The Puppet Masters (29 page)

He colored. “I don’t know what you are talking about. You both were entitled to leave; the rest was accidental.”

“Hmm! Accidents don’t happen; not around you. Never mind; I’m a willing victim. Now about the job; give me a bit longer to size up the possibilities, if you really mean to let me pick my own method. Meantime, I’ll see Cosmetics about a rubber ear.”

I did not see a man about an ear, not then, for, as I was heading into Cosmetics, I met Mary coming out. I had not intended to let myself be surprised into endearments around the Section, but I was caught off guard. “Darling! They fixed you!”

She turned slowly around and let me look. “Good job, isn’t it?”

It
was
a good job. I could not tell that her hair had ever been burned. Besides that, they had done a make-up job on her shoulders over the temporary skin that was quite convincing, but I had expected that. It was the hair that fooled me. I touched it gently and examined the hair line on the left side. “They must have taken it all off and started fresh.”

“No, they simply matched it.”

“Now you’ve got your favorite gun cache back.”

“Like this?” she said, dimpling. She adjusted her curls with her left hand—then suddenly she had a gun in each hand. And again I did not know where the second one had come from.

“That’s papa’s good girl! If you ever have to, you can make a living as a night-club magician. But seriously—don’t let a Vigilante catch you doing that trick; he might get jumpy.”

“One won’t catch me,” she assured me solemnly. I wondered about the verb. We went to the staff lounge and found a quiet place to talk. We did not order drinks; we did not seem to need such. We talked over the situation and found that each had been briefed. I did not tell Mary about my proposed assignment, and, if she had one, she did not mention it; we were back with the Section and indoctrinated habits are hard to break.

“Mary,” I said suddenly, “are you pregnant?”

“It’s too early to tell, dear,” she answered, searching my eyes. “Do you want me to be?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll try very hard to be.”

W
e
finally decided to attempt to penetrate the Curtain rather than Zone Red. The evaluation group had advised that there was no chance of impersonating a renegade; their advice would not have stopped the Old Man, but it agreed with his opinion and mine. The question hinged on, “How does a man get to be a renegade? Why do the titans trust him?”

The question answers itself; a slug knows its host’s mind. Verbal guarantees would mean nothing to a titan—but if the titan, through once possessing a man’s mind,
knows
that he is a natural renegade, a man who can be had, then it may suit the slug’s purposes to let him be renegade rather than host. But first the slug had to plumb the vileness in the man’s mind and be sure of its quality.

We did not know this as fact but as logical necessity. Human logic—but it had to be slug logic, too, since it fitted what the slugs could and could not do. As for me, it was not possible even under deep hypnotic instruction to pass myself off to a slug in possession of my mind as a candidate for renegade. So the psycho lads decided—and to which I said “Amen!”; it saved me from telling the Old Man that I would not volunteer to let myself be caught by a slug and it saved him from rigging some damned logical necessity which would force me into “volunteering”.

It may seem illogical that titans would “free” a host even though they knew that the host was the sort who could be owned. But the advantages to them show up through analogy: the commissars will not willingly let any of their slave-citizens escape; nevertheless they send out thousands of fifth columnists into the territory of free men. Once outside, these agents can choose freedom and many do, but most of them don’t—as we all know too well. They prefer slavery.

In the renegades the slugs had a supply of “trustworthy” fifth columnists—“trustworthy” is not the right word but the English language has no word for this form of vileness. That Zone Green was being penetrated by renegades was certain—but it is hard to tell a fifth columnist from a custard head; it always has been. The ratio of damn fools to villains is high.

So I got ready to go. I took under light hypnosis a refresher in the languages I would need with emphasis on shibboleth phrases of the latest meanderings of the Party Line. I was provided with a personality and coached in a trade which would permit me to travel, repairman for irrigating pumps—and given much money. If it suited me, my trade would let me hint that a pump had been sabotaged. Coercion, intimidation, blackmail, and bribery are especially useful behind the Curtain; the people have lived under a terror so long that they have no defenses; their puppet strings are always at hand.

I was to be dropped, rather than let to crawl under the Curtain. If I failed to report back, other agents would follow. Probably other agents would anyhow—or already had gone. I was not told; what an agent does not know he cannot divulge, even under drugs.

The reporting equipment was a new model and a joy to have. Ultramicrowave stuff with the directional cavity no bigger than a teacup and the rest, power pack and all, hardly larger than a loaf of bread, with the whole thing so well shielded that it would not make a Geiger counter even nervous. Strictly horizon range—I was to aim it at whatever space station was above the horizon. It had to be aimed closely, which required me to seal into my mind the orbital tables of all three space stations and a navigational grid of the territory I was to operate in. The handicap was really its prime advantage; the highly directional quality of the sender meant that it would not be detected save by wild accident.

I had to drop through their screen but it would be under a blanket of anti-radar “window” to give their search technicians fits. They would know that something was being dropped, but they would not know what, nor where, nor when, for mine would not be the only blanket, nor the only night of such tactics.

Once I had made up my mind whether the USSR was or was not slug infested I was to dictate a report to whatever space station was in sight—the line-of-sight, that is; I can’t pick out a space station by eye and I doubt those who say they can. Report made, I was free to walk, ride, crawl, sneak and/or bribe my way out if I could.

The only trouble was that I never had a chance to use these preparations; the Pass Christian saucer landed.

The Pass Christian saucer was only the third to be seen after landing. Of the first two, the Grinnell saucer had been concealed by the slugs—or perhaps it took off again—and the Burlingame saucer was a radioactive memory. But the Pass Christian saucer was tracked and was seen on the ground almost at once.

It was tracked by Space Station Alpha—and recorded as an extremely large meteorite believed to have landed in or near the Gulf of Mexico. Which fact was not connected with the Pass Christian saucer until later but which, when it was, told us why we had failed to spot other landings by radar screen…the saucers came in too fast.

The saucers could be “seen” by radar—the primitive radar of sixty-odd years ago had picked them up many times, especially when cruising at atmospheric speeds while scouting this planet. But our modern radar had been “improved” to the point where saucers could not be seen; our instruments were too specialized. Electronic instruments follow an almost organic growth toward greater and greater selectivity. All our radar involves discriminator circuits and like gimmicks to enable each type to “see” what it is supposed to see and not bother with what it should ignore. Traffic block control sees atmospheric traffic only; the defense screen and fire control radars see what
they
are supposed to see—the fine screen “sees” a range from atmospheric speeds up to orbiting missiles at five miles a second; the coarse screen overlaps the fine screen, starting down at the lowest wingless-missile speed and carrying on up into the highest spaceship speeds relative to Earth and somewhat higher—about ten miles per second.

There are other selectivities—weather radar, harbor radar, and so forth. The point is
none
of them sees objects at speeds over ten miles per second…with the single exception of meteor-count radars in the space stations, which are not military but a research concession granted by the U.N. to the Association for the Advancement of Science.

Consequently the “giant meteor” was recorded as such and was not associated with flying saucers until later.

But the Pass Christian saucer was seen to land. The submersible cruiser U.N.S.
Robert Fulton
on routine patrol of Zone Red out of Mobile was ten miles off Gulfport with only her receptors showing when the saucer decelerated and landed. The spaceship popped up on the screens of the cruiser as it dropped from outer-space speed (around fifty-three miles per second by the space station record) to a speed the cruiser’s radars would accept.

It came out of nothing, slowed to zero, and disappeared from the screen—but the operator had a fix on the last blip, less than twenty miles away on the Mississippi coast. The cruiser’s skipper was puzzled. The radar track surely could not be a ship, since ships don’t decelerate at fifty gravities. It did not occur to him that g’s might not matter to a slug. He swung his ship over and took a look.

His first dispatch read: SPACESHIP LANDED BEACH WEST OF PASS CHRISTIAN MISSISSIPPI. His second was: LANDING FORCE BEACHING TO CAPTURE.

If I had not been in the Section offices I suppose I would have been left out of the party. As it was my phone shrilled so, that I bumped my head on the study machine I was using and swore. The Old Man said, “Come at once. Move!”

It was the same party we had started with so many weeks—or was it years?—before, the Old Man, Mary, and myself. We were in the air and heading south at emergency maximum, paying no attention to block controls and with our transponder sending out the police warning, before the Old Man told us why.

When he did tell us, I said, “Why the family group? You need a full-scale air task force.”

“It will be there,” he answered grimly. Then he grinned, his old wicked grin, an expression I had not seen since it started. “What do you care?” he jibed. “The ‘Cavanaughs’ are riding again. Eh, Mary?”

I snorted. “If you want that sister-and-brother routine, you had better get another boy.”

“Just the part where you protect her from dogs and strange men,” he answered soberly. “And I do mean dogs and I do mean strange men, very strange men. This may be the payoff, son.”

I started to ask him more but he went into the operator’s compartment, closed the panel, and got busy at the communicator. I turned to Mary. She snuggled up with a little sigh and said, “Howdy, Bud.”

I grabbed her. “Don’t give me that ‘Bud’ stuff or somebody’s going to get a paddling.”

W
e
were almost shot down by our own boys, then we picked up an escort of two Black Angels who throttled back and managed to stay with us. They turned us over to the command ship from which Air Marshal Rexton was watching the action. The command ship matched speeds with us and took us inboard with an anchor loop—I had never had that done before; it’s disconcerting.

Rexton wanted to spank us and send us home, since we were technically civilians—but spanking the Old Man is a chore. They finally unloaded us and I squatted our car down on the sea-wall roadway which borders the Gulf along there—scared out of my wits, I should add, for we were buffeted by A.A. on the way down. There was fighting going on above and all around us, but there was a curious calm near the saucer itself.

The outlander ship loomed up almost over us, not fifty yards away. It was as convincing and as ominous as the plastic-board fake in Iowa had been phony. It was a discus in shape and of great size; it was tilled slightly toward us, for it had grounded partly on one of the magnificent high-stilted old mansions which line that coast. The house had collapsed but the saucer was partly supported by the wreckage and by the six-foot-thick trunk of a tree that had shaded the house.

The ship’s canted attitude let us see that the upper surface and what was surely its airlock—a metal hemisphere, a dozen feet across, at the main axis of the ship, where the hub would have been had it been a wheel. This hemisphere was lifted straight out or up from the body of the ship some six or eight feet. I could not see what held it out from the hull but I assumed that there must be a central shaft or piston; it came out like a poppet valve.

It was easy to see why the masters of the saucer had not closed up again and taken off from there; the airlock was fouled, held open by a “mud turtle”, one of those little amphibious tanks which are at home on the bottom of a harbor or crawling up onto a beach—part of the landing force of the
Fulton
.

Let me set down now what I learned later; the tank was commanded by Ensign Gilbert Calhoun of Knoxville; with him was Powerman 2/c Florence Berzowski and a gunner named Booker T. W. Johnson. They were all dead, of course, before we got there.

The car, as soon as I roaded it, was surrounded by a landing force squad commanded by a pink-cheeked lad who seemed anxious to shoot somebody or anybody. He was less anxious when he got a look at Mary but he still refused to let us approach the saucer until he had checked with his tactical commander—who in turn consulted the skipper of the
Fulton
. We got an answer back in a short time, considering that the demand must have been referred to Rexton and probably clear back to Washington.

While waiting I watched the battle and, from what I saw, was well pleased to have no part of it. Somebody was going to get hurt—a good many had already. There was a male body, stark naked, just behind the car—a boy not more than fourteen. He was still clutching a rocket launcher and across his shoulders was the mark of the beast, though the slug was nowhere around. I wondered whether the slug had crawled away and was dying, or whether, perhaps, it had managed to transfer to the person who had bayoneted the boy.

Mary had walked west on the highway with the downy young naval officer while I was examining the corpse. The notion of a slug, possibly still alive, being around caused me to hurry to her. “Get back into the car,” I said.