The Puppet Masters (27 page)

You would not have known they were cops, except for the manner and the drawn guns. They were dressed in gun belts, shoes, and skimpy breech clouts—little more than straps. A second glance showed their shields clipped to their belts. “Now,” the same one went on, “Off with those pants, buddy.”

I did not move quickly enough to suit him. He barked, “Make it snappy! There have been two shot trying to escape already today; you may be the third.”

“Do it, Sam,” Mary said quietly. I did it. My shorts were a one-piece garment, with the underwear part built in; without them, I stood dressed in my shoes and a pair of gloves, feeling like a fool—but I had managed to keep both my phone and my gun covered up as I took off my shorts.

The cop made me turn around. His mate said, “He’s clean. Now the other one.” I started to put my shorts back on and the first cop stopped me.

“Hey! You looking for trouble? Leave ’em off.”

I said reasonably, “You’ve searched me. I don’t want to get picked up for indecent exposure.”

He looked surprised, then guffawed and turned to his mate. “You hear that. Ski? He’s afraid he’ll be arrested for indecent exposure.”

The second one said patiently, “Listen, yokel, you got to cooperate, see? You know the rules. You can wear a fur coat for all of me—but you won’t get picked up for indecent exposure; you’ll get picked up DOA. The Vigilantes are a lot quicker to shoot than we are.” He turned to Mary. “Now, lady, if you please.”

Without argument Mary started to remove her shorts. The second cop said kindly, “That isn’t necessary lady, not the way those things are built. Just turn around slowly.”

“Thank you,” Mary said and complied. The policeman’s point was well taken; Mary’s briefies appeared to have been sprayed on, and her halter also quite evidently contained nothing but Mary.

“How about those bandages?” the first one commented. “Her clothes sure can’t cover anything.” I thought, brother, how wrong you are; I’ll bet she’s packing at least two guns this minute, besides the one in her purse—and I’ll bet one of them is ready to heat up quicker than yours! But what I said was,

“She’s been badly burned. Can’t you see that?” He looked doubtfully at the sloppy job I had done on the dressings; I had worked on the principle that, if a little is good, more is better, and the dressing across her shoulders where she had been burned the worst undoubtedly could have concealed a slug, if that had been the purpose. “Mmmm…” he said, “
If
she was burned.”

“Of course she was burned!” I felt my judgment slipping away; I was the perfect heavy husband, unreasonable where my wife was concerned. I knew it—and I liked it that way. “Damn it, look at her hair! Would she ruin a head of hair like that just to fool you?”

The first cop said darkly, “One of
them
would.”

The more patient one said, “Carl is right. I’m sorry, lady; we’ll have to disturb those bandages.”

I said excitedly, “You can’t do that! We’re on our way to a doctor. You’ll just—”

Mary said, “Help me, Sam. I can’t take them off myself.”

I shut up and started to peel up one corner of the big dressing, my hands trembling with rage. Presently the older, more kindly one whistled and said, “I’m satisfied. How about you, Carl?”

“Me, too. Ski. Gripes, girlie, it looks like somebody tried to barbecue you. What happened?”

“Tell them, Sam.”

So I did. The older cop finally commented, “I’d say you got off easy—no offense, madam. So it’s cats, now, eh? Dogs I knew about. Horses, yes. But cats—you wouldn’t think the ordinary cats could carry one.” His face clouded. “We got a cat and now we’ll have to get rid of it. My kids won’t like that.”

“I’m sorry,” Mary told him and sounded as if she meant it.

“It’s a bad time for everybody. Okay, folks, you can go—”

“Wait a minute,” the first one said. “Ski, if she goes through the streets with that thing on her back somebody is likely to burn her.”

The older one scratched his chin. “That’s true,” he said to Mary. “I’d say you couldn’t stand to have that dressing off. We’ll just have to dig up a prowl car for you.”

Which they did—one was just landing and they hailed it. I had to pay the charges on the rented wreck, then I went along, as far as Mary’s entrance. It was in a hotel, through a private elevator; I got in with her to avoid explanations, then went back up after she had gotten out at a level lower than the obvious controls of the car provided for. I was tempted to go on in with her, but the Old Man had ordered me to come in by Kay Five, so Kay Five it was.

I was tempted, too, to put my shorts back on. In the prowl car and during a quick march through a side door of the hotel, with police around us to keep Mary from being shot, I had not minded so much—but it took nerve to step out of the elevator and face the world without pants.

I need not have worried. The short distance I had to go was enough to show me that a fundamental custom had gone with last year’s frost. Most men were wearing straps—codpieces, really—as the cops had been, but I was not the only man in New Brooklyn stark naked to his shoes. One in particular I remember; he was leaning against a street roof stanchion and searching with cold eyes every passer-by. He was wearing nothing but slippers and a brassard lettered with “VIG”—and he was carrying an Owens mob gun under his arm.

I saw three more like him before I reached Kay Five; I was glad that I was carrying my shorts.

Some women were naked, some were not—but those who were not might as well have been—string brassieres, translucent plastic trunks, nothing that could possibly hide a slug.

Most of the women, I decided, would have looked better in clothes, preferably togas. If this was what the preachers had been worrying about all these years, then they had been barking up the wrong tree; it was nothing to arouse the happy old beast in men. The total effect was depressing. That was my first impression—but before I got to my destination even that had worn off. Ugly bodies weren’t any more noticeable than ugly taxicabs; the eye discounted them automatically. And so it appeared to be with everybody else, too; those on the streets seemed to have acquired utter indifference. Maybe Schedule Bare Back got them ready for it.

One thing I did not notice consciously until much later: after the first block I was unaware of my own nakedness. I noticed other people long after I had forgotten my own bare skin. Somehow, some way, the American community had been all wrong about the modesty taboo and had been wrong for centuries.

When tackled firmly, it was as empty as the ghost that turns out to be a flapping window drape. It did not mean a thing, either pro or con, moral or immoral. Skin was skin and what of it?

I was let in to see the Old Man at once. He looked up and growled, “You’re late.”

I answered, “Where’s Mary?”

“In the infirmary, getting treated and dictating her report. Let’s see your hands.”

“I’ll show them to the doctor, thanks,” I replied, making no move to take off the gloves. “What’s up?”

“If you would ever bother to listen to a newscast,” he grumbled, “you would know what was up.”

I
’m
glad I had not looked at a newscast; our honeymoon would never have gotten to first base. While Mary and I had each been telling the other how wonderful the other one was the war had almost been lost—and I was not sure about that “almost”. My suspicion that the slugs could, if necessary, hide themselves on any part of the body and still control hosts had proved to be right—but I had guessed that from my own experience on the streets. It had been proved by experiments at the National Zoo before Mary and I had holed up on the mountain, although I had not seen the report. I suppose the Old Man knew it; certainly the President knew it and the other top VIPs.

So Schedule Sun Tan replaced Schedule Bare Back and everybody skinned down to the buff.

Like hell they did! The matter was still “Top Secret” and the subject of cabinet debates at the time of the Scranton Riot. Don’t ask me why it was top secret, or even restricted; our government has gotten the habit of classifying anything as secret which the all-wise statesmen and bureaucrats decide we are not big enough boys and girls to know, a Mother-Knows-Best-Dear policy. I’ve read that there used to be a time when a taxpayer could demand the facts on anything and get them. I don’t know; it sounds Utopian.

The Scranton Riot should have convinced anybody that the slugs were loose in Zone Green despite Schedule Bare Back, but even that did not bring on Schedule Sun Tan. The fake air-raid alarm on the east coast took place, as I figure it, the third day of our honeymoon; there had not been any special excitement in the village when we visited it the day before that and certainly no vigilante activity. After the false air-raid alarm it took a while to figure out what had happened, even though it was obvious that lighting could not fail by accident in so many different shelters.

It gives me the leaping horrors to think about it even now—all those people crouching in the darkness, waiting for the all-clear, while zombies moved among them, slapping slugs on them. Apparently in some air raid bunkers the recruitment was one hundred percent. They did not have a chance.

So there were more riots the next day and we were well into the Terror, though we did not know it. Technically, the start of vigilantism came the first time a desperate citizen pulled a gun on a cop—Maurice T. Kaufman of Albany and the cop was Sergeant Malcolm MacDonald. Kaufman was dead a half second later and MacDonald followed him in a few minutes, torn to pieces by the mob, along with his titan master. But the Vigilantes did not really get going until the air-raid wardens put organization into the movement.

The wardens, being mostly aboveground at the time the coup in the bunkers took place, largely escaped—but they felt responsible. Not that all Vigilantes were wardens, nor all wardens Vigilantes—but a stark naked, armed man on the street was as likely to be wearing a warden’s armband as the “VIG” brassard. Either way, you could count on him shooting at any unexplained excrescence on a human body—shoot and investigate afterward.

While my hands were being treated and dressed I was brought up to date concerning the period (it turned out to be two weeks) that Mary and I had spent at the cabin. By the Old Man’s orders the doctor gave me a short shot of tempus before he worked on me and I spent the time—subjective, about three days; objective, less than an hour—studying stereo tapes through an over-speed scanner. This gadget has never been released to the public, though I have heard that it is bootlegged at some of the colleges around examination week. You adjust the speed to match your subjective time rate, or a little faster, and use an audio frequency step-down to let you hear what is being said. It is hard on the eyes and usually results in a splitting headache—but it is a big help in my profession.

It was hard to believe that so much could have happened in so short a time. Take dogs. A Vigilante would kill a dog on sight, even though it was not wearing a slug—because it was even money that it would be wearing one before next sunrise, that it would attack a man and that the titan would change riders in the dark.

A hell of a world where you could not trust dogs!

Apparently cats were hardly ever used because of their smaller size. Poor old Pirate was an exceptional case.

In Zone Green dogs were almost never seen now, at least by day. They filtered out of Zone Red at night, traveled in the dark and hid out in the daytime. They kept showing up, even on the coasts. It made one think of the werewolf legends. I made a mental note to apologize to the village doctor who had refused to come to see Mary at night—after I pasted him one.

I scanned dozens of tapes which had been monitored from Zone Red; they fell into three time groups: the masquerade period, when the slugs had been continuing the “normal” broadcasts; a short period of counter-propaganda during which the slugs had tried to convince citizens in Zone Green that the government had gone crazy—it had not worked as we had not relayed their casts, just as they had not relayed the President’s proclamation—and, finally, the current period in which pretense had been dropped, the masquerade abandoned.

According to Dr. McIlvaine the titans have no true culture of their own; they are parasitic even in that and merely adapt the culture they find to their own needs. Maybe he assumes too much, but that is what they did in Zone Red. The slugs would have to maintain the basic economic activity of their victims since the slugs themselves would starve if the hosts starved. To be sure, they continued that economy with variations that we would not use—that business of processing damaged and excess people in fertilizer plants, for example—but in general farmers stayed farmers, mechanics went on being mechanics, and bankers were still bankers. That last seems silly, but the experts claim that any “division-of-labor” economy requires an accounting system, a “money” system.

I know myself that they use money behind the Curtain, so he may be right—but I never heard of “bankers” or “money” among ants or termites. However, there may be lots of things I’ve never heard of.

It is not so obvious why they continued human recreations. Is the desire to be amused a universal need? Or did they learn it from us? The “experts” on each side of the argument are equally emphatic—and I don’t know. What they picked from human ideas of fun to keep and “improve on” does not speak well for the human race although some of their variations may have merit—that stunt that they pulled in Mexico, for example, of giving the bull an even break with the matador.

But most of it just makes one sick at the stomach and I won’t elaborate. I am one of the few who saw even transcriptions on such things, except for foolhardy folk who still held out in Zone Amber; I saw them professionally. The government monitored all stereocasts from Zone Red but the transcriptions were suppressed under the old Comstock “Indecency” Law—another example of “Mother-Knows-Best”, though perhaps Mother did know best in this case. I hope that Mary, in her briefing, did not have to look at such things, but Mary would never say so if she had.