The Puppet Masters (21 page)

“Will you
listen
, please? I’ll land, but I’ve got to get—” He switched off, leaving me with my jaw pumping air.

The first burst seemed considerably short of a half mile ahead of me; I landed.

I cracked up in doing it, but without hurting myself or my passenger. I did not have long to wait. They had me flare-lighted and were swooping down on me before I had satisfied myself that the boat wouldn’t move. They took me in and I met the wing commander personally. He even put my message through after his psych squad got through giving me the antidote for the sleep test. By then it was one-thirteen, zone five—and Schedule Counter Blast had been underway for exactly that hour and thirteen minutes.

The Old Man listened to a summary, grunted, then told me to shut up and see him in the morning.

I
f
the Old Man and I had gone to the National Zoological Gardens instead of sitting around in the park, it would not have been necessary for me to go to Kansas City. The ten titans we had captured at the joint session of Congress, plus two the next day, had been entrusted to the director of the zoo to be placed on the shoulders of unlucky anthropoids—chimps and orangutans, mostly. No gorillas.

The director had had the apes locked up in the zoo’s veterinary hospital. Two chimpanzees, Abelard and Heloise, were caged together; they had always been mates and there seemed to be no reason to separate them. Maybe that sums up our psychological difficulty in dealing with the titans; even the men who transplanted the slugs to the apes still thought of the result as apes, rather than as titans.

The treatment cage next to that of the two chimps was occupied by a family of tuberculous gibbons. They were not used as hosts, since they were sick, and there was no communication between cages. They were shut one from another by sliding, gasketed panels and each cage had its own air-conditioning. I’ve been in worse hospitals; I remember one in the Ukraine—

Anyhow, the next morning the panel had been slid back and the gibbons and the chimps were all in together. Abelard, or possibly Heloise, had found some way to pick the lock. The lock was supposed to be monkey proof, but it was not ape-
cum
-titan proof. Don’t blame the designer of the lock.

Two chimps plus two titans plus five gibbons—the next morning there were seven apes ridden by
seven
titans.

This was discovered two hours before I left for Kansas City, but the Old Man had not been notified. Had he been, he would have
known
that Kansas City was saturated. I might have figured it out for myself. Had the Old Man known about the gibbons, Schedule Counter Blast would not have taken place.

Schedule Counter Blast was the worst wet firecracker in military history. The evolution was beautifully worked out and the drops were made simultaneously just at midnight, zone five, on over ninety-six hundred communication points—newspaper offices, block controls, relay stations, and so forth. The raiding squad were the cream of our sky-borne forces, mostly veteran non-coms, and with them, technicians to put each communication point back into service.

Whereupon the President’s speech and the visual display would go out from each local station; Schedule Bare Back would take effect all through the infected territory; and the war would be over, save for minor mopping up.

Ever see a bird hurt itself by flying into a glass window? The bird is not stupid; he simply did not have all the data.

By twenty-five minutes after midnight reports started coming in that such-and-such points were secured. A little later there were calls for help from other points. By one in the morning most of the reserves had been committed but the operation was clearly going well—so well, indeed, that unit commanders were landing and were reporting from the ground.

That was the last anybody ever heard of them.

Zone Red swallowed up the task force as if it had never existed—over eleven thousand military craft, more than a hundred and sixty thousand fighting men and technicians, seventy-one group commanders and—why go on? The United States had received its worst military setback since Black Sunday. Not in numbers, for there was not a city bombed, but in selected quality.

Let me make it clear that I am not criticizing Martinez, Rexton, the General Staff, or those poor devils who made the drop. The program was properly planned, it was based on what appeared to be a true picture, and the situation called for fast action with the best we had. If Rexton had sent any but his best boys he would have earned a court martial; the Republic was at stake and he had the sense to realize it.

But he did not know about the seven apes.

It was nearly daylight, so I understand, before Martinez and Rexton got it through their heads that the messages they had gotten back about successes were actually faked, fakes sent by their own men—
our
own men—but hag-ridden, possessed, and brought into the masquerade. After my report, more than an hour too late to stop the raids, the Old Man had tried to get them not to send in any more men, but they were flushed with success and anxious to make a clean sweep.

The Old Man asked the President to insist on visual checks of what was happening, but the operation was being controlled by relay through Space Station Alpha and there just aren’t enough channels to parallel audio with video through a space station. Rexton had said, “They know what they are up against; quit worrying. As fast as we get local stations back in our hands, our boys will patch back into the ground relay net and you will have all the visual evidence you want.”

The Old Man had pointed out that by then it would be too late. Rexton had burst out, “Confound it, man!—I can’t stop soldiers in action to have them take pictures of bare backs. Do you want a thousand men to let themselves be killed just to quiet your jitters?”

The President had backed him up.

By early morning they had their visual evidence. Stereo stations in the Central Valley were giving out with the same old pap;
Rise and Shine with Mary Sunshine, Breakfast with the Browns
, and such junk. There was not a station with the President’s stereocast, not one that even conceded that anything had happened. The military dispatches tapered off and stopped around four o’clock and Rexton’s frantic calls were not answered. Task Force Redemption of Schedule Counter Blast ceased to exist—
spurlos versenkt
.

I got this not from the Old Man but from Mary. Being the President’s little shadow who went in and out with him, she had a box seat. I did not get to see the Old Man until nearly eleven the next morning. He let me report without comment, and without bawling me out, which was worse.

He was about to dismiss me when I put in, “How about my prisoner? Didn’t he confirm my conclusions?”

“Oh, him? Still unconscious, by the last report. They don’t expect him to live. The psychotechnicians can’t get anything out of him.”

“I’d like to see him.”

“You stick to things you understand.”

“Well—have you got something for me to do?”

“Not at the moment. I think you had better—No, do this: trot down to the National Zoo. You’ll see some things that may put a different light on what you picked up in Kansas City.”

“Huh?”

“Look up Doctor Horace, he’s the Assistant Director. Tell him I sent you.”

So I went down to see the animals. I tried to find Mary, but she was tied up.

Horace was a nice little guy who looked like one of his own baboons; he turned me over to a Doctor Vargas who was a specialist in exotic biologies—the same Vargas who was on the Second Venus Expedition. He told me what had happened and I looked at the gibbons, meantime rearranging my prejudices.

“I saw the President’s broadcast,” he said conversationally, “weren’t you the man who—I mean, weren’t you the—”

“Yes, I was ‘the man who’,” I agreed shortly.

“Then you can tell us a great deal about these phenomena. Your opportunities have been unique.”

“Perhaps I should be able to,” I admitted slowly, “but I can’t.”

“Do you mean that no cases of fission reproduction took place while you were, uh, their prisoner?”

“That’s right.” I thought about it and went on, “At least, I think that’s right.”

“Don’t you know? I was given to understand that, uh, victims have full memory of their experiences?”

“Well, they do and they don’t.” I tried to explain the odd detached frame of mind of a servant of the masters.

“I suppose it could happen while you sleep.”

“Maybe. Besides sleep, there is another time, or rather times, which are difficult to remember. During conference.”

“Conference?”

So I explained. His eyes lit up, “Oh, you mean ‘conjugation’.”

“No, I mean ‘conference’.”

“We mean the same thing. Don’t you see? Conjugation and fission—they reproduce at will, whenever the food supply, that is to say the supply of hosts, permits. Probably one contact for each fission; then, when the opportunity exists, fission—two fully adult daughter parasites in a matter of hours…or less, possibly.”

I thought it over. If that were true—and looking at the gibbons, I could not doubt it—then why had we depended on shipments at the Constitution Club? Or had we? In fact I did not know; I did what my master wanted done and saw only what came under my eyes. But why had we not saturated New Brooklyn as Kansas City had been saturated. Lack of time?

It was clear how Kansas City had been saturated. With plenty of “livestock” at hand and a space ship loaded with transit cells to draw from, the titans had reproduced to match the human population.

I am no biologist, exotic or otherwise, but I can do simple arithmetic. Assume a thousand slugs in that space ship, the one we believed to have landed near Kansas City; suppose that they could reproduce when given the opportunity every twenty-four hours.

First day, one thousand slugs.

Second day, two thousand.

Third day, four thousand.

At the end of the first week, the eighth day, that is—
a hundred and twenty-eight thousand
slugs.

After two weeks,
more than sixteen million slugs
.

But we did not know that they were limited to spawning once a day; on the contrary the gibbons proved they weren’t. Nor did we know that a flying saucer could lift only a thousand transit cells; it might be ten thousand—or more—or less. Assume ten thousand as breeding stock with fission every twelve hours. In two weeks the answer comes out—

MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF TRILLION!!!!

The figure did not mean anything; it was cosmic. There aren’t anything like that many people on the whole globe, not even if you counted in apes.

We were going to be knee deep in slugs—and that before long. I felt worse than I had in Kansas City.

Dr. Vargas introduced me to a Doctor McIlvaine of the Smithsonian Institution; McIlvaine was a comparative psychologist, the author, so Vargas told me, of
Mars, Venus, and Earth: A Study in Motivating Purposes
. Vargas seemed to expect me to be impressed but I was not as I had not read it. Anyhow, how can anyone study the motives of Martians when they were all dead before we swung down out of trees?

They started swapping trade talk not intelligible to an outsider; I continued to watch the gibbons. Presently McIlvaine asked me, “Mr. Nivens, how long does a conference last?”

“Conjugation,” Vargas corrected him.

“Conference,” McIlvaine repeated. “Keep your mind on the more important aspect.”

“But, Doctor,” Vargas insisted, “there are parallels in terrestrial biology. In primitive reproduction, conjugation is the means of gene exchange whereby mutation is spread through the body of the—”

“You are being anthropocentric. Doctor. You do not know that this life form has genes.”

Vargas turned red. “I presume you will allow me gene equivalents?” he said stiffly.

“Why should I? I repeat, sir, that you are reasoning by analogy where there is no reason to judge that analogy exists. There is one and only one characteristic common to all life forms and that is the drive to survive.”

“And to reproduce,” insisted Vargas.

“Suppose the organism is immortal and has no need to reproduce?”

“But—” Vargas shrugged. “Your question is not germane; we know that they reproduce.” He gestured at the apes.

“And I am suggesting,” McIlvaine came back, “that this is not reproduction, but a single organism availing itself of more space, as a man might add a wing to his house. No, really. Doctor, I do not wish to be offensive, but it is possible to get so immersed in the idea of the zygote-gamete cycle that one forgets that there may be other patterns.”

Vargas started out, “But throughout the entire system—”

McIlvaine cut him short. “Anthropocentric, terrocentric, solocentric—it is still a provincial approach. These creatures may be from outside the solar system entirely.”

I said, “Oh, no!” I had had a sudden flash picture of the planet Titan and with it a choking sensation.

Neither one paid any attention to me. McIlvaine continued, “If you must have analogy, take the amoeba—an earlier, more basic, and much more successful life form than ours. The motivational psychology of the amoeba—”

I switched off my ears; I suppose free speech gives a man the right to talk about the ‘psychology’ of an amoeba, but I don’t have to listen. They never did get back to asking me how long a conference takes, not that I could have told them. A conference is, well—
timeless
.

They did do some direct experimentation which raised my opinion of them a little. Vargas ordered brought in a baboon who was wearing a slug and had him introduced into the cage with the gibbons and the chimps. Up to then the gibbons had been acting like gibbons, grooming each other and such, except that they seemed rather quiet—and kept a sharp eye on our movements. As soon as the newcomer was dumped in they gathered in a ring facing outwards and went into direct conference, slug to slug. McIlvaine jabbed his finger excitedly at them. “You see? You see? Conference is
not
for reproduction, but for exchange of memory. The organism, temporarily divided, has now re-identified itself.”