Oh, the slugs had discovered sex, all right!
There was one more thing which I saw in this and other tapes, a thing so outrageous, so damnably disgusting that I hesitate even to mention it, though I feel I must—there were men and women here and there among the slaves, humans (if you could call them that) without slugs . . . trusties . . . renegades—
I hate slugs but I would turn from killing a slug to kill one such. Our ancestors believed that there were men who would willingly sign compacts with the Devil; our ancestors were partly right: there are men who would, given the chance.
Some people refuse to believe that any human being turned renegade; those who disbelieve did not see the suppressed transcriptions. There was no chance for mistake; as everyone knows, once the masquerade was no longer useful to the slugs, the wearing of clothes was dropped in Zone Red even more thoroughly than it was under Schedule Sun Tan in Zone Green; one could see. In the Fort Worth horror which I have faintly sketched above the referee was a renegade; he was much in the camera and I was able to be absolutely sure. I knew him by sight, a well-known amateur sportsman, a “gentleman” referee. I shan’t mention his name, not to protect him but to protect myself; later on I killed him.
We were losing ground everywhere; that I knew before they finished treating my hands. Ours was a holding action only; our methods were effective only in stopping the spread of the infection and not fully effective in that. To fight them directly we would have to fight our own people, bomb our own cities, with no certainty of killing the humps. What we needed was a selective weapon, one that would kill slugs but not men, or something that would disable humans or render unconscious without killing and thereby permit us to rescue our compatriots. No such weapon was available, though the scientists were all busy on the problem, from the comedy team of McIlvaine & Vargas down to the lowliest bottle-washer in the Bureau of Standards. A “sleep” gas would have been perfect, but it is lucky that no such gas was known before the invasion, or the slugs could have used it against us; it would have cut both ways. It must be remembered that the slugs then had as much, or more, of the military potential of the United States at their disposal as had the free men.
Stalemate—with time on the side of the enemy. There were the fools who wanted to H-bomb the cities of the Mississippi Valley right out of existence, like curing a lip cancer by cutting off the head, but they were offset by their twins who had not seen slugs, did not believe in slugs, and felt that the whole matter was a violation of states’ rights and Schedule Sun Tan a tyrannical Washington plot. These second sort were fewer each day, not because they changed their minds but because the Vigilantes were awfully eager.
Then there was the tertium quid, the flexible mind, the “reasonable” man who hardly had a mind to change—he favored negotiation; he thought we could “do business” with the titans. One such committee, a delegation from the caucus of the opposition party in Congress, actually attempted negotiation. Bypassing the State Department they got in touch via a linkage rigged across Zone Amber with the Governor of Missouri, and were assured of safe conduct and diplomatic immunity—”guarantees” from a titan, but they accepted them; they went to St. Louis—and never came back. They sent messages back; I saw one such, a good rousing speech adding up to, “Come on in; the water is fine!”
Do steers sign treaties with meat packers?
North America was still the only known center of infection. The only action by the United Nations, other than placing the space stations at our disposal, was to remove temporarily to Geneva. No aggression by any other nation was involved and it was even argued that the slugs—if they existed—were technically an epidemic disease rather than a potential source of war and therefore of no interest to the Security Council. It was voted, with twenty-three nations abstaining, to define it as “civil disorder” and to urge each member nation to give such aid as it saw fit to the legitimate governments of the United States, Mexico, and Canada.