The Puppet Masters (35 page)

They let me go right ahead. You could have heard a pin drop, if anybody in that bare-skinned crew had had a pin. The general interrupted me once when I placed a rather low estimate on “X”; “Mr. Nivens. I think we can assure you of any number of volunteers for vectoring.”

I shook my head. “You can’t accept volunteers, General.”

“I think I see your objection. The disease would have to be given time to establish itself in the volunteer and the timing might be dangerously close for his safety. But I think we could get around that—a gelatin capsule with the antitoxin embedded in tissue, or something of the sort. I’m sure the staff could work it out.”

I thought they could, too, but I did not say that my real objection was a deep-rooted aversion to any additional human soul having to be possessed by a slug. “You
must not
use human volunteers, sir. The slug will know everything that his host knows—and he simply will not go into direct conference; he’ll warn the others by word of mouth instead.” I did not know that I was right but it sounded plausible. “No, sir, we will use animals—apes, dogs, anything large enough to carry a slug but incapable of human speech, and in sufficient quantities to infect the whole group before any slug knows that it is sick.”

I went on to give a fast sketch of the final drop, Schedule Mercy, as I visualized it. “We can assume that the first drop—Schedule Fever—can start as soon as we are sure that we will have enough units of antitoxin for the second drop. In less than a week thereafter there should be no slug left alive on this continent.”

They did not applaud, but it felt that way. The general adjourned the meeting and hurried away to call Air Marshal Rexton, then sent his aide back to invite me to lunch. I sent word that I would be pleased provided the invitation included my wife, otherwise I would be unable to accept.

Dad waited for me outside the conference room. “Well, how did I do?” I asked him, more anxiously than I tried to sound.

He shook his head. “Sam, you wowed ’em. You have the makings of a politician. No, I think I’ll sign you up for twenty-six weeks of stereo instead.”

I tried not to show how much I was pleased. I had gotten through the whole performance without once stammering; I felt like a new man.

T
hat
ape Satan which had wrung my heart so back at the National Zoo turned out to be as mean as he was billed, once he was free of his slug. Dad had volunteered to be the test case for the Nivens-Hazelhurst theories, but I put my foot down and Satan drew the short straw.

Dad made an issue out of it; he had some silly idea that it was up to him to be possessed by a slug, at least once. I told him that we had no time to waste on his sinful pride. He grew huffy but I made it stick.

It was neither filial affection nor its neo-Freudian antithesis that caused me to balk him; I was afraid of the combination of Dad-cum-slug. I did not want him on
their
side even temporarily and under laboratory conditions. Not with his shifty, tricky mind! I did not know how he would manage to escape nor what he would do to wreck our plans, but I was morally certain he would, once possessed.

People who have never experienced possession, even those who have seen it, cannot appreciate that the host is utterly
against
us—with all his abilities intact. We could not risk having Dad against us—and I swung enough weight to overrule him.

So we used anthropoid apes for the experiments. We had on hand not only apes from the National Zoological Gardens but simian citizens from half a dozen zoos and a couple of circuses. I did not select Satan for the job; I would have let the poor beast be. The look of patient suffering on his face made one forget the slug on his back.

Satan was injected with nine-day fever on Wednesday the 13th. By Friday the fever had established; another chimp-cum-slug was introduced into his cage; the two slugs immediately went into direct conference, after which the second ape was removed.

On Sunday the 17th Satan’s master shriveled up and fell off—dead. Satan was immediately injected with the antitoxin. Late Monday the other slug died and its host was dosed.

By Wednesday Satan was well though a bit thin and the second ape, Lord Fauntleroy, was on the road to recovery. I gave Satan a banana to celebrate and he took off the first joint of my left index finger and me with no time for a repair job. It was no accident either; that ape was nasty.

But a minor injury could not depress my spirits. After I had it dressed I looked for Mary, as I wanted to crow; I failed to find her and ended up in the messroom, wanting someone with whom to share a toast.

The place was empty; everyone in the labs—except me—was working harder than ever, mounting Schedule Fever and Schedule Mercy. By order of the President all possible preparations were taking place in this one lab in the Smoky Mountains. The apes for vectoring, some two hundred of them, were here, and both the culture and the antitoxin were being “cooked” here; the horses needed for serum were stalled in what had been an underground handball court.

The million-plus men necessary for the Schedule Mercy drop could not be here, but they would know nothing about it until alerted a few hours before the drop, at which time each would be issued a hand gun and two bandoleers of individual dose antitoxin injectors. Those who had never parachuted before would not be given a chance to practice; they would each be pushed, if necessary, by some sergeant with a large foot. Everything possible was being done to keep the secret close; the only way I could see that we could lose (now that we knew that our theories worked) would be for the titans to find out our plans, through a renegade or by whatever means. Too many good plans have failed because some fool told his wife about it in bed.

If we failed to keep this secret, our ape disease vectors would never get into direct conference; they would be shot on sight wherever they appeared in the titan nation. But I relaxed over my first drink, happy and reasonably sure that the secret could not leak. Traffic with the laboratory was “incoming only” until after Drop Day and Colonel Kelly censored or monitored all communication outward—Kelly was no fool.

As for a leak from outside, the chances were slight. The general, Dad, Colonel Gibsy, and myself had gone to the White House the week before, there to see the President and Marshal Rexton. I had already convinced Dad that the way to keep this secret was not to share it with anybody; he put on a histrionic exhibition of belligerence and exasperation that got him what we wanted; in the end even Secretary Martinez was bypassed. If the President and Rexton could keep from talking in their sleep for another week, I did not see how we could miss.

A week would be none too soon; Zone Red was spreading. The counterattack they had launched at Pass Christian had not stopped there. The slugs had pushed on and now held the Gulf coast past Pensacola and there were signs that more was to come. Perhaps the slugs were growing tired of our resistance and might decide to waste human raw material by A-bombing the cities we still held. If so, we would find it hard to stop; a radar screen can alert your defenses, but it won’t stop a determined attack.

But I refused to worry about that. One more week—

Colonel Kelly came in, looked around the otherwise empty room, came over and sat down beside me. “How about a drink?” I suggested. “I feel like celebrating.”

He examined the hairy paunch bulging out in front of him and said, “I suppose one more beer wouldn’t put me in any worse shape.”

“Have two beers. Have four—a dozen.” I dialed for him, and told him about the success of the experiments with the apes.

He nodded. “Yes, I had heard. Sounds good.”

“‘Good’, the man says! Colonel, we are on the one yard line and goal to go. A week from now the game will be won.”

“So?”

“Oh, come now!” I answered, irritated by his manner. “In a short time you’ll be able to put your clothes back on and lead a normal life. Or don’t you think our plans will work?”

“Yes, I think they will work.”

“Then why the crepe-hanging?”

Instead of answering directly he said, “Mr. Nivens, you don’t think that a man with my pot belly enjoys running around without his clothes, do you?”

“I suppose not. As for myself, I’m beginning to find it pleasant. I may hate to have to give it up—saves time and it’s comfortable.”

“You need not worry about having to give it up. This is a permanent change.”

“Huh? I don’t get you. You said our plans would work and now you talk as if Schedule Sun Tan would go on forever.”

“In a modified way, it will.”

I said, “Pardon me? I’m stupid today.”

He dialed for another beer. “Mr. Nivens, I never expected to live to see a military reservation turned into a ruddy nudist camp. Having seen it happen, I never expect to see us change back—because we
can’t
. Pandora’s box has a one-way lid. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men—”

“Conceded,” I answered. “Things never go back quite to what they were before. Just the same, you are exaggerating. The day after the President rescinds Schedule Sun Tan the suspended blue laws will go into effect and a man without pants will be liable to arrest.”

“I hope not.”

“Huh? Make up your mind.”

“It’s made up for me. Mr. Nivens, as long as there exists a possibility that a slug is alive the polite man must be willing to bare his entire body on request—or risk getting shot. Not just this week and next week but twenty years from now, or a hundred. No, no!” he said, seeing that I was about to interrupt, “I am not disparaging your fine plans—but pardon me if I say that you have been too busy with their details to notice that they are strictly local and temporary. For example—have you made any plans for combing the Amazonian jungles, tree by tree?”

He went on apologetically, “Just a rhetorical inquiry. This globe has nearly sixty million square miles of dry land; we can’t begin to search it and clean out the slugs. Shucks, man, we haven’t made a dent in the rats and we’ve been at that a long time. Titans are trickier and more prolific than rats.”

“Are you trying to tell me it’s hopeless?” I demanded.

“Hopeless? Not at all. Have another drink. I’m trying to say that we are going to have to learn to live with this horror, the way we had to learn to
live
with the atom bomb.”

I went away feeling dashed and not at all cocky. I wanted to find Mary. Some days, it occurred to me, the “genius” business wasn’t worth the trouble.

W
e
were gathered in the same conference room in the White House; it put me in mind of the night after the President’s message many weeks before. Dad was there; so were Mary and Rexton and Martinez. None of the “fishing cabinet” was present but their places were filled by our own lab general, by Dr. Hazelhurst, and by Colonel Gibsy. Martinez was busy trying to restore his face after having been told that he had been shunted out of the biggest show of his own department.

Nobody paid him any attention. Our eyes were on the big map still mounted across one wall; it had been four and a half days since the vector drop of Schedule Fever but the Mississippi Valley still glowed in ruby lights.

I was getting jittery, although the drop had been an apparent success and we had lost only three craft. According to the equations every slug within reach of direct conference should have been infected three days ago, with an estimated twenty-three percent overlap. The operation had been computed to contact about eighty percent of the slugs in the first twelve hours alone, mostly in the large cities.

Soon, slugs should start dying a dam sight faster than flies ever did—
if
we were right.

I forced myself to sit still and wondered whether those ruby lights covered a few million very sick slugs—or merely two hundred dead apes. Had somebody skipped a decimal point? Or blabbed? Or had there been an error in our reasoning so colossal that we could not see it?

Suddenly a light blinked green, right in the middle of the board; everybody sat up. Right on top of it a voice began to come out of the stereo gear though no picture built up. “This is Station Dixie, Little Rock,” a very tired southern voice said. “We need help very badly. Anyone who is listening, please be good enough to pass on this message: Little Rock, Arkansas, is in the grip of a terrible epidemic. Notify the Red Cross. We have been in the hands of—” The voice trailed off, whether from weakness or transmission failure I could not be sure.

I remembered to breathe. Mary patted my hand and I sat back, relaxing consciously. It was joy too great to be pleasure. I saw now that the green light had not been Little Rock, but farther west in Oklahoma. Two more lights blinked green, one in Nebraska and one north of the Canadian line. Another voice came over, a twangy New England voice; I wondered how he had gotten into Zone Red.

“A little like election night, eh, chief?” Martinez said heartily.

“A little,” the President agreed, “but we do not usually get returns from Old Mexico.” He pointed to the board; a pair of green lights were showing in Chihuahua.

“By George, you’re right. Well, I guess ‘State’ will have some international incidents to straighten out when this is over, eh?”

The President did not answer and he shut up, to my relief. The President seemed to be talking to himself; he noticed me watching him, smiled, and spoke out loud:

“‘’Tis said that fleas have little fleas,

Upon their backs to bite ’em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas,

And so, ad infinitum.’”

I smiled to be polite though I thought the notion was gruesome, under the circumstances. The President looked away and said, “Would anyone like supper? I find that I am hungry, for the first time in days.”

By late the next afternoon the board was more green than red. Rexton had caused to be set up two annunciators keyed into the command center in the New Pentagon; one showed percentage of completion of the complicated score deemed necessary before the big drop; the other showed the projected time of drop. The figures on it changed from time to time, sometimes up, sometimes down. For the past two hours they had been holding fairly steady around 17.43, east coast time.