The Puppet Masters

Chapter 30

Since our arrival Mary and I had been living in a cubicle about the size of a bass drum. It had been intended for one junior officer; the laboratory had not been planned for married couples. We were as crowded as a plate of smorgasbord but we did not care.

I woke up first the next morning and made my usual quick check to be sure that a slug had not gotten to her. While I was doing so, she opened her eyes and smiled drowsily. "Go back to sleep," I said. "You've got another thirty minutes."

But she did not go back to sleep. After a while I said, "Mary, do you know the incubation period for bubonic plague?"

She answered, "Should I know? One of your eyes is slightly darker than the other."

I shook her. "Pay attention, wench. I was in the lab library last night, doing some rough figuring. As I get it, the slugs must have moved in on our commie pals at least three months before they invaded us."

"Yes, of course."

"You knew? Why didn't you say so?"

"Nobody asked me. Besides, it's obvious."

"Oh, for heaven's sake! Let's get up; we'll be late for breakfast."

Before we left the cubicle I said, "Parlor games at the usual time this morning?"

"Yes."

"Mary, you never talk about what they ask you."

She looked surprised. "But I never know."

"That's what I gathered. Deep trance with a 'forgetter' order, eh?"

"I suppose so."

"Hmm . . . well, there will be some changes made. Today I am going in with you."

All she said was, "Yes, dear."

They were gathered as usual in Dr. Steelton's office, the Old Man, Steelton himself, a Colonel Gibsy who was chief of staff, a lieutenant colonel whom I knew only by sight, and an odd lot of sergeant-technicians, j.o.'s, and flunkies. In the army it seems to take an eight-man working party to help a brass hat blow his nose; that is one reason why I left the service.

The Old Man's eyebrows shot up when he saw me but he said nothing. A sergeant who seemed to be doorman tried to stop me. "Good morning, Mrs. Nivens," he said to Mary; then to me he added, "I don't seem to have you on the list."

"I'm putting myself on the list," I announced to the entire room and pushed on past him.

Colonel Gibsy glared at me and turned to the Old Man with one of those "Hrrumph-hrrumph-what's-all-this?" noises. The Old Man did not answer but his eyebrows went still higher. The rest looked frozen faced and tried to pretend they weren't there-except one WAC sergeant who could not keep from grinning.

The Old Man got up, said to Gibsy, "Just a moment. Colonel." and limped over to me. In a voice that reached me alone, he said, "Son, you promised me."

"And I withdraw it. You had no business exacting a promise from a man about his wife. You were talking out of turn."

"You've no business here, son. You are not skilled in these matters. For Mary's sake, get out."

Up to that moment it had not occurred to me to question the Old Man's right to stay-but I found myself announcing my decision as I made it. "You are the one with no business here-you are not an analyst. So get out."

The Old Man glanced at Mary and so did I. Nothing showed in her face; she might have been waiting for me to make change. The Old Man said slowly, "You been eating raw meat, son?"

I answered, "It's my wife who is being experimented on; from here on I make the rules-or there won't be any experiments."

Colonel Gibsy butted in with, "Young man, are you out of your mind?"

I said, "What's your status here?" I glanced at his hands and added, "That's a V.M.I, ring, isn't it? Have you any other qualifications? Are you an M.D.? Or a psychologist?"

He drew himself up and tried to look dignified-pretty difficult dressed in your skin, unless your dignity is built in, the way Mary's is. "You seem to forget that this is a military reservation."

"And you seem to forget that my wife and I aren't military personnel!" I added, "Come on, Mary. We're leaving."

"Yes, Sam."

I added to the Old Man, "I'll tell the offices where to send our mail." I started for the door with Mary following me.

The Old Man said, "Just a moment, as a favor to me." I stopped and he went on to Gibsy, "Colonel, will you step outside with me? I'd like a word in private."

Colonel Gibsy gave me a general-court-martial look but he went. We all waited. Mary sat down but I did not. The juniors continued to be poker-faced, the lieutenant colonel looked perturbed, and the little sergeant seemed about to burst. Steelton was the only one who appeared unconcerned. He took papers out of his "incoming" basket and commenced quietly to work on them.

It was ten or fifteen minutes later that a sergeant came in. "Dr. Steelton, the Commanding Officer says to go ahead."

"Very well. Sergeant," he acknowledged, then looked at me, and said, "Let's go into the operating room."

I said, "Not so fast. Who are the rest of these supernumeraries? How about them?" I indicated the lieutenant colonel.

"Eh? He's Dr. Hazelhurst-two years on Venus."

"Okay, he stays." I caught the eye of the sergeant with the grin and said, "What's your job here, sister?"

"Me? Oh, I'm sort of a chaperone."

"I'm taking over the chaperone business. Now, Doctor, suppose you sort out the spare wheels from the people you actually need for your work."

"Certainly, sir." It turned out that he wanted no one but Colonel Hazelhurst. I gathered an impression that he was glad to get rid of the gallery. We went on inside-Mary, myself, and the two specialists.

The operating room contained a psychiatrist's couch surrounded by a semi-circle of chairs. The double snout of a tri-dim camera poked unobtrusively out of the overhead; I suppose the mike was hidden in the couch. Mary went to the couch and sat down; Dr. Steelton got out an injector. "We'll try to pick up where we left off, Mrs. Nivens."

I said, "Just a moment. You have records of the earlier attempts?"

"Of course."

"Let's play them over first. I want to come up to date."

He hesitated, then answered, "If you wish. Mrs. Nivens, I suggest that you wait in my office. No, it will take quite a long time; suppose I send for you later?"

It was probably just the contrary mood that I was in; bucking the Old Man had gotten me hiked up with adrenaline. "Let's find out first if she wants to leave."

Steelton looked surprised. "You don't know what you are suggesting. These records would be emotionally disturbing to your wife, even harmful."

Hazelhurst put in, "Very questionable therapy, young man."

I said, "This isn't therapy and you know it. If therapy had been your object you would have used eidetic recall technique instead of drugs."

Steelton looked worried. "There was not time for that. We had to use rough methods for quick results. I'm not sure that I can authorize the subject to see the records."

Hazelhurst put in, "I agree with you. Doctor."

I exploded. "Damn it, nobody asked you to authorize anything and you haven't got any authority in the matter. Those records were snitched right out of my wife's head and they belong to her. I'm sick of you people trying to play God. I don't like it in a slug and I don't like it any better in a human being. She'll make up her own mind whether or not she wants to see them and whether or not I or anybody else will see them. Now ask her!"

Steelton said, "Mrs. Nivens, do you wish to see your records?"

Mary answered, "Yes, Doctor, I'd like very much to see them."

He seemed surprised. "Uh, to be sure. Do you wish to see them by yourself?" He glanced at me.

"My husband and I will see them. You and Dr. Hazelhurst are welcome to remain, if you wish."

Which they did. Presently a whole stack of tape spools were brought in, each labeled with attributed dates and ages. It would have taken us hours to go through them all, so I discarded those which concerned Mary's life after about 1991. I could not see how they could affect the problem and Mary could see them later if she wished.

We started out with her very early life. Each record started with the subject-Mary, that is-choking and groaning and struggling the way people always do when they are being forced back on a memory track which they would rather not follow, then would come the reconstruction, both in Mary's voice and in other voices. What surprised me most was Mary's face-in the tank, I mean. We had the magnification stepped up so that the stereo image of her face was practically in our laps and one could follow every change of expression.

First her face became that of a little girl-oh, her features were the same grown-up features but I knew that I was seeing my darling as she must have been when she was very small. It made me hope that we would have a little girl ourselves.

Then her expression would change to match when other actors out of her memory took over. It was like watching an incredibly able monologist playing many parts.

Mary took it with apparent serenity but her hand stole into mine. When we came to the terrible part when her parents changed, became not her parents but slaves of slugs, she clamped down on my fingers so hard that it would have crushed a hand less hamlike than my own. But she controlled herself.

I skipped over the spools marked "period of suspended animation". I was surprised to find that there were a great many of them; I would have thought that there was nothing to dig out of the memory of a person in such a condition. Be that as it may, I could not see how she could have learned anything during that period which would tell us how the slugs had died, so I left them out and proceeded to the group concerned with the time from her resuscitation to the group concerned with her rescue from the swamps.

One thing was certain from her expressions in the imaged record: she had been possessed by a slug as soon as she was revived. The dead quality of her face was that of a slug not bothering to keep up a masquerade; the stereocasts from Zone Red were full of that expression. The barren qualities of her memories from that period confirmed it.

Then, rather suddenly, she was no longer hag-ridden but was again a little girl, a very sick and frightened little girl. There was a delirious quality to her remembered thoughts, but, at the last, a new voice came out loud and clear; "Well, skin me alive come Sunday! Look, Pete-it's a little girl!"

Another voice answered, "Alive?" and the first voice answered, "I don't know."

The rest of that tape carried on into Kaiserville, her recovery, and many new voices and memories; presently it ended.

"I suggest," Dr. Steelton said as he took the tape out of the projector, "that we play another one of the same period. They are all slightly different and this period is the key to the whole matter."

"Why, Doctor?" Mary wanted to know.

"Eh? Of course you need not see them if you don't want to-but this period is the one which we are actually investigating. From your memories we must build up a picture of what happened to the parasites on Venus, why they died. In particular, if we could tell just what killed the titan which, uh, possessed you before you were found-what killed it and left you alive-we might well have the weapon we need."

"But don't you know?" Mary asked wonderingly.

"Eh? Not yet, not yet-but we'll get it. The human memory is an amazingly complete record, even though unhandy to use."

"But I can tell you now-I thought you knew. It was 'nine-day fever'."

"What?" Hazelhurst was out of his chair as if prodded.

"But of course. Couldn't you tell from my face? It was utterly characteristic-the mask, I mean. I saw it several times; I used to nurse it back ho-back in Kaiserville, because I had had it once and was immune to it."

Steelton said, "How about it Doctor? Have you ever seen a case of it?"

"Seen a case? No, I can't say that I have; by the time of the second expedition they had the vaccine for it. I'm thoroughly acquainted with its clinical characteristics, of course."

"But can't you tell from this record?"

"Well," Hazelhurst answered carefully, "I would say that what we have seen is consistent with it-but not conclusive, not conclusive."

"What's not conclusive?" Mary said sharply. "I told you it was 'nine-day fever'."

"We must be sure," Steelton said apologetically.

"How sure can you get? There is no question about it. I was told that I had had nine-day fever, that I had been sick with it when Pete and Frisco found me. I nursed other cases later and I never caught it again. I remember what their faces looked like when they were ready to die-just like my own face in the record. Anyone who has ever seen a case never forgets it and could not possibly mistake it for anything else. What more do you want? Fiery letters in the sky?" I have never seen Mary so close to losing her temper-except once. I said to myself: look out, gentlemen, better duck!

Steelton said, "I think you have proved your point, dear lady-but tell me: you were believed to have no memory of this period and my own experience with you leads me to think so. Now you speak as if you had direct, conscious memory-yes?"

Mary looked puzzled. "I remember it now-I remember it quite clearly. I haven't thought about it in many years."

"I think I understand." He turned to Hazelhurst. "Well, Doctor? Do we have a culture of it in the laboratory? Have your boys done any work on it?"

Hazelhurst seemed stunned. "Work on it? Of course not! It's utterly out of the question-nine-day fever! We might as well use polio-or typhus. I'd rather treat a hangnail with an ax!"

I touched Mary's arm and said, "Let's go, darling. I think we have done all the damage we can." As we left I saw that she was trembling and that her eyes were full of tears. I took her into the messroom for systemic treatment-distilled.

Later on I bedded Mary down for a nap and sat with her until I was sure she was asleep. Then I looked up my father; he was in the office they had assigned to him. The green privacy light was already on. "Howdy," I said.

He looked at me speculatively. "Well, Elihu, I hear that you hit the jackpot."

"I prefer to be called 'Sam'," I answered.

"Very well, Sam. Success is its own excuse; nevertheless the jackpot appears to be disappointingly small. The situation seems to be almost as hopeless as before. Nine-day fever, no wonder the colony died out and the slugs as well. I don't see how we can use it. We can't expect everyone to have Mary's indomitable will to live."

I understood him; the fever carried a 98-percent plus death rate among unprotected Earthmen. With those who had taken the shots the rate was an effective zero-but that did not figure. We needed a bug that would just make a man sick-but would kill his slug. "I can't see that it makes much difference," I pointed out. "It's odds-on that you will have typhus-or plague-or both-throughout the Mississippi Valley in the next six weeks."

"Or the slugs may have learned a lesson from the setback they took in Asia and will start taking drastic sanitary measures," he answered. I had not thought of that; the idea startled me so that I almost missed the next thing he said, which was: "No, Sam, you'll have to devise a better plan than that."

"I'll have to? I just work here."

"You did once-but now you've taken charge. I don't mind; I was ready to retire anyhow."

"Huh? What the devil are you talking about? I'm not in charge of anything-and don't want to be. You are head of the Section."

He shook his head. "A boss is the man who does the bossing. Titles and insignia usually come after the fact, not before. Tell me-do you think Oldfield could take over my job?"

I considered it and shook my head; Dad's chief deputy was the executive officer type, a "carry-outer", not a "think-upper". "I've known that you would take over, some day," he went on. "Now you've done it-by bucking my judgment on an important matter, forcing your own on me, and by being justified in the outcome."

"Oh, rats! I got bull-headed and forced one issue. It never occurred to you big brains that you were failing to consult the one real Venus expert you had on tap-Mary, I mean. But I didn't expect to find out anything; I had a lucky break."

He shook his head. "I don't believe in luck, Sam. Luck is a tag given by the mediocre to account for the accomplishments of genius."

I placed my hands on the desk and leaned toward him. "Okay, so I'm a genius-just the same you are not going to get me to hold the sack. When this is over Mary and I are going up in the mountains and raise kittens and kids. We don't intend to spend our time bossing screwball agents."

He smiled gently as though he could see farther into the future than I could. I went on, "I don't want your job-understand me?"

"That is what the Devil said to the Deity after he displaced him-but he found he could not help himself. Don't take it so hard, Sam. I'll keep the title for the present and give you all the help I can. In the meantime, what are your orders, sir?"