Once I saw a cat struck by a ground car; the poor thing leapt straight up about four feet with its back arched the wrong way and all limbs flying. These two unlucky men did the same sort of thing; they contorted in every muscle in a grand spasm as if every motor cell in each body had been stimulated at once.
Which is perhaps just what happened when I clutched and crushed their masters.
I could not hold them; they jerked out of my arms and flopped to the floor. But there was no need to hold them; after that first bone-shaking convulsion they went limp, unconscious, possibly dead.
Someone was knocking at the door. I called out, “Just a moment. The doctor is busy.” The knocking stopped. I made sure that the door was fastened, then went back, bent over the “doctor” and pulled up his coat to see what I had done to his master.
The thing was a ruptured, slimy mess, already beginning to stink. So was the one on the other man—which facts pleased me heartily as I was determined to burn the slugs if they were not already dead and I was not sure that I could do so without killing the hosts as well. I left the men, to live or die—or be seized again by titans, as might be. I had no way to help them.
The masters waiting in their cells were another matter. With a fan beam and a max charge I burned them all in seconds only. There were two large crates against the wall. I did not know that they contained masters but I had no reason to believe otherwise; I beamed them through and through until the wood charred.
The knocking at the door resumed. I looked around hastily for somewhere to hide the two men. There was nowhere at all, so I decided to execute the classic military maneuver. As I was about to go out the exit, I felt that something was missing. I hesitated and looked around again.
The room was almost bare; there seemed to be nothing suited to my purpose. I could use clothing from the “doctor” or his helper, but I did not want to touch them. Then I noticed the dust cover for the acuity tester lying on the bench. I loosened my shirt, snatched up the dust cover, wadded it up, and stuffed it under my shirt between my shoulder blades. With my shirt collar fastened and my jacket zipped tightly it made a bulge of the proper size.
Then I went out, “—a stranger and afraid, into a world I never made.”
As a matter of fact I was feeling pretty cocky.
Another cop took my car check. He glanced sharply at me, then motioned me to climb in. I did so and he said, “Go to police headquarters, under the City Hall.”
” ‘Police headquarters, the City Hall’,” I repeated and gunned her ahead. I started in that direction and turned onto Nichols Freeway. I came to a stretch where traffic thinned out and punched the button to shift license plates, hoping that no one would notice. It seemed possible that there was already a call out for the plates I had been showing at the toll gate. I wished that I had been able to change the car’s colors and body lines as well.
Before the freeway reached Magee Traffic Way, I turned into a down ramp and stuck thereafter to residential side streets. It was eighteen hundred, zone six time, and I was due in Washington in four and one-half hours.
XVIII
The city did not look right. I tried to discount my own keyed-up state and to see what was actually there—not what I expected to see nor what I was expected to see. Superficially there was nothing wrong, but it did not have the right flavor, as if it were a clumsily directed play. I kept trying to put my finger on it; it kept slipping away.
Kansas City has many wide neighborhoods made up of family units a century old or more. Time seems to have passed them by; kids roll on lawns and householders sit in the cool of the evening on their front porches, just as their great-grandparents did. If there are bomb shelters around, they do not show. The queer, old, bulky houses, fitted together piece by piece by guildsmen long since dead, have homely charm. Seeing them, one wonders how Kansas City got its gamy reputation; those old neighborhoods feel like an enclave of security, impregnable, untouchable.