The Puppet Masters (30 page)

She continued to look west along the road. “I thought I might get in a shot or two,” she answered, her eyes bright.

“She’s safe here,” the youngster assured me. “We’re holding them, well down the road.”

I ignored him. “Listen, you bloodthirsty little hellion,” I snapped, “get back in that car before I break every bone in your body!”

“Yes, Sam.” She turned and did so.

I looked back at the young salt. “What are you staring at?” I demanded, feeling edgy and needing someone to take it out on. The place smelled of slugs and the wait was making me nervous.

“Nothing much,” he said, looking me over. “In my part of the country we don’t speak to ladies that way.”

“Then why in the hell don’t you go back where you come from?” I answered and stalked away. The Old Man was missing, too; I did not like it.

An ambulance, coming back from the west, ground to a halt beside me. “Has the road to Pascagoula been opened?” the driver called out.

The Pascagoula River, thirty miles or so east of where the saucer had landed, was roughly “Zone Amber” for that area; the town of that name was east of the river’s mouth and, nominally at least, in Zone Green—while sixty or seventy miles west of us on the same road was New Orleans, the heaviest concentration of titans south of St. Louis. Our opposition came from New Orleans while our nearest base was in Mobile.

“I haven’t heard,” I told the driver.

He chewed a knuckle. “Well… I made it through once; maybe I’ll make it back all right.” His turbines whined and he was away. I continued to look for the Old Man.

Although the ground fighting had moved away from the site, the air fighting was all around and above us. I was watching the vapor trails and trying to figure out who was what and how they could tell, when a big transport streaked into the area, put on the brakes with a burst of rato units, and spilled a platoon of sky boys. Again I wondered; it was too far away to tell whether they wore slugs or not. At least it came in from the east, but that did not necessarily prove anything.

I spotted the Old Man, talking with the commander of the landing force. I went up and interrupted. “We ought to get out of here, boss. This place is due to be atom-bombed about ten minutes ago.”

The commander answered me. “Relax,” he said blandly, “the concentration does not merit A-bombing, not even a pony bomb.”

I was just about to ask him sharply how he knew that the slugs would figure it that way, when the Old Man interrupted. “He’s right, son.” He took me by the arm and walked me back toward the car. “He’s perfectly right, but for the wrong reasons.”

“Huh?”

“Why haven’t
we
bombed the cities
they
hold? They won’t bomb this area, not while that ship is intact. They don’t want to damage it; they want it back. Now go on back to Mary. Dogs and strange men—remember?”

I shut up, unconvinced. I expected us all to be clicks in a Geiger counter any second. Slugs, fighting as individuals, fought with gamecock recklessness—perhaps because they were really not individuals. Why should they be any more cautious about one of their own ships? They might be more anxious to keep it out of our hands than to save it.

We had just reached the car and spoken to Mary when the still-damp little snottie came trotting up. He halted, caught his breath, and saluted the Old Man. “The commander says that you are to have anything you want, sir—anything at all!”

From his manner I gathered that the answering dispatch had probably been spelled out in asterisks, accompanied by ruffles and flourishes. “Thank you, sir,” the Old Man said mildly. “We merely want to inspect the captured ship.”

“Yes, sir. Come with me, sir.” He came with us instead, having difficulty making up his mind whether to escort the Old Man or Mary. Mary won. I came along behind, keeping my mind on watching out and ignoring the presence of the youngster. The country on that coast, unless gardened constantly, is practically jungle; the saucer lapped over into a brake of that sort and the Old Man took a shortcut through it. The kid said to him. “Watch out, sir. Mind where you step.”

I said, “Slugs?”

He shook his head. “Coral snakes.”

At that point a poisonous snake would have seemed as pleasant as a honey bee, but I must have been paying some attention to his warning for I was looking down when the next thing happened.

I first heard a shout. Then so help me, a Bengal tiger was charging us.

Probably Mary got in the first shot. I know that mine was not behind that of the young officer; it might even have been ahead. I’m sure it was—fairly sure, anyhow. It was the Old Man who shot last.

Among the four of us we cut that beast so many ways that it would never be worth anything as a rug. And yet the slug on it was untouched; I fried it with my second bolt. The young fellow looked at it without surprise. “Well,” he said, “I thought we had cleaned up that load.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“One of the first transport tanks they sent out. Regular Noah’s Ark. We were shooting everything from gorillas to polar bears. Say, did you ever have a water buffalo come at you?”

“No and I don’t want to.”

“Not near as bad as the dogs, really. If you ask me, those things don’t have much sense.” He looked at the slug, quite unmoved, while I was ready as usual to throw up.

We got up out of there fast and onto the titan ship—which did not make me less nervous, but more. Not that there was anything frightening in the ship itself, not in its appearance.

But its appearance wasn’t
right
. While it was obviously artificial, one knew without being told that it was not made by men. Why? I don’t know. The surface of it was dull mirror, not a mark on it—not any sort of a mark; there was no way to tell how it had been put together. It was as smooth as a Jo block.

I could not tell of what it was made. Metal? Of course, it
had
to be metal. But was it? You would expect it to be either bitterly cold—or possibly intensely hot from its landing. I touched it and it was not anything at all, neither cold nor hot. Don’t tell me it just happened to be exactly ninety-eight and six-tenths. I noticed another thing presently; a ship that size, landing at high speed, should have blasted a couple of acres. There was no blast area at all; the brake around it was green and rank.

We went up to the parasol business, the air lock, if that is what it was. The edge was jammed down tight on the little mud turtle; the armor of the tank was crushed in, as one might crush a pasteboard box with the hand. Those mud turtles are built to launch five hundred feet deep in water; they are
strong
.

Well, I suppose this one was strong. The parasol arrangement had damaged it, but the air lock had not closed. On the other hand the metal, or whatever the spaceship’s door was made of, was unmarked by the exchange.

The Old Man turned to me. “Wait here with Mary.”

“You’re not going in there by yourself?”

“Yes. There may be very little time.”

The kid spoke up. “I’m to stay with you, sir. That’s what the commander said.”

“Very well, sir,” the Old Man agreed. “Come along.” He peered over the edge, then knelt and lowered himself by his hands. The kid followed him. I felt burned up—but had no desire to argue the arrangements.

They disappeared into the hole. Mary turned to me and said, “Sam—I don’t like this. I’m afraid.”

She startled me. I was afraid myself—but I had not expected her to be. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Do we have to stay? He did not say so, quite.”

I considered it. “If you want to go back to the car I’ll take you back.”

“Well…no, Sam, I guess we have to stay. Come closer to me.” She was trembling.

I don’t know how long it was before they stuck their heads over the rim. The youngster climbed out and the Old Man told him to stand guard. “Come on,” he said to us, “it’s safe—I think.”

“The hell it is,” I told him, but I went because Mary was already starting. The Old Man helped her down.

“Mind your head,” he said. “Low bridge all the way.”

It is a platitude that unhuman races produce unhuman works, but very few humans have ever been inside a Venerian labyrinth and still fewer have seen the Martian ruins—and I was not one of the few. I don’t know what I expected. Superficially the inside of the saucer was not, I suppose, too startling, but it was strange. It had been thought out by unhuman brains, ones which did not depend on human ideas in fabricating, brains which had never heard of the right angle and the straight line or which regarded them as unnecessary or undesirable. We found ourselves in a very small oblate chamber and from there we crawled through a tube about four feet thick, a tube which seemed to wind down into the ship and which glowed from all its surface with a reddish light.

The tube held an odd and somewhat distressing odor, as if of marsh gas, and mixed with it faintly was the reek of dead slugs. That and the reddish glow and the total lack of heat response from the wall of the tube as my palms pressed against it gave me the unpleasant fancy that I was crawling through the gut of some unearthly behemoth rather than exploring a strange machine.

The tube branched like an artery and there we came across our first Titanian androgyne. He—let me call it “he”—was sprawled on his back, like a child sleeping, his head pillowed on his slug. There was a suggestion of a smile on the little rosebud mouth; at first I did not realize that he was dead.

At first sight the similarities between the Titanian people and ourselves are more noticeable than the differences; we impress what we expect to see on what we do see, as a wind-sculptured rock may look like a human head or a dancing bear. Take the pretty little “mouth” for example; how was I to know that it was an organ for breathing solely?

Conceded that they are not human and that, despite the casual similarities of four limbs and a head-like protuberance, we are less like them than is a bullfrog like a bullpup; nevertheless the general effect is pleasing, not frightening, and faintly human. “Elfin” I should say—the elves of Saturn’s moons. Had we met them before the slugs we call titans possessed them I think we could have gotten along with them. Judged by their ability to build the saucers they were our equals—if they did build them. (Certainly the slugs did not build them; slugs are not builders but thieves, cosmic cuckoos.)

But I am letting my own later thoughts get in the way. When I saw the little fellow I managed to draw my gun. The Old Man, anticipating my reaction, turned and said, “Take it easy. It’s dead—they are all dead, smothered in oxygen when the tank ruined their air seal.”

I still had my gun out. “I want to burn the slug,” I insisted. “It may still be alive.” It was not covered by the horny shell we had lately come to expect but was naked, moist and ugly.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself. It can’t possibly hurt you.”

“Why not?”

“Wrong chemistry. That slug can’t live on an oxygen breather.” He crawled across the little body, giving me no chance to shoot had I decided to. Mary, always so quick with a gun, had not drawn but had shrunk against my side and was breathing in sharp little sobbing gasps. The Old Man stopped and said patiently, “Coming, Mary?”

She choked and then gasped, “Let’s go back! Let’s get out of here!”

I said, “She’s right. This is no job for three people; this is something for a research team and proper equipment.”

He paid no attention to me. “It has to be done, Mary. You know that. And you have to be the one to do it.”

“Why does she have to do it?” I demanded angrily.

Again he ignored me. “Well, Mary?”

From somewhere inside herself she called on reserves. Her breathing became normal, her features relaxed, and she crawled across the slug-ridden elfin body with the serenity of a queen going to the gallows. I lumbered after them, still hampered by my gun and trying not to touch the body.

We came at last to a large chamber. It may have been the control room, for there were many of the dead little elfin creatures in it, though I saw nothing resembling (to my eye) instruments or machinery. Its inner surface was cavitated and picked out with lights much brighter than the reddish illumination and the chamber space was festooned with processes as meaningless to me as the convolutions of a brain. I was troubled again with the thought—completely wrong, I know now—that the ship itself was a living organism.

The Old Man paid no attention but crawled on through and into another ruddy-glowing tube. We followed its contortions to a place where it widened out to ten feet or more with a “ceiling” overhead almost tall enough to let us stand erect. But that was not what caught our eyes; the walls were no longer opaque.

On each side of us, beyond transparent membranes, were thousands on thousands of slugs, swimming, floating, writhing in some fluid which sustained them. Each tank had an inner diffuse light of its own and I could see back into the palpitating mass—and I wanted to scream.

I still had my gun out. The Old Man reached back and placed his hand over the bell of it. “Don’t yield to temptation,” he warned me. “You don’t want to let
that
loose in
here
. Those are for
us
.”

Mary looked at them with a face too calm. Thinking back, I doubt that she was fully conscious in the ordinary sense. I looked at her, glanced back at the walls of that ghoulish aquarium, and said urgently, “Let’s get out of here if we can—then just bomb it out of existence.”

“No,” he said quietly, “there is more. Come.” The tube narrowed in again, then enlarged and we were again in a somewhat smaller chamber like that of the slugs. Again there were transparent walls and again there were things floating beyond them.

I had to look twice before I could fully make out and believe what I saw.

Floating just beyond the wall, face down, was the body of a man—a human, Earth-born man—about forty to fifty years old. He was grizzled and almost bald. His arms were curved across his chest and his knees were drawn up, as if he were sleeping safe in bed—or in the womb.

I watched him, thinking terrible thoughts. He was not alone; there were more beyond him, male and female, young and old—but he was the only one I could see properly and he got my attention. I was sure that he was dead; it did not occur to me to think otherwise—then I saw his mouth working—and then I wished he were dead.