“Control,” I called out. “Control! This is an emergency!”
The screen lighted up and I was looking at a young man. He was, I saw with relief, bare-skinned so far as he appeared in the screen. “Control answering—Block Fox Eleven. What are you doing in the air? I’ve been trying to raise you ever since you entered my block.”
“Never mind!” I snapped. “Patch me into the nearest military circuit. This is crash priority!”
He looked uncertain, but the screen flickered and went blank. Shortly another picture built up showing a military message center—and that did my heart good, as every person in sight was stripped to the waist. The foreground was occupied by a young watch officer; I could have kissed him. Instead I said, “Military emergency—patch me through to the Pentagon and there to the White House.”
“Who are you?”
“No time, no time! I’m a civil agent and you wouldn’t recognize my I.D. if you saw it. Hurry!”
I might have talked him into it but he was shouldered out of scan by an older man, a wing commander by his cap insignia. “Land at once!” was all that he said.
“Look, skipper,” I said. “This is a military emergency; you’ve got to put me through. I—”
“This is a military emergency,” he interrupted, “and all civil craft have been grounded for the past three hours. Land at once.”
“But I’ve got to—”
“Land or be shot down. We are tracking you; I am about to launch an interceptor to burst a half mile ahead of you. Hold your course, or make any maneuver but landing, and the next one will burst on.”
“Will you listen, please? I’ll land, but I’ve got to get—” He switched off, leaving me with my jaw pumping air.
The first burst seemed considerably short of a half mile ahead of me; I landed.
I cracked up in doing it, but without hurting myself or my passenger. I did not have long to wait. They had me flare-lighted and were swooping down on me before I had satisfied myself that the boat wouldn’t move. They took me in and I met the wing commander personally. He even put my message through after his psych squad got through giving me the antidote for the sleep test. By then it was one-thirteen, zone five—and Schedule Counter Blast had been underway for exactly that hour and thirteen minutes.
The Old Man listened to a summary, grunted, then told me to shut up and see him in the morning.
XIX
If the Old Man and I had gone to the National Zoological Gardens instead of sitting around in the park, it would not have been necessary for me to go to Kansas City. The ten titans we had captured at the joint session of Congress, plus two the next day, had been entrusted to the director of the zoo to be placed on the shoulders of unlucky anthropoids—chimps and orangutans, mostly. No gorillas.
The director had had the apes locked up in the zoo’s veterinary hospital. Two chimpanzees, Abelard and Heloise, were caged together; they had always been mates and there seemed to be no reason to separate them. Maybe that sums up our psychological difficulty in dealing with the titans; even the men who transplanted the slugs to the apes still thought of the result as apes, rather than as titans.
The treatment cage next to that of the two chimps was occupied by a family of tuberculous gibbons. They were not used as hosts, since they were sick, and there was no communication between cages. They were shut one from another by sliding, gasketed panels and each cage had its own air-conditioning. I’ve been in worse hospitals; I remember one in the Ukraine—
Anyhow, the next morning the panel had been slid back and the gibbons and the chimps were all in together. Abelard, or possibly Heloise, had found some way to pick the lock. The lock was supposed to be monkey proof, but it was not ape-cum-titan proof. Don’t blame the designer of the lock.
Two chimps plus two titans plus five gibbons—the next morning there were seven apes ridden by seven titans.
This was discovered two hours before I left for Kansas City, but the Old Man had not been notified. Had he been, he would have known that Kansas City was saturated. I might have figured it out for myself. Had the Old Man known about the gibbons, Schedule Counter Blast would not have taken place.