The Puppet Masters by Robert A. Heinlein

Author:Robert A. Heinlein
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

XIX

If the Old Man and I had gone to the National Zoological Gardens instead of sitting around in the park, it would not have been necessary for me to go to Kansas City. The ten titans we had captured at the joint session of Congress, plus two the next day, had been entrusted to the director of the zoo to be placed on the shoulders of unlucky anthropoids–chimps and orangutans, mostly. No gorillas.

The director had had the apes locked up in the zoo's veterinary hospital. Two chimpanzees, Abelard and Heloise, were caged together; they had always been mates and there seemed to be no reason to separate them. Maybe that sums up our psychological difficulty in dealing with the titans; even the men who transplanted the slugs to the apes still thought of the result as apes, rather than as titans.

The treatment cage next to that of the two chimps was occupied by a family of tuberculous gibbons. They were not used as hosts, since they were sick, and there was no communication between cages. They were shut one from another by sliding, gasketed panels and each cage had its own air-conditioning. I've been in worse hospitals; I remember one in the Ukraine–

Anyhow, the next morning the panel had been slid back and the gibbons and the chimps were all in together. Abelard, or possibly Heloise, had found some way to pick the lock. The lock was supposed to be monkey proof, but it was not ape-cum-titan proof. Don't blame the designer of the lock.

Two chimps plus two titans plus five gibbons–the next morning there were seven apes ridden by seven titans.

This was discovered two hours before I left for Kansas City, but the Old Man had not been notified. Had he been, he would have known that Kansas City was saturated. I might have figured it out for myself. Had the Old Man known about the gibbons, Schedule Counter Blast would not have taken place.

Schedule Counter Blast was the worst wet firecracker in military history. The evolution was beautifully worked out and the drops were made simultaneously just at midnight, zone five, on over ninety-six hundred communication points–newspaper offices, block controls, relay stations, and so forth. The raiding squad were the cream of our sky-borne forces, mostly veteran non-coms, and with them, technicians to put each communication point back into service.

Whereupon the President's speech and the visual display would go out from each local station; Schedule Bare Back would take effect all through the infected territory; and the war would be over, save for minor mopping up.

Ever see a bird hurt itself by flying into a glass window? The bird is not stupid; he simply did not have all the data.

By twenty-five minutes after midnight reports started coming in that such-and-such points were secured. A little later there were calls for help from other points. By one in the morning most of the reserves had been committed but the operation was clearly going well–so well, indeed, that unit commanders were landing and were reporting from the ground.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.