I tried not to show how much I was pleased. I had gotten through the whole performance without once stammering; I felt like a new man.
XXXII
That ape Satan which had wrung my heart so back at the National Zoo turned out to be as mean as he was billed, once he was free of his slug. Dad had volunteered to be the test case for the Nivens-Hazelhurst theories, but I put my foot down and Satan drew the short straw.
Dad made an issue out of it; he had some silly idea that it was up to him to be possessed by a slug, at least once. I told him that we had no time to waste on his sinful pride. He grew huffy but I made it stick.
It was neither filial affection nor its neo-Freudian antithesis that caused me to balk him; I was afraid of the combination of Dad-cum-slug. I did not want him on their side even temporarily and under laboratory conditions. Not with his shifty, tricky mind! I did not know how he would manage to escape nor what he would do to wreck our plans, but I was morally certain he would, once possessed.
People who have never experienced possession, even those who have seen it, cannot appreciate that the host is utterly against us—with all his abilities intact. We could not risk having Dad against us—and I swung enough weight to overrule him.
So we used anthropoid apes for the experiments. We had on hand not only apes from the National Zoological Gardens but simian citizens from half a dozen zoos and a couple of circuses. I did not select Satan for the job; I would have let the poor beast be. The look of patient suffering on his face made one forget the slug on his back.
Satan was injected with nine-day fever on Wednesday the 13th. By Friday the fever had established; another chimp-cum-slug was introduced into his cage; the two slugs immediately went into direct conference, after which the second ape was removed.
On Sunday the 17th Satan’s master shriveled up and fell off—dead. Satan was immediately injected with the antitoxin. Late Monday the other slug died and its host was dosed.
By Wednesday Satan was well though a bit thin and the second ape, Lord Fauntleroy, was on the road to recovery. I gave Satan a banana to celebrate and he took off the first joint of my left index finger and me with no time for a repair job. It was no accident either; that ape was nasty.
But a minor injury could not depress my spirits. After I had it dressed I looked for Mary, as I wanted to crow; I failed to find her and ended up in the messroom, wanting someone with whom to share a toast.
The place was empty; everyone in the labs—except me—was working harder than ever, mounting Schedule Fever and Schedule Mercy. By order of the President all possible preparations were taking place in this one lab in the Smoky Mountains. The apes for vectoring, some two hundred of them, were here, and both the culture and the antitoxin were being “cooked” here; the horses needed for serum were stalled in what had been an underground handball court.
The million-plus men necessary for the Schedule Mercy drop could not be here, but they would know nothing about it until alerted a few hours before the drop, at which time each would be issued a hand gun and two bandoleers of individual dose antitoxin injectors. Those who had never parachuted before would not be given a chance to practice; they would each be pushed, if necessary, by some sergeant with a large foot. Everything possible was being done to keep the secret close; the only way I could see that we could lose (now that we knew that our theories worked) would be for the titans to find out our plans, through a renegade or by whatever means. Too many good plans have failed because some fool told his wife about it in bed.
If we failed to keep this secret, our ape disease vectors would never get into direct conference; they would be shot on sight wherever they appeared in the titan nation. But I relaxed over my first drink, happy and reasonably sure that the secret could not leak. Traffic with the laboratory was “incoming only” until after Drop Day and Colonel Kelly censored or monitored all communication outward—Kelly was no fool.