The Puppet Masters

Chapter 4

I woke up at dusk. The room I was in had a real window-the Section pays well and I could afford little luxuries. I looked out over the Capital as it came to life for the night. The river swept away in a wide bend past the Memorial; it was summer and they were adding fluorescine to the water above the District so the river stood out in curving sweeps of glowing rose and amber and emerald and shining fire. Little pleasure boats cut through the colors, each filled, I had no doubt, with couples up to no good and enjoying it.

On the land, here and there among the older buildings, the bubble domes were lighting up, giving the city a glowing fairyland look. Off to the east, where the Bomb had landed, there were no old buildings at all and the area was an Easter basket of color giant Easter eggs, lighted from within.

I've seen the Capital at night oftener than most, because of my business, and, while I like the place, I had not thought much about it. But tonight I had that "Last Ride Together" feeling. It was so beautiful it hurt but it was not its beauty that choked me up; it was knowing that down under those warm lights were people, alive and individual people, going about their lawful occasions, making love or having spats, whichever suited them . . . doing whatever they damn well pleased, each under his own vine and his own fig tree with nobody to make him afraid, as it says.

I thought about all those gentle, kindly people (with only an occasional heel) and I thought about them each with a gray slug clinging to the back of his neck, twitching his legs and arms, making his voice say what the slug wished, going where the slug wanted to go.

Hell's bells-life under the commissars couldn't be that bad. I know-I've been behind the Curtain.

I made myself a solemn promise: if the parasites won. I'd arrange to be dead before I would let one of those things ride me the way one had ridden Barnes. For an agent it would be simple; just bite my nails– or, if your hands happen to be off, there are a couple of other ways. The Old Man planned for all professional necessities.

But the Old Man had not planned such arrangements for such a purpose and I knew it. It was the Old Man's business-and mine-to keep those people down there safe, not to run out on them when the going got rough.

I turned away from the window. There was not a confounded thing I could do about it now; I decided that what I needed was company. The room contained the usual catalog of "escort bureaus" and "model agencies" that you'll find in almost any big hotel except maybe the Martha Washington. I thumbed through it, looking the girls over, then slammed it shut. I didn't want a whoopee girl; I wanted one particular girl-one who would as soon shoot as shake hands and would bite in the clinches. And I did not know where she had gone.

I always carry a tube of "tempus fugit" pills; most agents do, as one never knows when giving your reflexes a jolt will get you through a tight spot. Despite the scare propaganda, tempos pills are not habit-forming, not the way the original hashish is.

Nevertheless a purist would say I was addicted to them, for I had the habit of taking them occasionally to make a twenty-four hour leave seem like a week. I admit that I enjoyed the mild euphoria which the pills induced as a side effect. Primarily, though, they just stretch out your subjective time by a factor of ten or more, chop time into finer bits so that you live longer for the same amount of clock and calendar.

What's wrong with that? Sure, I know the horrible example story of the man who died of old age in a calendar month through taking the pills steadily, but I took them only once in a while.

Maybe he had the right idea. He lived a long and happy life-you can be sure it was happy-and died happy at the end. What matter that the sun rose only thirty times? Who is keeping score and what are the rules anyhow?

I sat there, staring at my tube of pills and thinking that I had enough to keep me hopped up and contented for what would be, to me, at least two "years". If I wanted to, I could crawl in my hole and pull it in after me.

I took out two pills and got a glass of water. Then I put them carefully back in the tube, put on my gun and phone, left the hotel and headed for the Library of Congress.

On the way I stopped in a bar for a quick one and looked at a newscast. There was no news from Iowa, but when is there any news from Iowa?

At the Library I went to the general catalog, put on blinkers, and started scanning for references. "Flying Saucers" led to "Flying Discs", then to "Project Saucer", then "Lights in the Sky", "Fireballs", "Cosmic Diffusion Theory of Life Origins", and two dozen blind alleys and screwball branches of literature. I needed some sort of a Geiger counter to tell me what was pay dirt and what was not, especially as what I wanted was almost certain to carry a semantic-content code key classing it somewhere between Aesop's fables and the Lost Continent myths.

Nevertheless, in an hour I had a double handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper. Presently she said, "Most of the films you want are in use. The rest will be delivered to study room 9-A. Take the south escalator, puhlease."

Room 9-A had one occupant-who looked up as I came in and said, "Well! The wolf in person, how did you manage to pick me up again? I could swear I gave you a clean miss."

I said, "Hello, Mary."

"Hello," she answered, "and now, good-by. Miss Barkis still ain't willin' and I've got work to do."

I got annoyed. "Listen, you conceited little twerp, odd as it may seem to you, I did not come here looking for your no-doubt beautiful white body. I occasionally do some work myself and that is why I'm here. If you will put up with my unwelcome presence until my spools arrive, I'll get the hell out and find another study room,fa stag one."

Instead of flaring back, she immediately softened, thereby proving that she was more of a gentleman than I was. "I'm sorry, Sam. A woman hears the same thing so many thousand times that she gets to thinking that no other topic is possible. Sit down."

"No," I answered, "thanks, but I'll take my spools to an unoccupied room. I really do want to work."

"Stay here," she insisted. "Read that notice on the wall. If you remove spools from the room to which they are delivered, you will not only cause the sorter to blow a dozen tubes, but you'll give the chief reference librarian a nervous breakdown."

"I'll bring them back when I'm through with them."

She took my arm and warm tingles went up it. "Please, Sam. I'm sorry."

I sat down and grinned at her. "Nothing could persuade me to leave. I did not expect to find you here, but now that I have, I don't intend to let you out of sight until I know your phone code, your home address, and the true color of your hair."

"Wolf," she said softly, wrinkling her nose. "You'll never know any of them." She made a great business of fitting her head back into her study machine while ignoring me. But I could see that she was not displeased.

The delivery tube went thunk! and my spools spilled into the basket. I gathered them up and stacked them on the table by the other machine. One of them rolled over against the ones Mary had stacked up and knocked them down. Mary looked up.

I picked up what I thought was my spool and glanced at the end-the wrong end, as all it held was the serial number and that little pattern of dots which the selector reads. I turned it over, read the label, and placed it in my pile.

"Hey!" said Mary. "That's mine."

"In a pig's eye," I said politely.

"But it is–I read the label when it was faced toward me. It's the one I want next."

Sooner or later, I can see the obvious. Mary wouldn't be there to study the history of footgear through the Middle Ages. I picked up three or four more of hers and read the labels. "So that's why nothing I wanted was in," I said. "But you didn't do a thorough job; I found some that you missed." I handed her my selection.

Mary looked them over, then pushed all the spools into a single pile. "Shall we split them fifty-fifty, or both of us see them all?"

"Fifty-fifty to weed out the junk, then we'll both go over the remainder," I decided. "Let's get busy."

Even after having seen the parasite on poor Barnes's back, even after being solemnly assured by the Old Man that a "flying saucer" had in fact landed, I was not prepared for the monumental pile of evidence to be found buried in a public library. A pest on Digby and his evaluating formula! Digby was a floccinaucinihilipilificator at heart-which is an eight-dollar word meaning a joker who does not believe in anything he can't bite.

The evidence was unmistakable; Earth had been visited by ships from outer space not once but many times.

The reports long antedated our own achievement of space travel; some of them ran back into the seventeenth century-earlier than that, but it was impossible to judge the quality of reports dating back to a time when "science" meant an appeal to Aristotle. The first systematic data came from the United States itself in the 1940's and '50's. The next flurry was in the 1980's, mostly from Russo-Siberia. These reports were difficult to judge as there was no direct evidence from our own intelligence agents and anything that came from behind the Curtain was usually phony, ipso facto.

I noticed something and started taking down dates. Strange objects in the sky appeared to hit a cycle with crests at thirty-year intervals, about. I made a note about it; a statistical analyst might make something of it-or more likely, if I fed it to the Old Man, he would see something in that crystal ball he uses for a brain.

"Flying saucers" were tied in with "mysterious disappearances" not only through being in the same category as sea serpents, bloody rain, and such like wild data, but also because in at least three well-documented instances pilots had chased "saucers" and never come back, or down, anywhere, i.e., officially classed as crashed in wild country and not recovered– an "easy out" or "happy hurdle" type of explanation.

I got another wild hunch and tried to see whether or not there was a thirty-year cycle in mysterious disappearances, and, if so, did it phase-match the objects in-the-sky cycle? There seemed to be but I could not be sure-too much data and not enough fluctuation; there are too many people disappearing every year for other reasons, from amnesia to mothers-in-law.

But vital records have been kept for a long time and not all were lost in the bombings. I noted it down to farm out for professional analysis.

The fact that groups of reports seemed to be geographically and even politically concentrated I did not try very hard to understand. I tabled it, after trying one hunch hypothesis on for size; put yourself in the invaders' place; if you were scouting a strange planet, would you study all of it equally, or would you pick out areas that looked interesting by whatever standards you had and then concentrate?

It was just a guess and I was ready to chuck it before breakfast, if necessary.

Mary and I did not exchange three words all night. Eventually we got up and stretched, then I lent Mary change to pay the machine for the spools of notes she had taken (why don't women carry change?) and got my wires out of hock, too. "Well, what's the verdict?" I asked.

"I feel like a sparrow who has built a nice nest and discovers that it is in a rain spout."

I recited the old jingle. "And we'll do the same thing-refuse to learn and build again in the spout."

"Oh, no! Sam, we've got to do something, fast. The President has to be convinced. It makes a full pattern; this time they are moving in to stay."

"Could be. In fact I think they are."

"Well, what do we do?"

"Honey chile, you are about to learn that in the Country of the Blind the one-eyed man is in for a hell of a rough ride."

"Don't be cynical. There isn't time."

"No. There isn't. Gather up your gear and let's get out of here."

Dawn was on us as we left and the big library was almost deserted. I said, "Tell you what-let's find a barrel of beer, take it to my hotel room, bust in the head, and talk this thing over."

She shook her head. "Not to your hotel room."

"Damn it, this is business."

"Let's go to my apartment. It's only a couple of hundred miles away; I'll fix you breakfast when we get there."

I recalled my basic purpose in life in time to remember to leer. "That's the best offer I've had all night. But seriously-why not the hotel? We'd get breakfast there and save a half hour's travel."

"You don't want to come to my apartment? I won't bite you."

"I was hoping you would-so I could bite back. No, I was just wondering why the sudden switch?"

"Well-perhaps I wanted to show you the bear traps I have arranged tastefully around my bed. Or perhaps I just wanted to prove to you I could cook." She dimpled for a moment.

I flagged a taxi and we went to her apartment.

When we got inside she left me standing, while she made a careful search of the place, then she came back and said, "Turn around. I want to feel your back."

"Why do-"

"Turn around!"

I shut up and did so. She gave it a good knuckling, all over, then said, "Now you can feel mine."

"With pleasure!" Nevertheless I did a proper job, for I saw what she was driving at. There was nothing under her clothes but girl-girl and assorted items of lethal hardware.

She turned around and let a deep sigh. "That's why I didn't want to go to your hotel room. Now we're safe. Now I know we are safe for the first time since I saw that thing on the station manager's back. This apartment is tight; I turn off the air and leave it sealed like a vault every time I leave it."

"Say-how about the air conditioning? Could one get in through the ducts?"

"Possibly-but I didn't turn on the conditioner system; I cracked one of the air-raid reserve bottles instead. Never mind; what would you like to eat?"

I wanted to suggest Mary herself, served up on lettuce and toast, but I thought better of it. "Any chance of about two pounds of steak, just warmed through?"

We split a five-pound steak between us and I swear I ate the short half. While we chomped, we watched the newscast. Still no news from Iowa.