The Puppet Masters

  “At my cabin in the mountains,” I told her.

  “I didn’t know you had a cabin in the mountains. I thought you were headed for my apartment.”

  “What, and risk those bear traps? Anyhow, it’s not mine; it’s ours.”

  She kissed me again and I loused up the landing. She slid out ahead of me while I was securing the board, then I followed and found her staring at my shack. “Sweetheart, it’s beautiful!”

  “You can’t beat the Adirondacks,” I agreed. There was a slight haze with the sun low in the west, giving that wonderful, depth upon depth, stereo look that you never get anywhere else. “I picked this place for the view.”

  She glanced at it and said, “Yes, yes—but I didn’t mean that. I meant your—our cabin. Let’s go inside, right now.”

  “Suits,” I agreed, “but it’s really just a simple shack.” Which it was—not even an indoor pool. I had kept it that way on purpose; when I came up here I didn’t want to feel that I had brought the city with me. The shell was conventional steel-and-fiberglass construction but I had had it veneered in duroslabs which could not be told from real logs unless you took a knife to them. The inside was just as simple—a big living room with a real, wood-burning fireplace, deep plain-colored rugs, and plenty of low chairs. The services were all in a Kompacto special, the shell of which was buried under the foundation—air-conditioner, power pack, cleansing system, sound equipment, plumbing, radiation alarm, servos—everything but the deep-freeze and the other kitchen equipment, out of sight and out of mind. Even the stereo screens were covered up and would not be noticed unless in use. It was about as near as a man could get to a real log cabin and still have inside plumbing.

  “I think it’s just lovely,” Mary said seriously. “I wouldn’t want to have an ostentatious place.”

  “You and me both.” I worked the combo and the front door dilated; Mary was inside at once. “Hey! Come back here!” I yelled.

  She did so. “What’s the matter, Sam? Did I do something wrong?”

  “You sure did.” I dragged her back to me, then swung her up in my arms and carried her across the threshold. I kissed her as I put her down. “There. Now you are in your own house, properly.”

  The lights had come on as we entered the house. She looked around her, then turned and threw her arms around my neck. “Oh, darling, darling! I can’t see—my eyes are all blurry.”

  Mine were blurry, too, so we took time out for mutual treatment. Then she started wandering around, touching things. “Sam, if I had planned it all myself, it would have been just this way.”

  “It hasn’t but one bathroom,” I apologized. “We’ll have to rough it a bit.”

  “I don’t mind. In fact I’m glad; now I know you didn’t bring any of those women of yours up here.”

  “What women?”

  “You know darn well what women. If you had been planning this as a nest, you would have included a woman’s bathroom.”

  “You know too much.”

  She did not answer but wandered on out into the kitchen. I heard her squeal. “What’s the matter?” I asked, following her out.

  “I never expected to find a real kitchen in a bachelor’s lodge.”

  “I’m not a bad cook myself. I wanted a kitchen so I bought one.”

  “I’m so glad. Now I will cook you dinner.”

  “It’s your kitchen; suit yourself. But don’t you want to wash up? You can have first crack at the shower if you want it. And tomorrow we’ll get a catalog and you can pick out a bathroom of your own. We’ll have it flown in.”

  “No hurry,” she said. “You take the first shower. I want to start dinner.”

  So I did. I guess she did not have any trouble figuring out the controls and filing system in the kitchen, for about fifteen minutes later while I was whistling away in the shower, letting the hot water soak in, I heard a tap on the shower door. I looked through the translucent panel and saw Mary silhouetted there.

  “May I come in?” she called out.

  “Sure, sure!” I said, “Plenty of room.” I opened the door and looked at her. She looked good. For a moment she stood there, letting me look but with a sweet shyness on her face that I had never seen before.

  I put on an expression of utter surprise and said, “Honey! What’s the matter? Are you sick?”

  She looked startled out of her wits and said, “Me? What do you mean?”

  “There’s not a gun on you anywhere.”

  She giggled and came at me. “Idiot!” she squealed and started to tickle me. I got her left arm in a bonebreaker but she countered with one of the nastiest judo tricks that ever came out of Japan. Fortunately I knew the answer to it and then we were both on the bottom of the shower and she was yelling, “Let me up! You’re getting my hair all wet.”

  “Does it matter?” I asked, not moving. I liked it there.

  “I guess not,” she answered softly and kissed me. So I let her up and we rubbed each other’s bruises and giggled. It was quite the nicest shower I have ever had.

  Mary and I slipped into domesticity as if we had been married for twenty years. Oh, not that our honeymoon was humdrum, far from it, nor that there weren’t a thousand things we still had to learn about each other—the point was that we already seemed to know the necessary things about each other that made us married. Especially Mary.

  I don’t remember those days too clearly, yet I remember every second of them. I went around feeling gay and a bit confused. My Uncle Egbert used to achieve much the same effect with a jug of corn liquor, but we did not even take tempus pills, not then. I was happy; I had forgotten what it was like to be happy, had not known that I was not happy. Interested, I used to be—yes. Diverted, entertained, amused—but not happy.

  We did not turn on a stereo, we did not read a book—except that Mary read aloud some Oz books that I had. Priceless items, they were, left to me by my great-grandfather; she had never seen any. But that did not take us back into the world; it took us farther out.

  The second day we did go down to the village; I wanted to show Mary off. Down there they think I am a writer and I encourage the notion, so I stopped to buy a couple of tubes and a condenser for my typer and a roll of copy tape, though I certainly had no intention of doing any writing, not this trip. I got to talking with the storekeeper about the slugs and Schedule Bare Back—sticking to my public persona of course. There had been a local false alarm and a native in the next town had been shot by a trigger-happy constable for absent-mindedly showing up in public in a shirt. The storekeeper was indignant. I suggested that it was his own fault; these were war conditions.

  He shook his head. “The way I see it we would have had no trouble at all if we had tended to our own business. The Lord never intended men to go out into space. We should junk the space stations and stay home; then we would be all right.”

  I pointed out that the slugs came here in their own ships; we did not go after them—and got a warning signal from Mary not to talk too much.

  The storekeeper placed both hands on the counter and leaned toward me. “We had no trouble before space travel; you’ll grant that?”

  I conceded the point. “Well?” he said triumphantly.

  I shut up. How can you argue?

  We did not go into town after that and saw no one and spoke to no one. On the way home (we were on foot) we passed close to the shack of John the Goat, our local hermit. Some say that John used to keep goats; I know he smelled like one. He did what little caretaking I required and we respected each other, that is, we saw each other only when strictly necessary and then as briefly as possible. But, seeing him, I waved.

  He waved back. He was dressed as usual, stocking cap, an old army blouse, shorts, and sandals. I thought of warning him that a man had been shot nearby for not complying with the bare-to-the-waist order, but decided against it. John was the perfect anarchist; advice would have made him only more stubborn. Instead I cupped my hands and shouted, “Send up the Pirate!” He
waved again and we went on without coming within two hundred feet of him, which was about right unless he was downwind.

  “Who’s the Pirate, darling?” Mary asked.

  “You’ll see.”

  Which she did; as soon as we got back the Pirate came in, for I had his little door keyed to his own meow so that he could let himself in and out—the Pirate being a large and rakish tom cat, half red Persian and half travelling salesman. He came in strutting, told me what he thought of people who stayed away so long, then headbumped my ankle in forgiveness. I reached down and roughed him up, then he inspected Mary.

  I was watching Mary. She had dropped to her knees and was making the sounds used by people who understand cat protocol, but the Pirate was looking her over suspiciously. Suddenly he jumped into her arms and commenced to buzz like a faulty fuel meter, while bumping her under the chin.

  I sighed loudly. “That’s a relief,” I announced. “For a moment I didn’t think I was going to be allowed to keep you.”

  Mary looked up and smiled. “You need not have worried; I get along with cats. I’m two-thirds cat myself.”

  “What’s the other third?”

  She made a face at me. “You’ll find out.” She was scratching the Pirate under the chin; he was stretching his neck and accepting it, with an expression of indecent and lascivious pleasure. I noticed that her hair just matched his fur.

  “Old John takes care of him while I’m away,” I explained, “but the Pirate belongs to me—or vice versa.”

  “I figured that out,” Mary answered, “and now I belong to the Pirate, too; don’t I, Pirate?”

  The cat did not answer but continued his shameless lallygagging—but it was clear that she was right. Truthfully I was relieved; aelurophobes cannot understand why cats matter to aelurophiles, but if Mary had turned out not to be one of the lodge it would have fretted me.

  From then on the cat was with us—or with Mary—almost all the time, except when I shut him out of our bedroom. That I would not stand for, though both Mary and the Pirate thought it small of me. We even took him with us when we went down the canyon for target practice. I suggested to Mary that it was safer to leave him behind but she said, “See to it that you don’t shoot him. I won’t.”

  I shut up, somewhat stung. I am a good shot and remain so by unrelenting practice at every opportunity—even on my honeymoon. No, that’s not quite straight; I would have skipped practice on that occasion had it not turned out that Mary really liked to shoot. Mary is not just a good trained shot; she is the real thing, an Annie Oakley. She tried to teach me, but it can’t be taught, not that sort of shooting.

  I asked why she carried more than one gun. “You might need more than one,” she told me. “Here—take my gun away from me.”

  I went through the motions of a standing, face-to-face disarm, bare hands against gun. She avoided it easily and said sharply, “What are you doing? Disarming me, or asking me to dance? Make it good.”

  So I made it good. I’ll never be a match-medal shot but I stood at the top of my class in barroom. If she had not given in to it, I would have broken her wrist.

  I had her gun. Then I realized that a second gun was pressing against my belly button. It was a lady’s social gun, but perfectly capable of making two dozen widows without recharging. I looked down, saw that the safety was off, and knew that my beautiful bride had only to tense one muscle to burn a hole through me. Not a wide one, but sufficient.

  “Where in the deuce did you find that?” I asked—and well I might, for neither one of us had bothered to dress when we came out. The area was very deserted and often it did not seem worthwhile to take the trouble; it was my land.

  So I was much surprised as I would have sworn that the only gun Mary had with her was the one she had carried in her sweet little hand.

  “It was high up on my neck, under my hair,” she said demurely. “See?” I looked. I knew a phone could be hidden there but I had not thought of it for a gun—though of course I don’t use a lady-size weapon and I don’t wear my hair in long flame-colored curls.

  Then I looked again, for she had a third gun shoved against my ribs. “Where did that one come from?” I asked.

  She giggled. “Sheer misdirection; it’s been in plain sight all the time.” She would not tell me anything further and I never did figure it out. She should have clanked when she walked—but she did not. Oh my, no!

  I found I could teach her a few things about hand-to-hand, which salved my pride. Bare hands are more useful than guns anyhow; they will save your life oftener. Not that Mary was not good at it herself; she packed sudden death in each hand and eternal sleep in her feet. However, she had the habit, whenever she lost a fall, of going limp and kissing me. Once, instead of kissing her back, I shook her and told her she was not taking it seriously. Instead of cutting out the nonsense, she continued to remain limp, let her voice go an octave lower, and said, “Don’t you realize, my darling, that these are not my weapons?”

  I knew that she did not mean that guns were her weapons; she meant something older and more primitive. True, she could fight like a bad-tempered Kodiak bear and I respected her for it, but she was no Amazon. An Amazon doesn’t look that way with her head on a pillow. Mary’s true strength lay in her other talents.

  Which reminds me; from her I learned how it was that I was rescued from the slugs. Mary herself had prowled the city for days, not finding me, but reporting accurately the progress with which the city was being “secured”. Had she not been able to spot a possessed man, we might have lost many agents fruitlessly—and I might never have gotten free from my master. As a result of the data she brought in, the Old Man drew back and concentrated on the entrances and exits to the city. And I was rescued, though they weren’t waiting for me in particular…at least I don’t suppose they were.

  Or maybe they were. Something Mary said led me to think that the Old Man and she had worked watch on and watch off, heel-and-toe, covering the city’s main launching platform, once it was evident that there was a focal point active in the city. But that could not have been correct—the Old Man would not have neglected his job to search for one agent. I must have misunderstood her.

  I never got a chance to pursue the subject; Mary did not like digging into the past. I asked her once why the Old Man had relieved her as a presidential guard. She said, “I stopped being useful at it,” and would not elaborate. She knew that I eventually would learn the reason: that the slugs had found out about sex, thus rendering her no longer useful as a touchstone for possessed males. But I did not know it then; she found the subject repulsive and refused to talk about it. Mary spent less time borrowing trouble than anyone I ever knew.

  So little that I almost forgot, during that holiday from the world, what it was we were up against.

  Although she would not talk about herself, she let me talk about myself. As I grew still more relaxed and still happier I tried to explain what had been eating me all my life. I told her about resigning from the service and the knocking around I had done before I swallowed my pride and went to work for the Old Man. “I’m a peaceable guy,” I told her, “but what’s the matter with me? The Old Man is the only one I’ve ever been able to subordinate myself to—and I still fight with him. Why, Mary? Is there something wrong with me?”

  I had my head in her lap; she picked it up and kissed me. “Heavens, boy, don’t you know? There’s nothing really wrong with you; it’s what has been done to you.”

  “But I’ve always been that way—until now.”

  “I know, ever since you were a child. No mother and an arrogantly brilliant father—you’ve been slapped around so much that you have no confidence in yourself.”

  Her answer surprised me so much that I reared up. Me? No confidence in myself? “Huh?” I said. “How can you say that? I’m the cockiest rooster in the yard.”

  “Yes. Or you used to be. Things will be better now.” And there’s where it stood for she took advantage of my change in posi
tion to stand up and say, “Let’s go look at the sunset.”

  “Sunset?” I answered. “Can’t be—we just finished breakfast.” But she was right and I was wrong, a common occurrence.

  The mix-up about the time of day jerked me back to reality. “Mary, how long have we been up here? What’s the date?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You’re dam right it matters. It’s been more than a week. I’m sure. One of these days our phones will start screaming and then it’s back to the treadmill.”

  “In the meantime what difference does it make?”

  She was right but I still wanted to know what day it was. I could have found out by switching on a stereo screen, but I would probably have bumped into a newscast—and I did not want that; I was still pretending that Mary and I were away in a different world, a safe world, where titans did not exist. “Mary,” I said fretfully, “how many tempus pills have you?”

  “None.”

  “Well—I’ve got enough for both of us. Let’s stretch it out, make it last a long time. Suppose we have just twenty-four more hours; we could fine it down into a month, subjective time.”

  “No.”

  “Why not? Let’s carpe that old diem before it gets away from us.”

  She put a hand on my arm and looked up into my eyes. “No, darling, it’s not for me. I must live each moment as it comes and not let it be spoiled by worrying about the moment ahead.” I suppose I looked stubborn for she went on, “If you want to take them, I won’t mind, but please don’t ask me to.”

  “Confound it. I’m not going on a joy ride alone.” She did not answer, which is the damnedest way of winning an argument I know of.