“You may have to,” I pointed out, “or make everybody strip.”
“We’ll run some experiments.”
“How?” I asked.
“You know that head-and-spine armor deal? It’s not worth much, except to give a feeling of security to anybody who bothers to wear one. I’ll tell Doctor Horace to take an ape, fit an armor to him so that a slug can’t reach anything but his legs, say—and see what happens. Or use some other method to limit the area of attack, and vary the areas, too. We’ll find out.”
“Uh, yes. But don’t have him use an ape, boss.”
“Why not?”
“Well—they’re too human.”
“Damn it, bub, you can’t make an omelet—”
“—without breaking eggs. Okay, okay, but I don’t have to like it. Anyhow, we’ll find out.”
I could see that he did not like what he was thinking. “I hope it turns out that you are wrong. Yes, sir, I surely do. It has been hard enough to get their shirts off; I’d hate like the very deuce to try to get ’em to take off their drawers as well.” He looked worried.
“Well, maybe it won’t be necessary.”
“I hope not.”
“By the way, we’re moving back to the old nest.”
“How about the New Philadelphia hide-out?” I asked.
“We’ll keep both. This war may go on a long time.”
“Speaking of such, what have you got for me now?”
“Well, now, as I said, this is likely to prove a long war. Why don’t you take some leave? Indefinite—I’ll call you back when I need you.”
“You always have,” I pointed out. “Is Mary going on leave?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I asked you a straight question. Boss.”
“Mary is on duty, with the President.”
“Why? She’s done her job, and nobly. You aren’t depending on her being able to smell out a slug, not if I know you. You don’t need her as a guard; she’s too good an agent to waste on such work.”
“See here—when did you get so big that you are telling me how to use other agents? Answer that and make it good.”
“Oh, skip it, skip it,” I told him, my temper very much out of hand. “Let it lay that if Mary isn’t taking leave, I don’t want leave—and none of your business why.”
“That’s a nice girl.”
“Did I say she wasn’t? Keep your nose out of my affairs. In the meantime, give me a job to do.”
“I say you need to take leave.”
“So you can make damn sure that I don’t have any free time when Mary has? What is this? A YWCA?
“I say you need leave because you are worn out.”
“Hunh!”
“You are a fair-to-good agent when you are in shape. Right now you aren’t; you’ve been through too much. No, shut up and listen: I send you out on a simple assignment. Penetrate an occupied city, look it over and see everything there is to see and report back by a certain time. What do you do? You are so jittery that you hang around in the suburbs and are afraid to go downtown. You don’t keep your eyes open and you damn near get caught three times. Then when you do head back, you get so nervy that you burn out your ship and fail to get back in time to be of any use. Your nerve is shot and your judgment with it. Take leave—sick leave, in fact.”
I stood there with my ears burning. He did not directly blame me for the failure of Schedule Counter Blast but he might as well have. I felt that it was unfair—and yet I knew that there was truth in it. My nerves used to be like rock, and now my hands trembled when I tried to strike a cigarette.
Nevertheless he let me have an assignment—the first and only time I have ever won an argument with him.
A hell of an assignment—I spent the next several days lecturing to brass, answering fool questions about what titans eat for lunch, explaining how to tackle a man who was possessed. I was billed as an “expert” but half the time my pupils seemed sure that they knew more about slugs than I did.