The Puppet Masters (15 page)

Something slipped. I don’t know whether the floor leader shook his head or signaled, but he did not take the floor. Meanwhile the delay was getting awkward and there were cries of, “Mister President!” and “Order!”

The Senate president passed over several others and gave the floor to a member of his own party. I recognized the man—Senator Gottlieb, a wheelhorse who would vote for his own lynching if it were on his party’s program. He started out by yielding to none in his respect for the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and, probably, the Grand Canyon. He pointed modestly to his own long and faithful service and spoke well of America’s place in history.

I thought he was beating the drum while the boys worked out a new shift—when I suddenly realized that his words were adding up to meaning: he was proposing to suspend the order of business and get on with the impeachment and trial of the President of the United States!

I think I tumbled to it as quickly as anyone; the senator had his proposal so decked out in ritualistic verbiage that it was a wonder that anyone noticed what he was actually saying. I looked at the Old Man.

The Old Man was looking at Mary.

She was looking back at him with an expression of extreme urgency.

The Old Man snatched a pad out of his pocket, scrawled something, wadded it up, and threw it down to Mary. She caught it, opened it, and read it—and passed it to the President.

He was sitting, relaxed and easy—as if one of his oldest friends were not at that moment tearing his name to shreds and, with it, the safety of the Republic. He put on his old-fashioned specs and read the note. He then glanced unhurriedly around at the Old Man and lifted his eyebrows. The Old Man nodded.

The President nudged the Senate president, who, at the President’s gesture, bent over him. The President and he exchanged whispers.

Gottlieb was still rumbling along about his deep sorrow, but that there came times when old friendship must give way to a higher duty and therefore—The Senate president banged his gavel. “If the senator please!”

Gottlieb looked startled and said, “I do not yield.”

“The senator is not asked to yield. At the request of the President of the United States, because of the importance of what you are saying, the senator is asked to come to the rostrum to speak.”

Gottlieb looked puzzled but there was nothing else he could do. He walked slowly toward the front of the house.

Mary’s chair blocked the little stairway up to the rostrum. Instead of getting quietly out of the way, she bumbled around, turning and picking up the chair, so that she got even more in the way. Gottlieb stopped and she brushed against him. He caught her arm, as much to steady himself as her. She spoke to him and he to her, but no one else could hear the words. Finally they got around each other and he went on to the front of the rostrum.

The Old Man was quivering like a dog in point. Mary looked up at him and nodded. The Old Man said, “Take him!”

I was over that rail in a flying leap, as if I had been wound up like a crossbow. I landed on Gottlieb’s shoulders.

I heard the Old Man shout, “Gloves, son! Gloves!” I did not stop for them. I split the senator’s jacket with my bare hands and I could see the slug pulsing under his shirt. I tore the shirt away and anybody could see it.

Six stereo cameras could not have recorded what happened in the next few seconds. I slugged Gottlieb back of the ear to stop his thrashing. Mary was sitting on his legs. The President was standing over me and pointing, while shouting, “There! There! Now you can
all
see.” The Senate president was standing stupefied, waggling his gavel.

The Congress was just a mob, men yelling and women screaming. Above me the Old Man was shouting orders to the presidential guards as if he were standing on a bridge.

We had this in our favor; doors were locked and there were no armed and disciplined men present except the Old Man’s own boys. Sergeants-at-arms, surely—but what are they? One elderly Congressman pulled a hogleg out of his coat that must have been a museum piece, but that was a mere incident.

Between the guns of the guards and the pounding of the gavel something like order was restored. The President started to talk. He told them that an amazing accident had given them a chance to see the true nature of the enemy and he suggested that they file past and see for themselves one of the titans from Saturn’s largest moon. Without waiting for their consent, he pointed to the front row and told them to come up.

They came.

I squatted back out of the way and wondered what was accidental about it. With the Old Man you can never tell. Had he
known
that Congress was infested? I rubbed a bruised knee and wondered.

Mary stayed on the platform. About twenty had filed by and a female Congressman had gotten hysterics when I saw Mary signal the Old Man again. This time I was a hair ahead of his order.

I might have had quite a fight if two of the boys had not been close by; this one was young and tough, an ex-marine. We laid him beside Gottlieb, and again the Old Man and the President and the Senate president, shouting their lungs out, restored order.

Then it was “inspection and search” whether they liked it or not. I patted the women on the back as they came by and caught one. I thought I had caught another, but it was an embarrassing mistake; she was so blubber fat that I guessed wrong.

Mary spotted two more, then there was a long stretch, three hundred or more, with no jackpots. It was soon evident that some were hanging back.

Don’t let anyone tell you that Congressmen are stupid. It takes brains to get elected and it takes a practical psychologist to stay elected. Eight men with guns were not enough—eleven, counting the Old Man, Mary, and me. Most of the slugs would have gotten away if the Whip of the House had not organized help.

With their assistance, we caught thirteen, ten alive. Only one of the hosts was badly wounded.

But the Congress of the United States has not been such a shambles since Jefferson Davis announced his momentous decision. No, not even after the Bombing.

S
o
the President got the authority he needed and the Old Man was his
de facto
chief of staff; at last we could move fast and effectively. Oh, yes? Did you ever try to hurry a project through a bureaucracy?

“Directives” have to be “implemented”; “agencies” have to be “coordinated”—and everything has to go to the files.

The Old Man had a simple enough campaign in mind. It could not be the straightforward quarantine he had proposed when the infection was limited to the Des Moines area; before we could fight back, we had to locate them. But government agents couldn’t search two hundred million people; the people had to do it themselves.

Schedule Bare Back was to be the first phase of the implementation of Operation Parasite—which makes
me
talk like a bureaucrat. Never mind—the idea was that everybody,
everybody
was to peel to the waist and stay peeled, until all titans were spotted and killed. Oh, women could have halter strings across their backs, but a parasite could not hide under a bra string.

We whipped up a visual presentation to go with the stereocast speech the President would make to the nation. Fast work had saved seven of the parasites we had flushed in the sacred halls of Congress and now they were alive on animal hosts. We could show them and we could show the less grisly parts of the film taken of me. The President himself would appear in the ’cast in shorts, and models would demonstrate what the Well Undressed Citizen Would Wear This Season, including the metal head-and-spine armor which was intended to protect a person even if a parasite got to him in his sleep.

We got it ready in one black-coffee night and the President’s writers had his lines ready for him. The smash finish was to show Congress in session, discussing the emergency, and every man, woman, and page boy showing a bare back to the camera.

With twenty-eight minutes left until stereocast time the President got a call from up the street. I was present; the Old Man had been with the President all night, and had kept me around for chores. Mary was there, of course; the President was her special charge. We were all in shorts; Schedule Bare Back had already started in the White House. The only ones who looked comfortable in the get-up were Mary, who can wear anything, the colored doorman, who carried himself like a Zulu king, and the President himself, whose innate dignity could not be touched.

When the call came in the President did not bother to cut us out of his end of the conversation. “Speaking,” he said. Presently he added, “You feel certain? Very well, John, what do you advise… I see. No, I don’t think that would work… I had better come up the street. Tell them to be ready.” He pushed back the phone, his face still serene, and turned to an assistant. “Tell them to hold up the broadcast.” He turned to the Old Man. “Come, Andrew, we must go to the Capitol.”

He sent for his valet and retired into a dressing room adjoining his office; when he came out, he was formally dressed for a state occasion. He offered no explanation, the Old Man raised an eyebrow but said nothing and I did not dare say anything. The rest of us stayed in our gooseflesh specials and so we went to the Capitol.

It was a joint session, the second in less than twenty-four hours. We trooped in—and I got that no-pants-in-church nightmare feeling, for the Congressmen and senators were dressed as usual. Then I saw that the page boys were in shorts without shirts and felt somewhat better.

I still don’t understand it. It seems that some people would rather be dead than lose dignity, with senators high on the list. Congressmen, too—a Congressman is a man who wants to be a senator. They had given the President all the authority he asked for; Schedule Bare Back itself had been discussed and approved—but they did not see where it applied to them. After all, they had been searched and cleaned out; Congress was the only group in the country known to be free of titans.

Maybe some saw the holes in the argument, but not one wanted to be first in a public striptease. Face and dignity are indispensable to an office holder. They sat tight, fully dressed.

When the President took the rostrum, he simply looked at them until he got dead silence. Then slowly, calmly, he started taking off clothes.

He stopped when he was bare to the waist. He had had me worried for a moment; I think he had others worried. He then turned slowly around, lifting his arms. At last he spoke.

“I did that,” he said, “so that you might see for yourself that your Chief Executive is not a prisoner of the enemy.” He paused.

“But how about
you
?” That last word was flung at them.

The President punched a finger at the junior Whip. “Mark Cummings—how about
you
? Are you a loyal citizen or are you a zombie spy? Get up! Get your shirt off!”

“Mister President—” It was Charity Evans, from the State of Maine, looking like a pretty schoolteacher. She stood and I saw that, while she was fully dressed, she was in evening dress. Her gown reached to the floor, but was cut as deep as could be above. She turned like a mannequin; in back the dress ended at the base of her spine; in front it came up in two well-filled scallops. “Is this satisfactory, Mr. President?”

“Quite satisfactory, madam.”

Cummings was on his feet and fumbling at his jacket; his face was scarlet. Someone stood up in the middle of the hall.

It was Senator Gottlieb. He looked as if he should have been in bed; his cheeks were gray and sunken; his lips showed cyanosis. But he held himself erect and, with incredible dignity, followed the President’s example. His old-fashioned underwear was a one-piece job; he wriggled his arms out and let it dangle over his galluses. Then he, too, turned all the way around; on his back, scarlet against his fish-white flesh, was the mark of the parasite.

He spoke. “Last night I stood here and said things I would rather have been flayed alive than utter. But last night I was not my own master. Today I am. Can you not see that Rome is burning?” Suddenly he had a gun in his hand. “Up on your feet, you wardheelers, you courthouse loafers! Two minutes to get your duds off and show a bare back—then I shoot!”

Men close to him sprang up and tried to grab his arm, but he swung the gun around like a flyswatter, smashing one of them in the face. I had my own out, ready to back his play, but it was not necessary. They could see that he was as dangerous as an old bull and they backed away.

It hung in balance, then they started shucking clothes like Doukhobors. One man bolted for a door; he was tripped. No, he was not wearing a parasite.

But we did catch three. After that, the show went on the channels, ten minutes late, and Congress started the first of its “bare back” sessions.

“L
OCK
YOUR DOORS!”

“CLOSE THE DAMPERS ON YOUR FIREPLACES!”

“NEVER ENTER A DARK PLACE!”

“BE WARY OF CROWDS!”

“A MAN WEARING A COAT IS AN ENEMY—SHOOT!”

We should have had every titan in the country spotted and killed in a week. I don’t know what more we could have done. In addition to a steady barrage of propaganda the country was being quartered and sectioned from the air, searching for flying saucers on the ground. Our radar screen was on full alert for unidentified blips. Military units, from airborne troops to guided-rocket stations, were ready to smear any that landed.

Then nothing happened. There was no work for them to do. The thing fizzled like a damp firecracker.

In the uncontaminated areas people took off their shirts, willingly or reluctantly, looked around them and found no parasites. They watched their newscasts and wondered and waited for the government to tell them that the danger was over. But nothing happened and both laymen and local officials began to doubt the necessity of running around the streets in sunbathing costumes. We had shouted “Wolf!” and no wolf came.

The contaminated areas? The reports from the contaminated areas were
not materially different from the reports from other areas
.