The Puppet Masters (28 page)

Or perhaps “Mother” did
not
“Know Best”; if anything more could have added to the determination of men still free to destroy this foul thing it would have been the “entertainment” stereocast from stations inside Zone Red. I recall a boxing match cast from the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium at Fort Worth—or perhaps you would call it a wrestling match. In any case there was a ring and a referee and two contestants pitted against each other. There were even fouls, i.e., doing anything which might damage the opponent’s manager—I mean “master”, the opponent’s slug.

Nothing else was a foul—nothing! It was a man versus a woman, both of them big and husky. She gouged out one of his eyes in the first clinch, but he broke her left wrist which kept the match on even enough terms to continue. It ended only when one of them had been so weakened by loss of blood that the puppet master could no longer make the slave dance. The woman lost—and died, I am sure, for her left breast was almost torn away and she had bled so much that only immediate surgery and massive transfusions could have saved her. Which she did not get; the slugs were transferred to new hosts at the end of the match and the inert contenders were dragged out.

But the male slave had remained active a little longer than the female, slashed and damaged though he was, and he finished the match with a final act of triumph over her which I soon learned was customary. It seemed to be a signal to turn it into an “audience participation show”, an orgy which would make a witches’ Sabbat seem like a sewing circle.

Oh, the slugs had discovered sex, all right!

There was one more thing which I saw in this and other tapes, a thing so outrageous, so damnably disgusting that I hesitate even to mention it, though I feel I must—there were men and women here and there among the slaves, humans (if you could call them that) without slugs…trusties…renegades—

I hate slugs but I would turn from killing a slug to kill one such. Our ancestors believed that there were men who would willingly sign compacts with the Devil; our ancestors were partly right: there are men who
would
, given the chance.

Some people refuse to believe that any human being turned renegade; those who disbelieve did not see the suppressed transcriptions. There was no chance for mistake; as everyone knows, once the masquerade was no longer useful to the slugs, the wearing of clothes was dropped in Zone Red even more thoroughly than it was under Schedule Sun Tan in Zone Green; one could see. In the Fort Worth horror which I have faintly sketched above the referee was a renegade; he was much in the camera and I was able to be absolutely sure. I knew him by sight, a well-known amateur sportsman, a “gentleman” referee. I shan’t mention his name, not to protect him but to protect myself; later on I killed him.

We were losing ground everywhere; that I knew before they finished treating my hands. Ours was a holding action only; our methods were effective only in stopping the spread of the infection and not fully effective in that. To fight them directly we would have to fight our own people, bomb our own cities, with no certainty of killing the humps. What we needed was a selective weapon, one that would kill slugs but not men, or something that would disable humans or render unconscious without killing and thereby permit us to rescue our compatriots. No such weapon was available, though the scientists were all busy on the problem, from the comedy team of McIlvaine & Vargas down to the lowliest bottle-washer in the Bureau of Standards. A “sleep” gas would have been perfect, but it is lucky that no such gas was known before the invasion, or the slugs could have used it against us; it would have cut both ways. It must be remembered that the slugs then had as much, or more, of the military potential of the United States at their disposal as had the free men.

Stalemate—with time on the side of the enemy. There were the fools who wanted to H-bomb the cities of the Mississippi Valley right out of existence, like curing a lip cancer by cutting off the head, but they were offset by their twins who had not seen slugs, did not believe in slugs, and felt that the whole matter was a violation of states’ rights and Schedule Sun Tan a tyrannical Washington plot. These second sort were fewer each day, not because they changed their minds but because the Vigilantes were awfully eager.

Then there was the
tertium quid
, the flexible mind, the “reasonable” man who hardly had a mind to change—he favored negotiation; he thought we could “do business” with the titans. One such committee, a delegation from the caucus of the opposition party in Congress, actually attempted negotiation. Bypassing the State Department they got in touch via a linkage rigged across Zone Amber with the Governor of Missouri, and were assured of safe conduct and diplomatic immunity—“guarantees” from a titan, but they accepted them; they went to St. Louis—and never came back. They sent messages back; I saw one such, a good rousing speech adding up to, “Come on in; the water is fine!”

Do steers sign treaties with meat packers?

North America was still the only known center of infection. The only action by the United Nations, other than placing the space stations at our disposal, was to remove temporarily to Geneva. No aggression by any other nation was involved and it was even argued that the slugs—if they existed—were technically an epidemic disease rather than a potential source of war and therefore of no interest to the Security Council. It was voted, with twenty-three nations abstaining, to define it as “civil disorder” and to urge each member nation to give such aid as it saw fit to the legitimate governments of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.

What each might have “seen fit” was academic; we did not know what to ask for.

It remained a creeping war, a silent war, with battles lost before we knew they were joined. After the debacle of Schedule Counter Blast, conventional weapons were hardly used, except in police action in Zone Amber—which was now a double no-man’s-land on each side of Zone Red, from the trackless Canadian forests to the Mexican deserts. It was almost deserted in the daytime of any life larger than birds and mice, save for our own patrols. At night our scouts drew back and the dogs came through—and other things, perhaps.

At the time Mary and I arrived back only one atom bomb had been used in the entire war and that against a flying saucer that landed near San Francisco just south of Burlingame. Its destruction was according to doctrine, but the doctrine was now under criticism; the saucer should have been captured for study, so it was argued, if we were to learn enough about our foe to fight successfully. I found my sympathies with those who wanted to shoot first and study later.

By the time the dose of tempus was beginning to wear off I had a picture of the United States in a shape that I had not imagined even when I was in saturated Kansas City—a country undergoing a Terror. Friend might shoot friend, or wife denounce husband. Rumor of a titan could drum up a mob on any street, with Old Judge Lynch baying in their van. To rap on a door at night was to invite a blast through the door rather than a friendly response. Honest folk stayed home; at night the dogs were out—and others.

The fact that most of the rumored discoveries of slugs were baseless made the rumors no less dangerous. It was not exhibitionism which caused many people to prefer outright nudity to the tight and scanty clothing permitted under Schedule Sun Tan; even the skimpiest clothing invited a doubtful second look, a suspicion that might be decided too abruptly. The head-and-spine armor was never worn now; the slugs had faked it and used it almost at once. And there had been the case of a girl in Seattle; she had been dressed in sandals and a big purse, nothing else—but a Vigilante who apparently had developed a nose for the enemy followed her and noticed that she never, under any circumstances, moved the purse from her right hand, even when she opened it to make change.

She lived, for he burned her arm off at the wrist, and I suppose that she had a new one grafted on; the supply of such spare parts was almost a glut. The slug was alive, too, when the Vigilante opened the purse—but not for long.

When I came across this in the briefing I realized with a shudder that I had not been too safe even in
carrying
my shorts through the streets; any slug-sized burden was open to suspicion.

The drug had worn off by the time I scanned this incident and I was back in contact with my surroundings. I mentioned the matter to the nurse. “Mustn’t worry,” she told me. “It does no good. Now flex the fingers of your right hand, please.”

I flexed them, while she helped the doctor spray on surrogate skin. I noticed that she was taking no chances; she wore no bra at all and her so-to-speak shorts were actually more of a G-string. The doctor was dressed about the same. “Wear gloves for rough work,” the doctor cautioned, “and come back next week.”

I thanked them and went to the operations office. I looked for Mary first, but found that she was busy in Cosmetics.

“H
ands
all right?” the Old Man asked when they let me in.

“They’ll do. False skin for a week. They do a graft job on my ear tomorrow.”

He looked vexed. “I forgot your ear. There’s no time for a graft to heal; Cosmetics will have to fake one for you.”

“The ear doesn’t matter,” I told him, “but why bother to fake it? Impersonation job?”

“Not exactly. Now that you’ve been briefed, what do you think of the situation?”

I wondered what answer he was fishing for. “Not good,” I conceded. “Everybody watching everybody else. Might as well be behind the Curtain. Shucks,” I admitted, going overboard, “this is worse. You can usually bribe a communist, but what bribe can you offer a slug?”

“Hmm—” he commented. “That’s an interesting thought. What would constitute a bribe inducement to a titan?”

“Look, that was a rhetorical question. I—”

“And my restatement of it was not rhetorical; we’ll farm it out for theoretical investigation.”

“Grabbing at straws these days, aren’t you?”

“Precisely. Now about the rest of your comment; would you say that it was easier to penetrate and maintain surveillance in the Soviet Union or in Zone Red. Which would you rather tackle?”

I eyed him suspiciously. “There’s a catch in this. You don’t let a man pick his assignment.”

“I asked you for a professional opinion.”

“Mmmm… I don’t have enough data. Tell me; are there slugs behind the Curtain?”

“That,” he answered, “is just what I would like to find out.”

I realized suddenly that Mary had been right; agents should not marry. If this job were ever finished, I wanted to hire out to count sheep for a rich insomniac or, something equally soft. “This time of year,” I said, “I think I’d want to enter through Canton. Unless you were figuring on a drop?”

“What makes you think I want you to go into the USSR?” he asked. “We might find out what we want to know quicker and easier in Zone Red.”

“Huh?”

“Certainly. If there is infection anywhere but in this continent, the titans in Zone Red must know about it. Why go half around the globe to find out?”

I put aside the plans I had been forming to be a Hindu merchant, travelling with his wife, and thought about what he was saying. Could be…could be. “How in the devil can Zone Red be penetrated now?” I asked. “Do I wear a plastic imitation slug on my shoulder blades? They’d catch me the first time I was called on for direct conference. Or before.”

“Don’t be a defeatist. Four agents have gone in already.”

“And come back?”

“Well, no, not exactly. That’s the rub.”

“And you want me to be the fifth? Have you decided that I’ve cluttered up the payroll long enough?”

“I think the others used the wrong tactics—”

“Obviously!”

“The trick is to convince them that you are a renegade. Got any ideas?”

The idea was overwhelming, so much so that I did not answer at once. Finally I burst out, “Why not start me easy? Can’t I impersonate a Panama pimp for a while? Or practice being an ax murderer? I have to get into the mood for this.”

“Easy,” he said. “It may not be practical—”

“
Hmmph
!”

“But you might bring it off. You’ve had more experience with their ways than any agent I’ve got. You must be rested up, aside from that little singe you got on your fingers. Or maybe we should drop you near Moscow and let you take a direct look. Think it over. Don’t get into a fret about it for maybe another day.”

“Thanks. Thank you too much.” I changed the subject. “What have you got planned for Mary?”

“Why don’t you stick to your own business?”

“I’m married to her.”

“Yes.”

“Well, for the love of Pete! Is that all you’ve got to say? Don’t you even want to wish me luck?”

“It strikes me,” he said slowly, “that you have had all the luck one man could ask for. You have my blessing, for whatever it’s worth.”

“Oh. Well, thanks.” I am slow in some ways, but I plead the excuse that I had had much on my mind—up to that moment it had not occurred to me that the Old Man might have had something directly to do with Mary’s leave and mine falling together so conveniently. I said, “Look here. Dad—”

“
Huh
?” It was the second time I had called him that in a month; it seemed to put him on the defensive.

“You meant for Mary and me to marry all along. You planned it that way.”

“Eh? Don’t be ridiculous. I believe in free will, son—and free choices.”

“Provided the choice suits you.”

“See here, we discussed this once before—”

“I know we did. Never mind; I’m hardly in a position to be angry about it. It’s just that I feel like a prize stallion being led into the pen. Why did you do it? It wasn’t sentiment about ‘young love’ and such twaddle; I know you better than that.”

“I did not do anything, I tell you. As for approving of it—well, the race must go on, so they tell me. If it doesn’t, everything else we do is pointless—even this war.”

“Like that, eh? You would send two agents on leave in the middle of a battle—to catch yourself a grandson?” I did a rapid summing up and added, “I’ll bet you used a slide rule.”