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themselves on any part of the body and still control hosts had proved to be right?but I had guessed that
from my own experience on the streets. It had been proved by experiments at the National Zoo before
Mary and I had holed up on the mountain, although I had not seen the report. I suppose the Old Man
knew it; certainly the President knew it and the other top VIPs.
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
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
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.
I scanned dozens of tapes which had been monitored from Zone Red; they fell into three time groups:
the masquerade period, when the slugs had been continuing the "normal" broadcasts; a short period of
counter-propaganda during which the slugs had tried to convince citizens in Zone Green that the
government had gone crazy?it had not worked as we had not relayed their casts, just as they had not
relayed the President's proclamation?and, finally, the current period in which pretense had been dropped,
the masquerade abandoned.
According to Dr. McIlvaine the titans have no true culture of their own; they are parasitic even in that
and merely adapt the culture they find to their own needs. Maybe he assumes too much, but that is what
they did in Zone Red. The slugs would have to maintain the basic economic activity of their victims since
the slugs themselves would starve if the hosts starved. To be sure, they continued that economy with
variations that we would not use?that business of processing damaged and excess people in fertilizer [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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