The Congress was just a mob, men yelling and women screaming. Above me the Old Man was shouting orders to the presidential guards as if he were standing on a bridge.
We had this in our favor; doors were locked and there were no armed and disciplined men present except the Old Man’s own boys. Sergeants-at-arms, surely—but what are they? One elderly Congressman pulled a hogleg out of his coat that must have been a museum piece, but that was a mere incident.
Between the guns of the guards and the pounding of the gavel something like order was restored. The President started to talk. He told them that an amazing accident had given them a chance to see the true nature of the enemy and he suggested that they file past and see for themselves one of the titans from Saturn’s largest moon. Without waiting for their consent, he pointed to the front row and told them to come up.
They came.
I squatted back out of the way and wondered what was accidental about it. With the Old Man you can never tell. Had he known that Congress was infested? I rubbed a bruised knee and wondered.
Mary stayed on the platform. About twenty had filed by and a female Congressman had gotten hysterics when I saw Mary signal the Old Man again. This time I was a hair ahead of his order.
I might have had quite a fight if two of the boys had not been close by; this one was young and tough, an ex-marine. We laid him beside Gottlieb, and again the Old Man and the President and the Senate president, shouting their lungs out, restored order.
Then it was “inspection and search” whether they liked it or not. I patted the women on the back as they came by and caught one. I thought I had caught another, but it was an embarrassing mistake; she was so blubber fat that I guessed wrong.
Mary spotted two more, then there was a long stretch, three hundred or more, with no jackpots. It was soon evident that some were hanging back.
Don’t let anyone tell you that Congressmen are stupid. It takes brains to get elected and it takes a practical psychologist to stay elected. Eight men with guns were not enough—eleven, counting the Old Man, Mary, and me. Most of the slugs would have gotten away if the Whip of the House had not organized help.
With their assistance, we caught thirteen, ten alive. Only one of the hosts was badly wounded.
But the Congress of the United States has not been such a shambles since Jefferson Davis announced his momentous decision. No, not even after the Bombing.
XIII
So the President got the authority he needed and the Old Man was his de facto chief of staff; at last we could move fast and effectively. Oh, yes? Did you ever try to hurry a project through a bureaucracy?
“Directives” have to be “implemented”; “agencies” have to be “coordi-nated”—and everything has to go to the files.
The Old Man had a simple enough campaign in mind. It could not be the straightforward quarantine he had proposed when the infection was limited to the Des Moines area; before we could fight back, we had to locate them. But government agents couldn’t search two hundred million people; the people had to do it themselves.
Schedule Bare Back was to be the first phase of the implementation of Operation Parasite—which makes me talk like a bureaucrat. Never mind—the idea was that everybody, everybody was to peel to the waist and stay peeled, until all titans were spotted and killed. Oh, women could have halter strings across their backs, but a parasite could not hide under a bra string.
We whipped up a visual presentation to go with the stereocast speech the President would make to the nation. Fast work had saved seven of the parasites we had flushed in the sacred halls of Congress and now they were alive on animal hosts. We could show them and we could show the less grisly parts of the film taken of me. The President himself would appear in the ‘cast in shorts, and models would demonstrate what the Well Undressed Citizen Would Wear This Season, including the metal head-and-spine armor which was intended to protect a person even if a parasite got to him in his sleep.