There was a lull after that, as the cases had not yet arrived. Hunger reflex nearly doubled me over, then it dropped off sharply but still persisted; I told the manager, who had me served one of the best lunches I have ever eaten, in his office. The cases arrived just as I was finishing.
During the drowsy period that every gentlemen’s club has in the mid-afternoon we secured the place. By four o’clock everyone present in the building—members, staff, and guests—were with us; from then on we simply processed them in the lobby as the doorman passed them in. Later in the day the manager phoned Des Moines for four more cases.
Our big prize came that evening—a guest, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury. We saw a real victory in that; the Treasury Department is charged with the safety of the President.
VIII
The jubilation caused by the capture of a high key official was felt by me only as absent-minded satisfaction, then I thought no more about it. We—the human recruits, I mean—hardly thought at all; we knew what we were to do each instant, but we knew it only at the moment of action, as a “high school” horse gets his orders, responds to them instantly, and is ready for the next signal from his rider.
High school horse and rider is a good comparison, as far as it goes—but it goes not nearly far enough. The horseman has partly at his disposal the intelligence of the horse; the masters had at their disposal not only our full intelligences, but also tapped directly our memory and experiences. We communicated for them between masters, too; sometimes we knew what we were talking about; sometimes we did not—such spoken words went through the servant, but the servant had no part in more important, direct, master-to-master conferences. During these we sat quietly and waited until our riders were through conferring, then rearranged our clothing to cover them up and did whatever was necessary. There was such a conference on a grand scale after the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury was recruited; I know no more of it than you do, although I sat in on it.
I had no more to do with words spoken by me for my master than had the audio relay buried behind my ear to do with words it sounded—the relay was silent all this time, incidentally; my phone proper I had left behind me. I, like it, was a communication instrument, nothing more. Some days after I was recruited I gave the club manager new instructions about how to order shipments of masters’ carrying cells. I was fleetingly aware, as I did so, that three more ships had landed, but I was not aware of their locations; my overt knowledge was limited to a single address in New Orleans.
I thought nothing about it; I went on with my work. After the day spent at the club, I was a new “special assistant to Mr. Potter” and spent the days in his office—and the nights, too. Actually, the relationship may have reversed; I frequently gave oral instructions to Potter. Or perhaps I understand the social organization of the parasites as little now as I did then; the relationship may have been more flexible, more anarchistic, and vastly more subtle than I have the experience to imagine.
I knew—and my master certainly knew—that it was well for me to stay out of sight. Through me, my master knew as much of the organization we called the “Section” as I did; it knew that I was one human known to the Old Man to have been recruited—and my master knew, I am sure, that the Old Man would not cease to search for me, to recapture me or kill me.
It seems odd that it did not choose to change bodies and to kill mine; we had vastly more potential recruits available than we had masters. I do not think it could have felt anything parallel to human squeamishness; masters newly delivered from their transit cells frequently damaged their initial hosts; we always destroyed the damaged host and found a new one for the master.
Contrariwise, my master, by the time he chose me, had controlled not less than three human hosts—Jarvis, Miss Haines, and one of the girls in Barnes’s office, probably the secretary—and in the course of it had no doubt acquired both sophistication and skill in the control of human hosts. It could have “changed horses” with ease.