He was about to dismiss me when I put in, “How about my prisoner? Didn’t he confirm my conclusions?”
“Oh, him? Still unconscious, by the last report. They don’t expect him to live. The psychotechnicians can’t get anything out of him.”
“I’d like to see him.”
“You stick to things you understand.”
“Well—have you got something for me to do?”
“Not at the moment. I think you had better—No, do this: trot down to the National Zoo. You’ll see some things that may put a different light on what you picked up in Kansas City.”
“Huh?”
“Look up Doctor Horace, he’s the Assistant Director. Tell him I sent you.”
So I went down to see the animals. I tried to find Mary, but she was tied up.
Horace was a nice little guy who looked like one of his own baboons; he turned me over to a Doctor Vargas who was a specialist in exotic biologies—the same Vargas who was on the Second Venus Expedition. He told me what had happened and I looked at the gibbons, meantime rearranging my prejudices.
“I saw the President’s broadcast,” he said conversationally, “weren’t you the man who—I mean, weren’t you the—”
“Yes, I was ‘the man who’,” I agreed shortly.
“Then you can tell us a great deal about these phenomena. Your opportunities have been unique.”
“Perhaps I should be able to,” I admitted slowly, “but I can’t.”
“Do you mean that no cases of fission reproduction took place while you were, uh, their prisoner?”
“That’s right.” I thought about it and went on, “At least, I think that’s right.”
“Don’t you know? I was given to understand that, uh, victims have full memory of their experiences?”
“Well, they do and they don’t.” I tried to explain the odd detached frame of mind of a servant of the masters.
“I suppose it could happen while you sleep.”
“Maybe. Besides sleep, there is another time, or rather times, which are difficult to remember. During conference.”
“Conference?”
So I explained. His eyes lit up, “Oh, you mean ‘conjugation’.”
“No, I mean ‘conference’.”
“We mean the same thing. Don’t you see? Conjugation and fission—they reproduce at will, whenever the food supply, that is to say the supply of hosts, permits. Probably one contact for each fission; then, when the opportunity exists, fission—two fully adult daughter parasites in a matter of hours . . . or less, possibly.”
I thought it over. If that were true—and looking at the gibbons, I could not doubt it—then why had we depended on shipments at the Constitution Club? Or had we? In fact I did not know; I did what my master wanted done and saw only what came under my eyes. But why had we not saturated New Brooklyn as Kansas City had been saturated. Lack of time?
It was clear how Kansas City had been saturated. With plenty of “livestock” at hand and a space ship loaded with transit cells to draw from, the titans had reproduced to match the human population.
I am no biologist, exotic or otherwise, but I can do simple arithmetic. Assume a thousand slugs in that space ship, the one we believed to have landed near Kansas City; suppose that they could reproduce when given the opportunity every twenty-four hours.
First day, one thousand slugs.
Second day, two thousand.
Third day, four thousand.
At the end of the first week, the eighth day, that is—a hundred and twenty-eight thousand slugs.
After two weeks, more than sixteen million slugs.
But we did not know that they were limited to spawning once a day; on the contrary the gibbons proved they weren’t. Nor did we know that a flying saucer could lift only a thousand transit cells; it might be ten thousand—or more—or less. Assume ten thousand as breeding stock with fission every twelve hours. In two weeks the answer comes out—
MORE THAN TWO AND A HALF TRILLION!!!!
The figure did not mean anything; it was cosmic. There aren’t anything like that many people on the whole globe, not even if you counted in apes.
We were going to be knee deep in slugs—and that before long. I felt worse than I had in Kansas City.