So Schedule Sun Tan replaced Schedule Bare Back and everybody skinned down to the buff.
Like hell they did! The matter was still “Top Secret” and the subject of cabinet debates at the time of the Scranton Riot. Don’t ask me why it was top secret, or even restricted; our government has gotten the habit of classifying anything as secret which the all-wise statesmen and bureaucrats decide we are not big enough boys and girls to know, a Mother-Knows-Best-Dear policy. I’ve read that there used to be a time when a taxpayer could demand the facts on anything and get them. I don’t know; it sounds Utopian.
The Scranton Riot should have convinced anybody that the slugs were loose in Zone Green despite Schedule Bare Back, but even that did not bring on Schedule Sun Tan. The fake air-raid alarm on the east coast took place, as I figure it, the third day of our honeymoon; there had not been any special excitement in the village when we visited it the day before that and certainly no vigilante activity. After the false air-raid alarm it took a while to figure out what had happened, even though it was obvious that lighting could not fail by accident in so many different shelters.
It gives me the leaping horrors to think about it even now—all those people crouching in the darkness, waiting for the all-clear, while zombies moved among them, slapping slugs on them. Apparently in some air raid bunkers the recruitment was one hundred percent. They did not have a chance.
So there were more riots the next day and we were well into the Terror, though we did not know it. Technically, the start of vigilantism came the first time a desperate citizen pulled a gun on a cop—Maurice T. Kaufman of Albany and the cop was Sergeant Malcolm MacDonald. Kaufman was dead a half second later and MacDonald followed him in a few minutes, torn to pieces by the mob, along with his titan master. But the Vigilantes did not really get going until the air-raid wardens put organization into the movement.
The wardens, being mostly aboveground at the time the coup in the bunkers took place, largely escaped—but they felt responsible. Not that all Vigilantes were wardens, nor all wardens Vigilantes—but a stark naked, armed man on the street was as likely to be wearing a warden’s armband as the “VIG” brassard. Either way, you could count on him shooting at any unexplained excrescence on a human body—shoot and investigate afterward.
While my hands were being treated and dressed I was brought up to date concerning the period (it turned out to be two weeks) that Mary and I had spent at the cabin. By the Old Man’s orders the doctor gave me a short shot of tempus before he worked on me and I spent the time—subjective, about three days; objective, less than an hour—studying stereo tapes through an over-speed scanner. This gadget has never been released to the public, though I have heard that it is bootlegged at some of the colleges around examination week. You adjust the speed to match your subjective time rate, or a little faster, and use an audio frequency step-down to let you hear what is being said. It is hard on the eyes and usually results in a splitting headache—but it is a big help in my profession.
It was hard to believe that so much could have happened in so short a time. Take dogs. A Vigilante would kill a dog on sight, even though it was not wearing a slug—because it was even money that it would be wearing one before next sunrise, that it would attack a man and that the titan would change riders in the dark.
A hell of a world where you could not trust dogs!
Apparently cats were hardly ever used because of their smaller size. Poor old Pirate was an exceptional case.
In Zone Green dogs were almost never seen now, at least by day. They filtered out of Zone Red at night, traveled in the dark and hid out in the daytime. They kept showing up, even on the coasts. It made one think of the werewolf legends. I made a mental note to apologize to the village doctor who had refused to come to see Mary at night—after I pasted him one.