Robert Heinlein - The Puppet Masters

The phone would not work. Perhaps I had jiggered it in one of the spots of exercise I had been forced to take that day but I had never had one fail me before. Printed circuits, transistors, and the whole works being embedded in plastic made those units almost as shock resistant as a proximity fuse. I put it back in my pocket, feeling that this was one of those days when it was just not worthwhile to get out of bed. I turned to the car's communicator and punched the emergency tab.

"Control," I called out. "Control! This is an emergency!"

The screen lighted up and I was looking at a young man. He was, I saw with relief, bare-skinned so far as he appeared in the screen. "Control answering-Block Fox Eleven. What are you doing in the air? I've been trying to raise you ever since you entered my block."

"Never mind!" I snapped. "Patch me into the nearest military circuit. This is crash priority!"

He looked uncertain, but the screen flickered and went blank. Shortly another picture built up showing a military message center-and that did my heart good, as every person in sight was stripped to the waist. The foreground was occupied by a young watch officer; I could have kissed him. Instead I said, "Military emergency-patch me through to the Pentagon and there to the White House."

"Who are you?"

"No time, no time! I'm a civil agent and you wouldn't recognize my I.D. if you saw it. Hurry!"

I might have talked him into it but he was shouldered out of scan by an older man, a wing commander by his cap insignia. "Land at once!" was all that he said.

"Look, skipper," I said. "This is a military emergency; you've got to put me through. I-"

"This is a military emergency," he interrupted, "and all civil craft have been grounded for the past three hours. Land at once."

"But I've got to-"

"Land or be shot down. We are tracking you; I am about to launch an interceptor to burst a half mile ahead of you. Hold your course, or make any maneuver but landing, and the next one will burst on."

"Will you listen, please? I'll land, but I've got to get-" He switched off, leaving me with my jaw pumping air.

The first burst seemed considerably short of a half mile ahead of me; I landed.

I cracked up in doing it, but without hurting myself or my passenger. I did not have long to wait. They had me flare-lighted and were swooping down on me before I had satisfied myself that the boat wouldn't move. They took me in and I met the wing commander personally. He even put my message through after his psych squad got through giving me the antidote for the sleep test. By then it was one-thirteen, zone five-and Schedule Counter Blast had been underway for exactly that hour and thirteen minutes.

The Old Man listened to a summary, grunted, then told me to shut up and see him in the morning.

If the Old Man and I had gone to the National Zoological Gardens instead of sitting around in the park, it would not have been necessary for me to go to Kansas City. The ten titans we had captured at the joint session of Congress, plus two the next day, had been entrusted to the director of the zoo to be placed on the shoulders of unlucky anthropoids-chimps and orangutans, mostly. No gorillas.

The director had had the apes locked up in the zoo's veterinary hospital. Two chimpanzees, Abelard and Heloise, were caged together; they had always been mates and there seemed to be no reason to separate them. Maybe that sums up our psychological difficulty in dealing with the titans; even the men who transplanted the slugs to the apes still thought of the result as apes, rather than as titans.

The treatment cage next to that of the two chimps was occupied by a family of tuberculous gibbons. They were not used as hosts, since they were sick, and there was no communication between cages. They were shut one from another by sliding, gasketed panels and each cage had its own air-conditioning. I've been in worse hospitals; I remember one in the Ukraine-

Anyhow, the next morning the panel had been slid back and the gibbons and the chimps were all in together. Abelard, or possibly Heloise, had found some way to pick the lock. The lock was supposed to be monkey proof, but it was not ape-cum-titan proof. Don't blame the designer of the lock.

Two chimps plus two titans plus five gibbons-the next morning there were seven apes ridden by seven titans.

This was discovered two hours before I left for Kansas City, but the Old Man had not been notified. Had he been, he would have known that Kansas City was saturated. I might have figured it out for myself. Had the Old Man known about the gibbons, Schedule Counter Blast would not have taken place.

Schedule Counter Blast was the worst wet firecracker in military history. The evolution was beautifully worked out and the drops were made simultaneously just at midnight, zone five, on over ninety-six hundred communication points-newspaper offices, block controls, relay stations, and so forth. The raiding squad were the cream of our sky-borne forces, mostly veteran non-coms, and with them, technicians to put each communication point back into service.

Whereupon the President's speech and the visual display would go out from each local station; Schedule Bare Back would take effect all through the infected territory; and the war would be over, save for minor mopping up.

Ever see a bird hurt itself by flying into a glass window? The bird is not stupid; he simply did not have all the data.

By twenty-five minutes after midnight reports started coming in that such-and-such points were secured. A little later there were calls for help from other points. By one in the morning most of the reserves had been committed but the operation was clearly going well-so well, indeed, that unit commanders were landing and were reporting from the ground.

That was the last anybody ever heard of them.

Zone Red swallowed up the task force as if it had never existed-over eleven thousand military craft, more than a hundred and sixty thousand fighting men and technicians, seventy-one group commanders and-why go on? The United States had received its worst military setback since Black Sunday. Not in numbers, for there was not a city bombed, but in selected quality.

Let me make it clear that I am not criticizing Martinez, Rexton, the General Staff, or those poor devils who made the drop. The program was properly planned, it was based on what appeared to be a true picture, and the situation called for fast action with the best we had. If Rexton had sent any but his best boys he would have earned a court martial; the Republic was at stake and he had the sense to realize it.

But he did not know about the seven apes.

It was nearly daylight, so I understand, before Martinez and Rexton got it through their heads that the messages they had gotten back about successes were actually faked, fakes sent by their own men-our own men-but hag-ridden, possessed, and brought into the masquerade. After my report, more than an hour too late to stop the raids, the Old Man had tried to get them not to send in any more men, but they were flushed with success and anxious to make a clean sweep.

The Old Man asked the President to insist on visual checks of what was happening, but the operation was being controlled by relay through Space Station Alpha and there just aren't enough channels to parallel audio with video through a space station. Rexton had said, "They know what they are up against; quit worrying. As fast as we get local stations back in our hands, our boys will patch back into the ground relay net and you will have all the visual evidence you want."

The Old Man had pointed out that by then it would be too late. Rexton had burst out, "Confound it, man! -I can't stop soldiers in action to have them take pictures of bare backs. Do you want a thousand men to let themselves be killed just to quiet your jitters?"