The Puppet Masters

Chapter 29

The 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, Mcllvaine'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-

The Old Man sighed. "Maybe that's the best solution. Maybe it's the only one."

"You might as well bomb them, if that's the best we have to offer. It would be a cleaner way to die."

"So it would. But you know that we won't. As long as there is a chance of cleaning out the vermin without burning down the barn, we'll keep on trying."

I mulled it over at great length. We were in still another race against time. Fundamentally the slugs must be too stupid to keep slaves; perhaps that was why they moved from planet to planet-they spoiled what they touched. After a while their hosts would die out and then they needed new hosts.

Theory, just theory-I brushed it aside. One thing was sure: what had happened behind the Curtain would happen in Zone Red unless we found a way to kill off the slugs, and that mighty soon! Thinking about it, I made up my mind to do something I had considered before-force myself into the mind-searching sessions being conducted on Mary. If there were something in her hidden memories which could be used to kill slugs, possibly I might see it where others had failed. In any case I was going in, whether Steelton and the Old Man liked it or not. I was tired of being treated like a cross between a prince consort and an unwelcome child.