He spoke. “Last night I stood here and said things I would rather have been flayed alive than utter. But last night I was not my own master. Today I am. Can you not see that Rome is burning?” Suddenly he had a gun in his hand. “Up on your feet, you wardheelers, you courthouse loafers! Two minutes to get your duds off and show a bare back—then I shoot!”
Men close to him sprang up and tried to grab his arm, but he swung the gun around like a flyswatter, smashing one of them in the face. I had my own out, ready to back his play, but it was not necessary. They could see that he was as dangerous as an old bull and they backed away.
It hung in balance, then they started shucking clothes like Doukhobors. One man bolted for a door; he was tripped. No, he was not wearing a parasite.
But we did catch three. After that, the show went on the channels, ten minutes late, and Congress started the first of its “bare back” sessions.
XIV
“LOCK YOUR DOORS!”
“CLOSE THE DAMPERS ON YOUR FIREPLACES!”
“NEVER ENTER A DARK PLACE!”
“BE WARY OF CROWDS!”
“A MAN WEARING A COAT IS AN ENEMY—SHOOT!”
We should have had every titan in the country spotted and killed in a week. I don’t know what more we could have done. In addition to a steady barrage of propaganda the country was being quartered and sectioned from the air, searching for flying saucers on the ground. Our radar screen was on full alert for unidentified blips. Military units, from airborne troops to guided-rocket stations, were ready to smear any that landed.
Then nothing happened. There was no work for them to do. The thing fizzled like a damp firecracker.
In the uncontaminated areas people took off their shirts, willingly or reluctantly, looked around them and found no parasites. They watched their newscasts and wondered and waited for the government to tell them that the danger was over. But nothing happened and both laymen and local officials began to doubt the necessity of running around the streets in sunbathing costumes. We had shouted “Wolf!” and no wolf came.
The contaminated areas? The reports from the contaminated areas were not materially different from the reports from other areas.
Our stereocast and the follow-ups did not reach those areas. Back in the days of radio it could not have happened; the Washington station where the ‘cast originated could have blanketed the country. But stereo-video rides wavelengths so short that horizon-to-horizon relay is necessary and local channels must be squirted out of local stations; it’s the price we pay for plenty of channels and high resolution pictures.
In the infected areas the slugs controlled the local stations; the people never heard the warning.
But in Washington we had every reason to believe that they had heard the warning. Reports came back from—well, Iowa, for example, just like those from California. The governor of Iowa was one of the first to send a message to the President, promising full cooperation. The Iowa state police were already cruising the roads, he reported, stopping everybody and requiring them to strip to the waist. Air travel above Iowa was stopped for the duration of the emergency, just as the President had urged.
There was even a relayed stereo of the governor addressing his constituents, bare to the waist. He faced the camera and I wanted to tell him to turn around. But presently they cut to another camera and we had a close up of a bare back, while the governor’s voice went cheerfully on, urging all citizens to work with the police.
If any place in the Union was a pest house of slugs, Iowa should have been it. Had they evacuated Iowa and concentrated on heavier centers of population?
We were gathered in a conference room off the President’s office. The President had kept the Old Man with him, I tagged along, and Mary was still on watch. Secretary of Security Martinez was there as well as the Supreme Chief of Staff, Air Marshal Rexton. There were others from the President’s “fishing cabinet”, but they weren’t important.