I squirmed. “So it’s a hoax—but we lose six men. We’re going to look for them?”
“No, for we would not find them. We are going to try to find out why triangulation of this photograph—” He held up the teleshot taken from the space station. “—doesn’t quite jibe with the news reports—and why Des Moines stereo station shut up for a while.”
Mary spoke up for the first time. “I’d like to talk with those farm boys.”
I roaded the car about five miles this side of Grinnell and we started looking for the McLain farm—the news reports had named Vincent and George McLain as the culprits. It wasn’t hard to find. At a fork in the road was a big sign, professional in appearance: THIS WAY TO THE SPACESHIP. Shortly the road was parked both sides with duos and groundcars and triphibs. A couple of hastily-built stands dispensed cold drinks and souvenirs at the turn-off into the McLain place. A state cop was directing traffic.
“Pull up,” directed the Old Man. “Might as well see the fun, eh?”
“Right, Uncle Charlie,” I agreed.
The Old Man bounced out with only a trace of limp, swinging his cane. I handed Mary out and she snuggled up to me, grasping my arm. She looked up at me, managing to look both stupid and demure. “My, but you’re strong. Buddy.”
I wanted to slap her, but gave a self-conscious smirk instead. That poor-little-me routine—from an agent, from one of the Old Man’s agents. A smile from a tiger.
“Uncle Charlie” buzzed around, bothering state police, buttonholing people to give them unasked-for opinions, stopping to buy cigars at one of the stands, and in general giving a picture of a well-to-do, senile old fool, out for a holiday. He turned back to us and waved his cigar at a state sergeant. “The inspector says the whole thing is a fraud, my dears—a prank thought up by some boys. Shall we go?”
Mary looked disappointed. “No space ship?”
“There’s a space ship, if you want to call it that,” the cop answered. “Just follow the suckers, and you’ll find it. It’s ‘sergeant’, not ‘inspector’.”
“Uncle Charlie” pressed a cigar on him and we set out, across a pasture and into some woods. It cost a dollar to get through the gate and many of the potential suckers turned back. The path through the woods was rather deserted. I moved carefully, wishing for eyes in the back of my head instead of a phone. According to the book six agents had gone down this path and none had come back. I didn’t want it to be nine.
Uncle Charlie and Sis walked ahead, Mary chattering like a fool and somehow managing to be both shorter and younger than she had been on the trip out. We came to a clearing and there was the “space ship”.
It was the proper size, more than a hundred feet across, but it was whipped together out of light-gauge metal and sheet plastic, sprayed with aluminum. It was roughly the shape of two giant pie plates, face to face. Aside from that, it looked like nothing in particular. Nevertheless Mary squealed. “Oh, how exciting!”
A youngster, eighteen or nineteen, with a permanent sunburn and a pimply face, stuck his head out of a sort of hatch in the top of the monstrosity. “Care to see inside?” he called out. He added that it would be fifty cents a piece more and Uncle Charlie shelled out.
Mary hesitated at the hatch. Pimple face was joined by what appeared to be his twin and they started to hand her down in. She drew back and I moved in fast, intending to do any handling myself. My reasons were 99 percent professional; I could feel danger all through the place. “It’s dark in there,” she quavered.
“It’s perfectly safe,” the second young man said. “We’ve been taking sightseers through all day. I’m Vinc McLain, one of the owners. Come on, lady.”
Uncle Charlie peered down the hatch, like a cautious mother hen. “Might be snakes in there,” he decided. “Mary, I don’t think you had better go in.”
“Nothing to fear,” the first McLain said insistently. “It’s safe as houses.”
“Just keep the money, gentlemen.” Uncle Charlie glanced at his finger. “We’re late as it is. Let’s go, my dears.”
I followed them back up the path, my hackles up the whole way.
We got back to the car and I pulled out into the road. Once we were rolling, the Old Man said sharply, “Well? What did you see?”
I countered with, “Any doubt about that first report? The one that broke off?”
“None.”
“That thing over in the woods wouldn’t have fooled an agent, even in the dark. This wasn’t the ship he saw.”
“Of course not. What else?”
“How much would you say that fake cost? That was new sheet metal, fresh paint, and from what I saw of the inside through the hatch, probably a thousand feet, more or less, of lumber to brace it.”
“Go on.”
“Well, the McLain house hadn’t been painted in years, not even the barn. The place had ‘mortgage’ spelled out all over it. If the boys were in on the gag, they didn’t foot the bill.”
“Obviously. You, Mary?”
“Uncle Charlie, did you notice the way they treated me?”
“Who?” I said sharply.
“Both the state sergeant and the two boys. When I use the sweet-little-bundle-of-sex routine, something should happen. Nothing did.”
“They were all attentive,” I objected.
“You don’t understand. You can’t understand—but I know. I always know. Something was wrong with them. They were dead inside. Harem guards, if you know what I mean.”
“Hypnosis?” asked the Old Man.
“Possibly. Or drugs perhaps.” She frowned and looked puzzled.
“Hmm—” he answered. “Sammy, take the next turn to the left. We’re investigating a point about two miles south of here.”
“The triangulated location by the pic?”
“What else?”
But we didn’t get there. First it was a bridge out and I didn’t have room enough to make the car hop it, quite aside from the small matter of traffic regulations for a duo on the ground. We circled to the south and came in again, the only remaining route. We were stopped by a highway cop and a detour sign. A brush fire, he told us; go any farther and we would probably be impressed into firefighting. He didn’t know but what he ought to send me up to the firelines anyhow.
Mary waved her lashes and other things at him and he relented. She pointed out that neither she nor Uncle Charlie could drive, a double lie.
After we pulled away I asked her, “How about that one?”
“What about him?”
“Harem guard?”
“Oh, my, no! A most attractive man.”
Her answer annoyed me.
The Old Man vetoed taking to the air and making a pass over the triangulated spot. He said it was useless. We headed for Des Moines. Instead of parking at the toll gates we paid to take the car into the city proper, and ended up at the main studios of Des Moines stereo. “Uncle Charlie” blustered his way into the office of the general manager, us in tow. He told several lies—or perhaps Charles M. Cavanaugh was actually a big wheel with the Federal Communications Authority. How was I to know?
Once inside and the door shut he continued the Big Brass act. “Now, sir, what is all this nonsense about a spaceship hoax? Speak plainly, sir; I warn you your license may depend on it.”
The manager was a little round-shouldered man, but he did not seem cowed, merely annoyed. “We’ve made a full explanation over the channels,” he said. “We were victimized by one of our own people. The man has been discharged.”
“Hardly adequate, sir.”
The little man—Barnes, his name was—shrugged. “What do you expect? Shall we string him up by his thumbs?”
Uncle Charlie pointed his cigar at him. “I warn you, sir, that I am not to be trifled with. I have been making an investigation of my own and I am not convinced that two farm louts and a junior announcer could have pulled off this preposterous business. There was money in it, sir. Yes, sir—money. And where would I expect to find mon
ey? Here at the top. Now tell me, sir, just what did you—”
Mary had seated herself close by Barnes’s desk. She had done something to her costume, which exposed more skin, and her pose put me in mind of Goya’s Disrobed Lady. She made a thumbs-down signal to the Old Man.
Barnes should not have caught it; his attention appeared to be turned to the Old Man. But he did. He turned toward Mary and his face went dead. He reached for his desk.
“Sam! Kill him!” the Old Man rapped.
I burned his legs off and his trunk fell to the floor. It was a poor shot; I had intended to burn his belly.
I stepped quickly to him and kicked his gun away from his still-groping fingers. I was about to give him the coup de grace—a man burned that way is dead, but it takes him a while to die—when the Old Man snapped, “Don’t touch him! Mary, stand back!”
We did so. The Old Man sidled toward the body, like a cat cautiously investigating the unknown. Barnes gave a long bubbling sigh and was quiet—shock death; a gun burn doesn’t bleed much, not that much. The Old Man looked him over and poked him gently with his cane.
“Boss,” I said, “about time to git, isn’t it?”
Without looking around he answered, “We’re as safe here as anywhere. Safer, probably. This building may be swarming with them.”
“Swarming with what?”
“How would I know? Swarming with whatever he was.” He pointed to Barnes’s body. “That’s what I’ve got to find out.”
Mary gave a choked sob, the first honest feminine thing I had known her to do, and gasped, “He’s still breathing. Look!”
The body lay facedown; the back of the jacket heaved as if the chest were rising. The Old Man looked at it and poked at it with his cane. “Sam. Come here.”
I came. “Strip it,” he went on. “Use your gloves. And be careful.”
“Booby trap?”
“Shut up. Use care.”
I don’t know what he expected me to find, but he must have had a hunch that was close to truth. I think the bottom part of the Old Man’s brain has a built-in integrator which arrives at a logical necessity from minimum facts the way a museum johnny reconstructs an extinct animal from a single bone.
I took him at his word. First pulling on gloves—agent’s gloves; I could have stirred boiling acid with my gloved hand, yet I could feel a coin in the dark and call heads or tails—once gloved, I started to turn him over to undress him.
The back was still heaving; I did not like the look of it—unnatural. I placed a palm between the shoulder blades.
A man’s back is bone and muscle. This was jelly soft and undulating. I snatched my hand away.
Without a word Mary handed me a fancy pair of scissors from Barnes’s desk. I took them and cut the jacket away. Presently I folded it back and we all looked. Underneath the jacket the body was dressed in a light singlet, almost transparent. Between this shirt and the skin, from the neck halfway down the back, was something which was not flesh. A couple of inches thick, it gave the corpse a round-shouldered, or slightly humped, appearance.
It pulsed like a jellyfish.
As we watched, it slid slowly off the back, away from us. I reached out to peel up the singlet, to let us at it; my hand was knocked away by the Old Man’s cane. “Make up your mind,” I said and rubbed my knuckles.
He did not answer but tucked the end of his cane under the bottom of the shirt and worried it up the trunk. The thing was uncovered.
Grayish, faintly translucent, and shot through with darker structure, shapeless—it reminded me of a giant clot of frogs’ eggs. It was clearly alive, for it pulsed and quivered and moved by flowing. As we watched it flowed down into the space between Barnes’s arm and chest, filled it and stayed there, unable to go farther.
“The poor devil,” the Old Man said softly.
“Huh? That?”
“No. Barnes. Remind me to see to it that he gets the Purple Heart, when this is over. If it ever is over.” The Old Man straightened up and stumped around the room, as if he had forgotten completely the gray horror nestling in the crook of Barnes’s arm.
I drew back a bit and continued to stare at it, my gun ready. It could not move fast; it obviously could not fly; but I did not know what it could do and I was not taking chances. Mary moved closer to me and pressed her shoulder against mine, as if for human comfort. I put my free arm around her.
On a side table there was an untidy stack of cans, the sort used for stereo tapes. The Old Man took a double program can, spilled the reels on the floor, and came back with it. “This will do, I think.” He placed the can on the floor, near the thing, and began chivvying it with his cane, trying to irritate it into crawling into the can.
Instead it oozed back until it was almost entirely under the body. I grabbed the free arm and heaved what was left of Barnes away from the spot; the thing clung momentarily, then flopped to the floor. After that, under dear old Uncle Charlie’s directions, Mary and I used our guns set at lowest power to force it, by burning the floor close to it, into the can. We got it in, a close fit, and I slapped the cover on.
The Old Man tucked the can under his arm. “On our way, my dears.”
On the way out he paused in the partly open door to call out a parting to Barnes, then, after closing the door, stopped at the desk of Barnes’s secretary. “I’ll be seeing Mr. Barnes again tomorrow,” he told her. “No, no appointment. I’ll phone first.”
Out we went, slow march, the Old Man with the can full of thing under his arm and me with my ears cocked for alarums. Mary played the silly little moron, with a running monologue. The Old Man even paused in the lobby, bought a cigar, and inquired directions, with bumbling, self-important good nature.
Once in the car he gave me directions, then cautioned me against driving fast. The directions led us into a garage. The Old Man sent for the manager and said to him, “Mr. Malone wants this car—immediately.” It was a signal I had had occasion to use myself, only then it had been “Mr. Sheffield” who was in a hurry. I knew that the duo would cease to exist in about twenty minutes, save as anonymous spare parts in the service bins.
The manager looked us over, then answered quietly, “Through that door over there.” He sent the two mechanics in the room away on errands and we ducked through the door.
We ended up presently in the apartment of an elderly couple; there we became brunets and the Old Man got his bald head back. I acquired a moustache which did nothing for my looks, but I was surprised to find that Mary looked as well dark as she had as a redhead. The “Cavanaugh” combination was dropped; Mary got a chic nurse’s costume and I was togged out as a chauffeur while the Old Man became our elderly, invalid employer, complete with shawl and temper tantrums.
A car was waiting for us when we were ready. The trip back was no trouble; we could have remained the carrot-topped Cavanaughs. I kept the screen turned on to Des Moines, but, if the cops had turned up the late Mr. Barnes, the newsboys hadn’t heard about it.
We went straight down to the Old Man’s office—straight as one can go, that is—and there we opened the can. The Old Man sent for Dr. Graves, the head of the Section’s bio lab, and the job was done with handling equipment.
We need not have bothered. What we needed were gas masks, not handling equipment. A stink of decaying organic matter, like the stench from a gangrenous wound, filled the room and forced us to slap the cover back on and speed up the blowers. Graves wrinkled his nose. “What in the world was that?” he demanded. “Puts me in mind of a dead baby.”
The Old Man was swearing softly. “You are to find out,” he said. “Use handling equipment. Work it in suits, in a germ-free compartment, and don’t assume that it is dead.”
“If that is alive, I’m Queen Anne.”
“Maybe you are, but don’t take chances. Here is all the help I can give. It’s a parasite; it’s capable of attaching itself to a host, such as a man, and controlling the host. It is almost certainly extra-terrestrial in origin and
metabolism.”
The lab boss sniffed. “Extra-terrestrial parasite on a terrestrial host? Ridiculous! The body chemistries would be incompatible.”
The Old Man grunted. “Damn your theories. When we captured it, it was living on a man. If that means it has to be a terrestrial organism, show me where it fits into the scheme of things and where to look for its mates. And quit jumping to conclusions; I want facts.”
The biologist stiffened. “You’ll get them!”
“Get going. Wait—don’t use more of it than necessary for your investigations; I need the major portion as evidence. And don’t persist in the silly assumption that the thing is dead; that perfume may be a protective weapon. That thing, if alive, is fantastically dangerous. If it gets on one of your laboratory men, I’ll almost certainly have to kill him.”
The lab director said nothing more, but he left without some of his cockiness.
The Old Man settled back in his chair, sighed, and closed his eyes. He seemed to have gone to sleep; Mary and I kept quiet. After five minutes or so he opened his eyes, looked at me, and said, “How many mustard plasters the size of that thing Doc just carted out of here can arrive in a space ship as big as that fraud we looked at?”
“Was there a space ship?” I asked. “The evidence seems slim.”
“Slim but utterly incontrovertible. There was a ship. There still is a ship.”
“We should have examined the site.”
“That site would have been our last sight. The other six boys weren’t fools. Answer my question.”
“I can’t. How big the ship was doesn’t tell me anything about its payload, when I don’t know its propulsion method, the jump it made, or what supply load the passengers require. It’s a case of how long is a piece of rope? If you want a horseback guess, I’d say several hundred, maybe several thousand.”
“Mmm…yes. So there are several hundred, maybe several thousand zombies in the State of Iowa tonight. Or harem guards, as Mary puts it.” He thought for a moment. “But how am I to get past them to the harem? We can’t go around shooting every round-shouldered man in Iowa; it would cause talk.” He smiled feebly.