“I’ll put you another question with no answer,” I said. “If one space ship lands in Iowa yesterday, how many will land in North Dakota tomorrow? Or in Brazil?”
“Yes, there’s that.” He looked still more troubled. “I’ll answer it by telling you how long is your piece of rope.”
“Huh?”
“Long enough to choke you to death. You kids go wash up and enjoy yourselves; you may not have another chance. Don’t leave the offices.”
I went back to Cosmetics, got my own skin color back and in general resumed my normal appearance, had a soak and a massage, and then went to the staff lounge in search of a drink and some company. I looked around, not knowing whether I was looking for a blonde, brunette, or redhead, but feeling fairly sure that I could spot the right chassis.
It was a redhead. Mary was in a booth, sucking on a drink and looking much as she had looked when she was introduced to me as my sister. “Hi, Sis,” I said, sliding in beside her.
She smiled and answered, “Hello, Bud. Drag up a rock,” while moving to make room for me.
I dialed for bourbon and water which I needed for medicinal purposes and then said, “Is this your real appearance?”
She shook her head. “Not at all. Zebra stripes and two heads. What’s yours?”
“My mother smothered me with a pillow the first time she saw me, so I never got a chance to find out.”
She again looked me over with that side-of-beef scrutiny, then said, “I can understand her actions, but I am probably more hardened than she was. You’ll do, Bud.”
“Thanks.” I went on, “Let’s drop this ‘Bud-and-Sis’ routine; I find it gives me inhibitions.”
“Hmm… I think you need inhibitions.”
“Me? Not at all. Never any violence with me; I’m more the ‘Barkis-is-willing’ type.” I might have added that, if I laid a hand on her and she happened not to like it. I’d bet that I would draw back a bloody stump. The Old Man’s kids are never sissies.
She smiled. “So? Well, note it down that Miss Barkis is not willing, at least not this evening.” She put down her glass. “Drink up and let’s reorder.”
We did so and continued to sit there, feeling warm and good, and, for the moment, not worried. There aren’t many hours like that, especially in our profession; it makes one savor them.
One of the nicest things about Mary was that she did not turn on the sex, except for professional purposes. I think she knew—I’m sure she knew—what a load of it she possessed. But she was too much of a gentleman to use it socially. She kept it turned down low, just enough to keep us both warm and comfortable.
While we sat there, not saying much, I got to thinking how well she would look on the other side of a fireplace. My job being what it was, I had never thought seriously about getting married—and after all, a babe is just a babe; why get excited? But Mary was an agent herself; talking to her would not be like shouting off Echo Mountain. I realized that I had been lonely for one hell of a long time.
“Mary—”
“Yes?”
“Are you married?”
“Eh? Why do you ask? As a matter of fact I’m not—now. But what business—I mean, why does it matter?”
“Well, it might,” I persisted.
She shook her head.
“I’m serious,” I went on. “Look me over. I’ve got both hands and both feet. I’m fairly young, and I don’t track mud in the house. You could do worse.”
She laughed, but her laugh was kindly. “And you could work up better lines than that. I am sure they must have been extemporaneous.”
“They were.”
“And I won’t hold them against you. In fact, I’ll forget them. Listen, wolf, your technique is down; just because a woman tells you that she is not going to sleep with you tonight is no reason to lose your head and offer her a contract. Some women would be just mean enough to hold you to it.”
“I meant it,” I said peevishly.
“So? What salary do you offer?”
“Damn your pretty eyes. If you want that type of contract, I’ll go along; you can keep your pay and I’ll allot half of mine to you…unless you want to retire.”
She shook her head. “I didn’t mean it; I’d never insist on a settlement contract, not with a man I was willing to marry in the first place—”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“I was just trying to make you see that you yourself were not serious.” She looked me over soberly. “But perhaps you are,” she added in a warm, soft voice.
“I am.”
She shook her head again. “Agents should not marry. You know that.”
“Agents shouldn’t marry anyone but agents.”
She started to answer, but stopped suddenly. My own phone was talking in my ear, the Old Man’s voice, and I knew she was hearing the same thing. “Come into my office,” he said.
We both got up without saying anything. Mary stopped me at the door, put a hand on my arm, and looked up into my eyes. “That is why it is silly to talk about marriage. We’ve got this job to finish. All the time we’ve been talking, you’ve been thinking about the job and so have I.”
“I have not.”
“Don’t play with me! Consider this, Sam—suppose you were married and you woke up to find one of those things on your wife’s shoulders, possessing her.” There was horror in her eyes as she went on, “Suppose I woke up and found one of them on your shoulders.”
“I’ll chance it. And I won’t let one get to you.”
She touched my cheek. “I don’t believe you would.”
We went on into the Old Man’s office.
He looked up just long enough to say, “Come along. We’re leaving.”
“Where to?” I answered. “Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“White House. See the President. Shut up.”
I shut.
III
At the beginning of a forest fire or an epidemic there is a short time when a minimum of correct action will contain and destroy. The B. W. boys express it in exponential equations, but you don’t need math to understand it; it depends on early diagnosis and prompt action before the thing gets out of hand. What the President needed to do the Old Man had already figured out—declare a national emergency, fence off the Des Moines area, and shoot anybody who tried to slip out, be it a cocker spaniel or grandma with her cookie jar. Then let them out one at a time, stripping them and searching them for parasites. Meantime, use the radar screen, the rocket boys, and the space stations to spot and smash any new landings.
Warn all the other nations including those behind the Curtain, ask for their help—but don’t be fussy about international law, for this was a fight for racial survival against an outside invader. For the moment it did not matter where they came from—Mars, Venus, the Jovian satellites, or outside the system entirely. Repel the invasion.
The Old Man had cracked the case, analyzed it, and come up with the right answer in a little more than twenty-four hours. His unique gift was the ability to reason logically with unfamiliar, hard-to-believe facts as easily as with the commonplace. Not much, eh? I have never met anyone else who could do it wholeheartedly. Most minds stall dead when faced with facts which conflict with basic beliefs; “I-just-can’t-believe-it” is all one word to highbrows and dimwits alike.
But not to the Old Man—and he had the ear of the President.
The Secret Service guards gave us the works, politely. An X-ray went beep! and I surrendered my heater. Mary turned out to be a walking arsenal; the machine gave four beeps and a hiccough, although you would have sworn she couldn’t hide a tax receipt under what she was wearing. The Old Man surrendered his cane without waiting to be asked; I got the notion he did not want it to be X-rayed.
Our audio capsules gave them trouble. They showed up both by X-ray and by metal detector, but the guards weren’t equipped for surgical operations. There was a hurried conference with a presidential secretary and the head guard ruled that a
nything embedded in the flesh need not be classed as a potential weapon.
They printed us, photographed our retinas, and ushered us into a waiting room. The Old Man was whisked out and in to see the President alone.
“I wonder why we were brought along?” I asked Mary. “The Old Man knows everything we know.”
She did not answer, so I spent the time reviewing in my mind the loopholes in the security methods used to guard the President. They do such things much better behind the Curtain; an assassin with any talent could have beaten our safeguards with ease. I got to feeling indignant about it.
After a while we were ushered in. I found I had stage fright so badly I was stumbling over my feet. The Old Man introduced us and I stammered. Mary just bowed.
The President said he was glad to see us and turned on that smile, the way you see it in the stereocasts—and he made us feel that he was glad to see us. I felt all warm inside and no longer embarrassed.
And no longer worried. The President, with the Old Man’s help, would take action and the dirty horror we had seen would be cleaned up.
The Old Man directed me to report all that I had done and seen and heard on this assignment. I made it brief but complete. I tried to catch his eye when it came to the part about killing Barnes, but he wasn’t having any—so I left out the Old Man’s order to shoot and made it clear that I had shot to protect another agent—Mary—when I saw Barnes reach for his gun. The Old Man interrupted me. “Make your report complete.”
So I filled in the Old Man’s order to shoot. The President threw the Old Man a glance at the correction, the only expression he showed. I went on about the parasite thing, went on, in fact, up to that present moment, as nobody told me to stop.
Then it was Mary’s turn. She fumbled in trying to explain to the President why she expected to get some sort of response out of normal men—and had not gotten it out of the McLain boys, the state sergeant, and Barnes. The President helped her…by smiling warmly, managing to bow without getting up, and saying, “My dear young lady, I quite believe it.”
Mary blushed, then went on. The President listened gravely while she finished. He asked a couple of questions, then sat still for several minutes.
Presently he looked up and spoke to the Old Man. “Andrew,” he said, “your section has been invaluable. On at least two occasions your reports have tipped the balance in crucial occasions in history.”
The Old Man snorted. “So it’s ‘no’, is it?”
“I did not say so.”
“You were about to.”
The President shrugged. “I was going to suggest that your young people withdraw, but now it does not matter. Andrew, you are a genius, but even geniuses make mistakes. They overwork themselves and lose their judgment. I’m not a genius but I learned to relax about forty years ago. How long has it been since you had a vacation?”
“Damn your vacations! See here, Tom, I anticipated this; that’s why I brought witnesses. They are neither drugged nor instructed. Call in your psych crew; try to shake their stories.”
The President shook his head. “You wouldn’t have brought witnesses who could be cracked. I’m sure you are cleverer about such things than anyone whom I could bring in to test them. Take this young man—he was willing to risk a murder charge to protect you. You inspire loyalty, Andrew. As for the young lady, really, Andrew, I can’t start what amounts to war on a woman’s intuition.”
Mary took a step forward. “Mr. President,” she said very earnestly, “I do know. I know every time. I can’t tell you how I know—but those were not normal male men.”
He hesitated, then answered, “I do not dispute you. But you have not considered an obvious explanation—that they actually were, ah, ‘harem guards’. Pardon me, Miss. There are always such unfortunates in the population. By the laws of chance you ran across four in one day.”
Mary shut up. The Old Man did not. “God damn it, Tom—” I shuddered; you don’t talk to the President that way. “—I knew you when you were an investigating senator and I was a key man in your investigations. You know I wouldn’t bring you this fairy tale if there were any way to explain it away. Facts can’t be ignored; they’ve got to be destroyed, or faced up to. How about that space ship? What was in it? Why couldn’t I even reach the spot where it landed?” He hauled out the photograph taken by Space Station Beta and shoved it under the President’s nose.
The President seemed unperturbed. “Ah, yes, facts. Andrew, both you and I have a passion for facts. But I have several sources of information other than your section. Take this photo—you made quite a point of it when you phoned. I’ve checked the matter. The metes and bounds of the McLain farm as recorded in the local county courthouse check precisely with the triangulated latitude and longitude of this object on this photograph.” The President looked up. “Once I absent-mindedly turned off a block too soon and got lost in my own neighborhood. You weren’t even in your own neighborhood, Andrew.”
“Tom—”
“Yes, Andrew?”
“You did not trot out there and check those courthouse maps yourself?”
“Of course not.”
“Thank God for that—or you would be carrying three pounds of pulsing tapioca between your shoulder blades this minute—and God save the United States! You can be sure of this: the courthouse clerk and whatever agent was sent to see him, both are hag-ridden by filthy parasites this very moment.” The Old Man stared at the ceiling. “Yes, and the Des Moines chief of police, newspaper editors around there, dispatchers, cops, all sorts of key people. Tom, I don’t know what we are up against, but they know what we are, and they are pinching off the nerve cells of our social organism before true messages can get back—or they cover up the true reports with false ones, just as they did with Barnes. Mr. President, you must order an immediate, drastic quarantine of the whole area. There is no other hope!”
“Barnes,” the President repeated softly, as if he had heard nothing else. “Andrew, I had hoped to spare you this, but—” He broke off and flipped a key at his desk. “Get me stereo station WDES, Des Moines, the manager’s office.”
Shortly a screen lighted on his desk; he touched another switch and a solid display in the wall lighted up. We were looking into the room we had been in only a few hours before.
Looking into it past the shoulders of a man who filled most of the screen—Barnes.
Or his twin. When I kill a man, I expect him to stay dead. I was shaken but I still believed in myself—and my heater.
The man in the display said, “You asked for me, Mr. President?” He sounded as if he were dazzled by the honor.
“Yes, thank you. Mr. Barnes, do you recognize any of these people?”
He looked surprised. “I’m afraid not. Should I?”
The Old Man interrupted. “Tell him to call in his office force.”
The President looked quizzical but did just that. “Barnes” looked puzzled but complied. They trooped in, girls mostly, and I recognized the secretary who sat outside the manager’s door. One of them squealed, “Ooh—it’s the President,” and they all fell to buzzing.
None of them identified us—not surprising with the Old Man and me, but Mary’s appearance was just as it had been in that same office, and I will bet that Mary’s looks would be burned into the mind of any woman who had ever seen her.
But I noticed one thing about them—every single one of them was round-shouldered.
The President eased us out. He put a hand on the Old Man’s shoulder. “Seriously, Andrew, take that vacation.” He flashed the famous smile. “The Republic won’t fall—I’ll worry it through till you get back.”
Ten minutes later we were standing in the wind on the Rock Creek platform. The Old Man seemed shrunken and, for the first time, old. “What now, boss?”
“Eh? For you two, nothing. You are both on leave until recalled.”
“I’d like to take another look at Barnes’s office.”
“Don’t go near the pl
ace. Stay out of Iowa. That’s an order.”
“Mmm—what are you going to do, if I may ask?”
“You heard the President, didn’t you? I am going down to Florida and lie in the sun and wait for the world to go to hell. If you have any sense, you’ll do the same. There’s damned little time.”
He squared his shoulders and stumped away. I turned to speak to Mary, but she was gone. His advice seemed awfully good, and it had suddenly occurred to me that waiting for the end of the world might not be too bad, with her help.
I looked around quickly but could not spot her. I trotted off and overtook the Old Man. “Excuse me, Boss. Where did Mary go?”
“Huh? On leave no doubt. Don’t bother me.”
I considered trying to relay to her through the Section circuit, when I remembered that I did not know her right name, nor her code, nor her I. D. number. I thought of trying to bull it through by describing her, but that was foolishness. Only Cosmetics Records knows the original appearance of an agent—and they won’t talk. All I knew about her was that she had twice appeared as a redhead, at least once by choice—and that, for my taste, she was “why men fight”. Try punching that into a phone!
Instead I found a room for the night. After I found it I wondered why I had not left the Capital and gone back to my own apartment. Then I wondered if the blonde were still in it. Then I wondered who the blonde was, anyway? Then I went to sleep.
IV
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.