The Puppet Masters (8 page)

The Old Man was between me and her and I couldn’t get in a clean shot—and every other agent in the place was disarmed! Again, I don’t think it was accident; the Old Man did not trust them not to shoot when the parasite was discovered. He wanted that slug, alive.

She was out the door and running down the passage by the time I could get organized. I could have winged her in the passageway but I was inhibited by two things—first, I could not shift gears emotionally that fast. I mean to say she was to me still old Lady Haines, the spinster secretary to the boss, the one who bawled me out for poor grammar in my reports. In the second place, if she was carrying a parasite I did not want to risk burning it, not after what we had been told. I am not the world’s best shot, anyhow.

She ducked into a room; I came up to it and again I hesitated—sheer habit; it was the ladies’ room.

But only a moment. I slammed the door open and looked around, gun ready.

Something hit me back of my right ear. It seemed to me that I took a long leisurely time in getting to the floor.

I can give no clear account of the next few moments. In the first place I was out cold, for a time at least. I remember a struggle and some shouts: “Look out!” “Damn her—she’s bitten me!” “Watch your hands! Watch your hands!” Then somebody said more quietly, “Bind her hands and feet, now—careful.” Somebody said, “How about him?” and someone else answered, “Later. He’s not really hurt.”

I was still practically out as they left, but I began to feel a flood of life stirring back into me. I sat up, feeling extreme urgency about something. I got up, staggering a little, and went to the door. I hesitated there, looked out cautiously; nobody was in sight. I stepped out and trotted down the corridor, away from the direction of the conference hall.

I slowed down momentarily at the outer door, then realized with a shock that I was naked and tore on down the hallway toward the men’s wing. There I grabbed the first clothes I could find and pulled them on. I found a pair of shoes much too small for me, but it did not seem to matter.

I ran back toward the exit, fumbled, and found the switch; the door opened.

I thought I had made a clean escape, but somebody shouted, “Sam!” just as I was going out. I did not wait, but plunged on out. At once I had my choice of six doors and then three more beyond the one I picked. The warren we called the “Offices”, being arranged to permit any number of people to come and go without being noticed, was served by a spaghetti-like mess of tunnels. I came up finally inside a subway fruit and bookstall, nodded to the proprietor—who seemed unsurprised—and swung the counter gate up and mingled with the crowd. It was not a route I had used before.

I caught the up-river jet express and got off at the first station. I crossed over to the down-river side, waited around the change window until a man came up who displayed quite a bit of money as he bought his counter. I got on the same train he did and got off when he did. At the first dark spot I rabbit-punched him. Now I had money and was ready to operate. I did not know quite why I had to have money, but I knew that I needed it for what I was about to do.

L
anguage
grows, so they say, to describe experience of the race using it. Experience first—language second. How can I tell how I felt?

I saw things around me with a curious double vision, as if I stared at them through rippling water—yet I felt no surprise and no curiosity about this. I moved like a sleepwalker, unaware of what I was about to do—but I was wide-awake, fully aware of who I was, where I was, what my job at the Section had been. There was no amnesia; my full memories were available to me at any moment. And, although I did not know what I was about to do, I was always aware of what I was doing and sure that each act was the necessary, purposeful act at that moment.

They say that post-hypnotic commands work something like that. I don’t know; I am a poor hypnotic subject.

I felt no particular emotion most of the time, except the mild contentment that comes from being at work which needs to be done. That was up on the conscious level—and, I repeat, I was fully awake. Someplace, more levels down than I understand about, I was excruciatingly unhappy, terrified, and filled with guilt—but that was down, ’way down, locked, suppressed; I was hardly aware of it and in no practical way affected by it.

I knew that I had been seen to leave. That shout of “Sam!” had been intended for me; only two persons knew me by that name and the Old Man would have used my right name. So Mary had seen me leave—it was a good thing, I thought, that she had let me find out where her private apartment was. It would be necessary presently to booby-trap it against her next use of it. In the meantime I must get on with work and keep from being picked up.

I was in a warehouse district, moving through it cautiously, all my agent’s training at work to avoid being conspicuous. Shortly I found what seemed to be a satisfactory building; there was a sign: LOFT FOR LEASE—SEE RENTAL AGENT ON GROUND FLOOR. I scouted it thoroughly, noted the address, then doubled back to the nearest Western Union booth two squares behind me. There I sat down at a vacant machine and sent the following message: EXPEDITE TWO CASES TINY TOTS TALKY TALES SAME DISCOUNT CONSIGNED TO JOEL FREEMAN and added the address of the empty loft. I sent it to Roscoe and Dillard, Jobbers and Manufacturers Agents, Des Moines, Iowa.

As I left the booth the sight of one of the Kwikfede chain of all-night restaurants reminded me that I was very hungry, but the reflex cut off at once and I thought no more about it. I returned to the warehouse building, found a dark corner in the rear, and settled quietly back to wait for dawn and business hours.

I must have slept; I have a dim recollection of ever repeating, claustrophobic nightmares.

From daylight until nine o’clock I hung around a hiring hall, studying the notices; it was the one place in the neighborhood where a man of no occupation would not attract attention. At nine o’clock I met the rental agent as he unlocked his office, and leased the loft, paying him a fat squeeze on the side for immediate possession while the paperwork went through on the deal. I went up to the loft, unlocked it, and waited.

About ten-thirty my crates were delivered. I let the teamsters leave; three were too many for me and I was not yet ready in any case. After they were gone, I opened one crate, took out one cell, warmed it, and got it ready. Then I went downstairs, found the rental agent again, and said, “Mr. Greenberg, could you come up for a moment? I want to see about making some changes in the lighting.”

He fussed, but agreed to do so. When we entered the loft I closed the door behind us and led him over to the open crate. “Here,” I said, “if you will just lean over there, you will see what I mean. If I could just—”

I got him around the neck with a grip that cut off his wind, ripped his jacket and shirt up, and, with my free hand, transferred a master from the cell to his bare back, then held him tight for a moment until his struggles stopped. Then I let him up, tucked his shirt back in and dusted him off. When he had recovered his breath, I said, “What news from Des Moines?”

“What do you want to know?” he asked. “How long have you been out?”

I started to explain, but he interrupted me with, “Let’s have a direct conference and not waste time.” I skinned up my shirt; he did the same; and we sat down on the edge of the unopened case, back to back, so that our masters could be in contact. My own mind was merely blank and I have no idea how long the conference went on. I watched a fly droning around a dusty cobweb, seeing it but not thinking about it.

The building superintendent was our next recruit. He was a large Swede and it took both of us to hold him. After that Mr. Greenberg called up the owner of the building and insisted that he simply had to come down and see some horrendous mishap that had occurred to the structure—just what, I don’t know; I was busy with the super, opening and warming several more cells.

The owner of the building was a real prize and we all felt quiet satisfaction, including, of course, he himself. He belonged to the Constitution Club, the membership list of which read like the index of
Who’s Who in Finance, Government, and Industry
. Better still, the club boasted the most famous chef in town; it was an even chance that any given member would be lunching there if he were in the city.

It was pushing noon; we had no time to lose. The super went out to buy suitable clothes and a satchel for me and sent the owner’s chauffeur up to be recruited as he did so. At twelve-thirty we left, the owner and I, in his own car; the satchel contained twelve masters, still in their cells but ready.

The owner signed:
J. Hardwick Potter & Guest
. One of the flunkies tried to take my bag but I insisted that I needed it to change my shirt before lunch. We fiddled around in the washroom until we had it to ourselves, save for the attendant—whereupon we recruited him and sent him out with a message to the resident manager that a guest had taken ill in the washroom.

After we took care of the manager he obtained a white coat for me and I became another washroom attendant. I had only ten masters left but I knew that the cases would be picked up from the warehouse loft and delivered to the club shortly. The regular attendant and I used up the rest of those I had been able to bring before the lunch hour rush was over. One guest surprised us while we were busy and I had to kill him, as there was no time to save him for recruiting. We stuffed him into the mop closet.

There was a lull after that, as the cases had not yet arrived. Hunger reflex nearly doubled me over, then it dropped off sharply but still persisted; I told the manager, who had me served one of the best lunches I have ever eaten, in his office. The cases arrived just as I was finishing.

During the drowsy period that every gentlemen’s club has in the mid-afternoon we secured the place. By four o’clock everyone present in the building—members, staff, and guests—were with us; from then on we simply processed them in the lobby as the doorman passed them in. Later in the day the manager phoned Des Moines for four more cases.

Our big prize came that evening—a guest, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. We saw a real victory in that; the Treasury Department is charged with the safety of the President.

T
he
jubilation caused by the capture of a high key official was felt by me only as absent-minded satisfaction, then I thought no more about it. We—the human recruits, I mean—hardly thought at all; we knew what we were to do each instant, but we knew it only at the moment of action, as a “high school” horse gets his orders, responds to them instantly, and is ready for the next signal from his rider.

High school horse and rider is a good comparison, as far as it goes—but it goes not nearly far enough. The horseman has partly at his disposal the intelligence of the horse; the masters had at their disposal not only our full intelligences, but also tapped directly our memory and experiences. We communicated for them between masters, too; sometimes we knew what we were talking about; sometimes we did not—such spoken words went through the servant, but the servant had no part in more important, direct, master-to-master conferences. During these we sat quietly and waited until our riders were through conferring, then rearranged our clothing to cover them up and did whatever was necessary. There was such a conference on a grand scale after the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury was recruited; I know no more of it than you do, although I sat in on it.

I had no more to do with words spoken by me for my master than had the audio relay buried behind my ear to do with words it sounded—the relay was silent all this time, incidentally; my phone proper I had left behind me. I, like it, was a communication instrument, nothing more. Some days after I was recruited I gave the club manager new instructions about how to order shipments of masters’ carrying cells. I was fleetingly aware, as I did so, that three more ships had landed, but I was not aware of their locations; my overt knowledge was limited to a single address in New Orleans.

I thought nothing about it; I went on with my work. After the day spent at the club, I was a new “special assistant to Mr. Potter” and spent the days in his office—and the nights, too. Actually, the relationship may have reversed; I frequently gave oral instructions to Potter. Or perhaps I understand the social organization of the parasites as little now as I did then; the relationship may have been more flexible, more anarchistic, and vastly more subtle than I have the experience to imagine.

I knew—and my master certainly knew—that it was well for me to stay out of sight. Through me, my master knew as much of the organization we called the “Section” as I did; it knew that I was one human known to the Old Man to have been recruited—and my master knew, I am sure, that the Old Man would not cease to search for me, to recapture me or kill me.

It seems odd that it did not choose to change bodies and to kill mine; we had vastly more potential recruits available than we had masters. I do not think it could have felt anything parallel to human squeamishness; masters newly delivered from their transit cells frequently damaged their initial hosts; we always destroyed the damaged host and found a new one for the master.

Contrariwise, my master, by the time he chose me, had controlled not less than three human hosts—Jarvis, Miss Haines, and one of the girls in Barnes’s office, probably the secretary—and in the course of it had no doubt acquired both sophistication and skill in the control of human hosts. It could have “changed horses” with ease.

On the other hand, would a skilled cowhand have destroyed a well-trained workhorse in favor of an untried, strange mount? That may have been why I was hidden and saved—or perhaps I don’t know what I am talking about; what does a bee know about Beethoven?

After a time the city was “secured” and my master started taking me out on the streets. I do not mean to say that every inhabitant of the city wore a hump—no, not by more than 99 percent; the humans were very numerous and the masters still very few—but the key positions in the city were all held by our own recruits, from the cop on the comer to the mayor and the chief of police, not forgetting ward bosses, church ministers, board members, and any and all who were concerned with public communications and news. The vast majority continued with their usual affairs, not only undisturbed by the masquerade but unaware that anything had happened.