The Puppet Masters (32 page)

“Very well, sir. I promise.”

“Well—there was a group of people, a cult you might call them, that got into disrepute.”

“I know—the Whitmanites.”

“Eh? How did you know? From Mary? No, she couldn’t have; she didn’t know herself.”

“No, not from Mary. I just figured it out.”

He looked at me with odd respect. “Maybe I’ve been underestimating you, son. As you say, the Whitmanites. Mary was one of them, as a kid in Antarctica.”

“Wait a minute!” I said. “They left Antarctica in—” The wheels buzzed in my mind and the number came up. “—in 1974.”

“Surely. What about it?”

“But that would make Mary around forty years old. She can’t be.”

“Do you care?”

“Huh? Why, no—but she can’t be.”

“She is and she isn’t. Just listen. Chronologically her age is about forty. Biologically she is in her middle twenties. Subjectively she is even younger, because she doesn’t remember anything, not to know it, earlier than about 1990.”

“What do you mean? That she doesn’t remember I can understand—she never
wants
to remember. But what do you mean by the rest?”

“Just what I said. She is no older than she is because—you know that room where she started to remember? She spent ten years and probably more floating in suspended animation in just such a tank as that.”

T
ime
was when I was immune to emotional shocks. But as I get older, I don’t get tougher; I get softer. Being in love has a lot to do with it, too. The thought of Mary, my beloved Mary, swimming in that artificial womb, neither dead nor alive but preserved like a pickled grasshopper, was too much for me.

I heard the Old Man saying, “Take it easy, son. She’s all right.”

I said, “Go ahead.”

Mary’s overt history was simple, although mystifying. She had been found in the swamps near Kaiserville at the North Pole of Venus—a little girl who could give no account of herself and who knew only her name—Allucquere. Nobody spotted the significance of the name and a child of her (apparent) age could not be associated with the Whitmanites debacle in any case; the 1980 supply ship had not been able to find any survivor of their “New Zion” colony. Its plantations had returned to the swamp; the dwellings were ruptured shells, hidden in rank growth. More than ten years of time and more than two hundred miles of jungle separated the little waif of Kaiserville from the God-struck colonists of New Zion.

At that time, an unaccounted-for Earth child on Venus was little short of incredible. Like finding the cat locked in the icebox, it called for explanation. But there was no one around with the intellectual curiosity to push the matter. Kaiserville still does not have a sweet reputation; in those days it was made up of miners, doxies, company representatives of the Two Planets Corporation—and nothing else. I don’t suppose that shoveling radioactive mud in the swamps leaves much energy for wonder.

Apparently she grew up using poker chips for toys and calling every woman in crib row “mother” or “auntie”. In turn they shortened her name to “Lucky”. The Old Man did not go into detail about who paid her way back to Earth and why, and he avoided my questions. The real question was where she had been from the time New Zion was eaten up by the Venerian jungle and just what had happened to the colony.

The only record of those things was buried in Mary’s mind, locked tight with terror and despair.

Sometime before 1980—about the same time as the flying saucer reports from Russo-Siberia, or a year or so earlier—the titans had discovered the New Zion colony. If you place it one Saturn year earlier than the invasion of Earth, the times fit fairly well. It does not seem likely that the titans were looking for Earthmen on Venus; more probably they were scouting Venus as they had long scouted Earth. Or they may have known just where to look; we know that they kidnapped Earthmen at intervals over the course of two or more centuries; they may have captured someone on Earth whose brain could tell them where to find the New Zion colony. Mary’s dark memories could contain no clue to that.

Mary saw the colony captured, saw her parents turned into zombies who no longer cared for her. Apparently she herself was not possessed, or she may have been possessed and turned loose, the titans finding a weak and ignorant young girl an unsuitable slave. In any case, for what was to her baby mind an endlessly long time, she hung around the slave colony, unwanted, uncared for, but unmolested, scavenging like a mouse for her living. On Venus the slugs were moving in to stay; their principal slaves were Venerians and the New Zion colonists were only incidental. It is sure that Mary saw her parents being placed in suspended animation—for later use in the invasion of Earth? Probable, but not certain.

In due course she herself was grabbed and placed in the tanks. Inside a titan ship? At a titan base on Venus itself? More probably the latter, as when she awoke, she was still on Venus. There are many such gaps. Were the slugs that rode the Venerians identical with the slugs which rode the colonists? Possible—since both Earth and Venus have oxy-carbon economy. The slugs seem to be endlessly protean but they surely have to adapt themselves to the biochemistry of their hosts. Had Venus an oxy-silicon economy like Mars, or a fluorine economy, the same parasite type could not possibly have fed on both.

But the gist of the matter lay in the situation as it was when Mary was removed from the artificial incubator. The titan invasion of Venus had failed, or was failing. Almost certainly she was possessed as soon as they removed her from the tank—but Mary had outlived the slug that possessed her.

Why had the slugs died? Why had the invasion of Venus failed? It was for clues to these that the Old Man and Dr. Steelton had gone fishing in Mary’s brain.

I said, “Is that all?”

He answered, “Isn’t that enough?”

“It raises as many questions as it answers,” I complained.

“Of course there is more,” he told me, “a great deal more. But you aren’t a Venerian expert of any sort, nor a psychologist, so you won’t be called on to evaluate it. I’ve told you what I have so that you will know why we have to work on Mary and so that you won’t question her about it. Be good to her, boy; she’s had more than her share of grief.”

I ignored the advice; I can get along or not get along with my own wife without help, thank you. “What I can’t figure out,” I answered, “is why you ever had Mary linked up with flying saucers in the first place? I can see now that you took her along on that first trip to Iowa on purpose. You were right, granted—but why? And don’t give me any malarkey.”

The Old Man himself looked puzzled. “Son, do you ever have hunches?”

“Lord, yes!”

“What is a ‘hunch’?”

“Eh? It’s a belief that something is so, or isn’t so, without evidence. Or a premonition that something is going to happen—or a compulsion to do something.”

“Sloppy definitions. I’d call a hunch the result of automatic reasoning below the conscious level on data you did not know you possessed.”

“Sounds like the black cat in the coal cellar at midnight. You didn’t have any data, not then. Don’t tell me that your unconscious mind works on data you are going to get, next week. I won’t believe it.”

“Ah, but I did have data.”

“Huh?”

“What’s the last thing that happens to a candidate before he is certified as an agent in our section?”

“The personal interview with you.”

“No, no!”

“Oh—the trance analysis.” I had forgotten hypno-analysis for the simple reason that the subject never remembers it; he’s off somewhere else, wherever it is you go when you’re asleep. “You mean you had this data on Mary then. It wasn’t a hunch at all.”

“No again. I had some, a very little of it—Mary’s defenses are strong. And I had forgotten what little I knew, in my conscious memory. But I knew that Mary was the agent for this job. Later on I played back her hypno interview; then I
knew
that there must be more. We tried for it—and did not get it. But I knew that there had to be more.”

I thought it over. “You must have been pretty cocky certain that it was worth digging out; you sure put her over the bumps to get it.”

“I had to. I’m sorry.”

“Okay, okay.” I waited a moment, then said, “Look—what was there in
my
hypno record?”

“That’s not a proper question.”

“Nuts.”

“And I couldn’t tell you if I would. I have never listened to your analysis, son.”

“Huh?”

“I had my deputy play it, then asked him if there were anything in it which I should know. He said there wasn’t so I never played it.”

“So? Well—thanks.”

He merely grunted, but I felt warmer toward him than I had in a long time. Dad and I have always managed to embarrass each other.

T
he
slugs had died from something they contracted on Venus. That much we knew, or thought we knew. We weren’t likely to get another chance in a hurry to collect direct information as a dispatch came in while the Old Man and I were still talking, telling us that Rexton had finally ordered the Pass Christian saucer bombed to keep it from falling back in the hands of the titans. I think that the Old Man had hoped to get at those human beings whom we knew to be inanimate prisoners in that ship, find some way to breathe life into them, and question them.

Well, that chance was gone—what they could dig out of Mary had better be the answer. Assuming that some infection peculiar to Venus was fatal to slugs but not fatal to humans—at least Mary had lived through it—then the thing to do was to test them all and determine which one. Just dandy!—it was like examining every grain of sand on a wide beach to locate the one with square edges!

The problem was somewhat simplified by there being no need to check the Venus diseases known to be fatal to Earthmen. Perhaps it had been one of such, but, if so, no matter; we could as well use smallpox. But the list of diseases native to Venus which kill Earthmen is surprisingly short and the list of those which are not fatal but merely nastily annoying is very long—from the standpoint of a Venerian bug we must be too strange a diet to suit his taste. If a Venerian bug has a viewpoint, which I doubt, McIlvaine’s silly ideas notwithstanding.

The problem was made harder by the fact that the types of diseases native to Venus which were represented by living cultures on Earth were strictly limited in number, i.e., the grain of sand we sought might not be on this beach. To be sure, such an omission could be repaired—in a century or so of exploration and research on a strange planet.

In the meantime there was beginning to be a breath of frost in the air; Schedule Sun Tan could not go on forever.

They had to go back where they hoped the answer was—into Mary’s brain. I did not like it, but I could not stop it. She did not appear to know why she was being asked to submit, over and over again, to hypnotics—or perhaps she would not tell. She seemed serene, but the strain showed—circles under her eyes, things like that. Finally I went to the Old Man and told him that it had to stop. “You know better than that, son,” he said mildly.

“The hell I do! If you haven’t gotten what you want from her by now, you’ll never get it.”

“Have you any idea of how long it takes to search
all
the memories in a person’s mind, even if you limit yourself to a particular period? It takes exactly as long as the period itself. What we need—if it’s there at all—may be subtle.”

“‘If it’s there at all,’” I repeated. “You don’t know that it is. See here—if Mary miscarries as a result of this, I’ll break your neck personally.”

“And if we don’t succeed,” he answered gently, “you will wish to heaven that she had. Or do you want to raise up kids to be hosts to titans?”

I chewed my lip. “Why didn’t you send me to the USSR as you planned to, instead of keeping me around?”

“Oh, that—In the first place I want you here, with Mary, keeping her morale up—instead of acting like a spoiled brat! In the second place, it isn’t necessary, or I would have sent you.”

“Huh? What happened? Did some other agent report in?”

He stood up and started to leave. “If you would ever learn to show a grown-up interest in the news of the world, you would know.”

I said, “Huh?” again, but he did not answer; he left.

I hurried out of there and brought myself up to date. My one-track mind has never been able to interest itself in the daily news; for my taste this dinning into the ears and eyes of trivia somewhere over the horizon is the bane of so-called civilization and the death of serious thinking. But I do miss things.

This time I had managed to miss the first news of the Asiatic plague. I had had my back turned on the biggest—no, the second biggest—news story of the century, the only continent-wide epidemic of the Black Death since the seventeenth century.

I could not understand it. Communists are crazy, granted—but I had been behind the Curtain enough to know that their public health measures were as good as ours and even better in some ways, for they were carried out “by the numbers” and no nonsense tolerated. And a country has to be, quite literally, lousy to permit the spread of plagues—rats, lice, and fleas, the historical vectors. In such respects the commissars had even managed to clean up China to the point, at least, that bubonic plague and typhus were sporadically endemic rather than epidemic.

Now both plagues were spreading like gossip across the whole Sino-Russo-Siberian axis, to the point where the soviet government system had broken down and pleas were being sent via the space stations for U.N. help. What had happened?

Out of my own mind I put the pieces together; I looked up the Old Man again. “Boss—there
were
slugs behind the Curtain.”

“Yes.”

“You knew? Well, for cripes sake—we’d better do something fast, or the whole Mississippi Valley will be in the shape that Asia is in. Just one rat, one little rat—” I was thinking back to my own time among the slugs, something I avoided doing when possible. The titans did not bother about human sanitation. My own master had not caused me to bathe, not once. I doubted if there had been a bath taken between the Canadian border and New Orleans since the slugs dropped the masquerade as unnecessary. Lice—Fleas—