They were in the same conference room, Martinez, Rexton, a couple of his high brass, and the Old Man. The President came in, wearing a bathrobe and followed by Mary, just as I arrived. Martinez started to speak but the Old Man cut in. “Let’s see your back, Tom!”
The President looked surprised and Mary signaled that everything was okay, but the Old Man chose not to see her. “I mean it,” he persisted.
The President said quietly, “Perfectly correct, Andrew,” and slipped his robe off his shoulders. His back was clean. “If I don’t set an example, how can I expect others to cooperate?”
The Old Man started to help him back into the robe, but the President shrugged him off and hung it over a chair. “I’ll just have to acquire new habits. Difficult, at my age. Well, gentlemen?”
I thought myself that bare skin would take getting used to; we made an odd group. Martinez was lean and tanned, carved smooth from mahogany. I’d judge he was part Indian. Rexton had a burned-in, high-altitude tan on his face, but from his collar line down he was as white as the President. On his chest was a black cross of hair, armpit to armpit and chin to belly, while the President and the Old Man were covered front and back with grizzled, wiry fur. The Old Man’s mat was so thick that mice could have nested in it.
Mary looked like a publicity pic—low angle shot to bring out the legs and careful posing, that sort. Me—well. I’m the spiritual type.
Martinez and Rexton had been shoving push pins into a map, red for bad, green for good, and a few amber ones. Reports were still coming and Rexton’s assistants kept adding new pins.
Iowa looked like measles; New Orleans and the Teche country were as bad. So was Kansas City. The upper end of the Missouri-Mississippi system, from Minneapolis and St. Paul down to St. Louis, was clearly enemy territory. There were fewer red pins from there down to New Orleans—but there were no green ones.
There was another hot spot around El Paso and two on the East Coast.
The President looked it over calmly. “We shall need the help of Canada and Mexico,” he said. “Any reports?”
“None that mean anything, sir.”
“Canada and Mexico,” the Old Man said seriously, “will be just a start. You are going to need the whole world with you on this job.”
Rexton said, “We will, eh? How about Russia?”
Nobody had an answer to that one; nobody ever has. Too big to occupy and too big to ignore—World War III had not settled the Russian problem and no war ever would. The parasites might feel right at home behind the Curtain.
The President said, “We’ll deal with that when we come to it.” He drew a finger across the map. “Any trouble getting messages through to the Coast?”
“Apparently not, sir,” Rexton told him. “They don’t seem to interfere with straight-through relay. But all military communications I have shifted to one-link relay through the space stations.” He glanced at his watch finger. “Space Station Gamma, at the moment.”
“Hmmm—” said the President. “Andrew, could these things storm a space station?”
“How would I know?” the Old Man answered testily. “I don’t know whether their ships are built for it or not. More probably they would do it by infiltration, through the supply rockets.”
There was discussion as to whether or not the space stations could already have been taken over; Schedule Bare Back did not apply to the stations. Although we had built them and paid for them, since they were technically United Nations territory, the President had to wait until the United Nations acted on the entire matter.
“Don’t worry about it,” Rexton said suddenly.
“Why not?” the President asked.
“I am probably the only one here who has done duty in a space station. Gentlemen, the costume we are now wearing is customary in a station. A man fully dressed would stand out like an overcoat on the beach. But we’ll see.” He gave orders to one of his assistants.
The President resumed studying the map. “So far as we know,” he said, pointing to Grinnell, Iowa, “all this derives from a single landing, here.”