“I did not mean that.”
“I know you didn’t.” There was no need to discuss it further; we both knew that the music had stopped and that now was time to go back to work. The heap we had arrived in was still sitting on my landing flat, piling up rental charges. It took about three minutes to burn the dishes, switch off everything but the permanent circuits, and get ready. I could not find my shoes but Mary remembered where I had left them.
Mary drove, because of my hands. Once in the air she turned to me and said, “Let’s go straight to the Section offices. We’ll get treatment there and find out what has been going on—or are your hands hurting too badly?”
“Suits,” I agreed. My hands were hurting but they would not be any worse for another hour of waiting. I wanted to learn the situation as soon as possible—and I wanted to get back to work. I asked Mary to switch on the squawk screen; I was as anxious to catch a newscast now as I had been anxious to avoid them before. But the car’s communication equipment was as junky as the rest of it; we could not even pick up audio. Fortunately the remote-control circuits were still okay, or Mary would have had to buck it through traffic by hand.
A thought had been fretting me for some time; I mentioned it to Mary. “A slug would not mount a cat just for the hell of it, would it?”
“I suppose not.”
“But why? It doesn’t make sense. But it has to make sense; everything they do makes sense, grisly sense, from their viewpoint.”
“But it did make sense. They caught a human that way.”
“Yes, I know. But how could they plan it? Surely there aren’t enough of them that they can afford to place themselves on cats on the off chance that the cat might catch a human. Or are there enough?” I remembered the speed with which a slug on an ape’s back had turned itself into two, I remembered Kansas City, saturated, and shivered.
“Why ask me, darling? I don’t have an analytical brain.” Which was true, in a way; there is nothing wrong with Mary’s brain but she jumps logic and arrives at her answers by instinct. Me, I have to worry it out by logic.
“Drop the modest little girl act and try this on for size: the first question is, ‘Where did the slug come from?’ It didn’t walk; it had to get to the Pirate on the back of another host. What host? I’d say it was Old John—John the Goat. I doubt if Pirate would have let any other human get close to him.”
“Old John?” Mary closed her eyes, then opened them. “I can’t get any feeling about it. I was never close to him.”
“It does not matter; by elimination I think it must be true. Old John wore a coat when everyone else was complying with the Bare Back order . . . getting away with it because he shuns people. Ergo, he was hag-ridden before Schedule Bare Back. But that does not get me any further. Why would a slug single out a hermit way up in the mountains?”
“To capture you.”
“Me?”
“To recapture you.”
It made some sense. Possibly any host that ever escaped them was a marked man; in that case the dozen-odd Congressmen and any others we had rescued—including Mary—were in special danger. I’d mark that down to report for analysis. No, not Mary—the only slug that knew she had been possessed was dead.
On the other hand they might want me in particular. What was special about me? I was a secret agent. More important, the slug that had ridden me must have known what I knew about the Old Man and known that I had access to him. That would be reason enough to try to get me back. I held an emotional certainty that the Old Man was their principal antagonist; the slug must have known that I thought so; he had full use of my mind.
That slug had even met the Old Man, talked with him. Wait a minute—that slug was dead. And my theory came tumbling down.