a young man. He was, I saw with relief, bare-skinned so far as he appeared in the screen. “Control answering—Block Fox Eleven. What are you doing in the air? I’ve been trying to raise you ever since you entered my block.”

“Never mind!” I snapped. “Patch me into the nearest military circuit. This is crash priority!”

He looked uncertain, but the screen flickered and went blank. Shortly another picture built up showing a military message center—and that did my heart good, as every person in sight was stripped to the waist. The foreground was occupied by a young watch officer; I could have kissed him. Instead I said, “Military emergency—patch me through to the Pentagon and there to the White House.”

“Who are you?”

“No time, no time! I’m a civil agent and you wouldn’t recognize my I.D. if you saw it. Hurry!”

I might have talked him into it but he was shouldered out of scan by an older man, a wing commander by his cap insignia. “Land at once!” was all that he said.

“Look, skipper,” I said. “This is a military emergency; you’ve got to put me through. I—”

“
This
is a military emergency,” he interrupted, “and all civil craft have been grounded for the past three hours. Land at once.”

“But I’ve got to—”

“Land or be shot down. We are tracking you; I am about to launch an interceptor to burst a half mile ahead of you. Hold your course, or make any maneuver but landing, and the next one will burst on.”