This choice: Continue reading "The Puppetmasters: An Oral History" • Go Back...Chapter #29The Puppetmasters: An Oral History (5) by: Seuzz   The week that followed would have struck most visitors as entirely unremarkable. Students went to class, and teachers taught them. Kids took notes and tests and turned in homework; they goofed off between classes; girls gossiped and guys talked about girls and cars and what they'd do if the foreign situation turned hot after they graduated from high school. Those who were still in control of themselves blithely carried on, and those of us with humps between our shoulders carried on right alongside them.
So things mostly went unremarked inside the school too. I was privy to only one such remark. On Thursday I saw Reggie Doorn hunched by the drinking fountain watching the crowds with a furtive eye. Reggie was one of the beatniks, a nobody and not a priority for any reason, but I'd often talked to him, so I sidled up and talked to him now.
His face was curled up in an expression halfway between puzzlement and fear, and the glance he gave me was keen with worry. "Don't things seem a little weird to you," he asked. I looked around and asked what he meant. "I don't know," he admitted. "It just seems like-- People seem a lot quieter lately."
I said that the halls seemed as noisy as ever.
"I mean when-- In class." He raised a hand, as though the words he sought could be pulled from the air. "And-- I was in the library earlier. Aaron and Ken and Sylvia were at the next table, but they weren't talking."
"They were doing homework?"
"They weren't doing anything. They were kind of spaced out. It made me realize there's been a lot of that lately."
"Worried about tests or something," I said with a shrug.
"Those are weeks away."
I said something about Ken having problems at home and excused myself. I then went to have a very quiet word with Mr. Paulson. During fourth period, which I shared with Reggie, the intercom crackled, summoning him to the office. He looked much calmer when he returned.
* * * * *
Otherwise, all my time was spent with the McLains out at the flying saucer. We'd opened it for business on Tuesday, and I helped staff it after school. Signs had gone up on the nearby highways, and we did a brisk business. A good portion of our clientele came from the town, but the real targets were travelers looking for a curiosity to explore on their long cross-country drives. They were insects buzzing along on the breeze, and each one--whether a solitary salesman looking to stretch his leg or a family trying to distract bored and cranky children--went away pollinated with Titans, spreading them to new cities. We had exhausted the original nests by this point, but each of us was birthing a new Titan every night, doubling the invading population every twenty-four hours. Some of them left on our visitors; most of them went into containers to be shipped to cities that were still being conquered; a sizable number remained behind, to go onto new hosts so as to solidify our grip on the town and increase the number of nightly births. They slowly lapped deeper into the school, and into the rest of the town.
Certain departments of the federal government had taken an interest by that point. I never heard directly what had happened, but on Sunday my dad got a call saying that the saucer was being abandoned; apparently some government agents had paid us a visit without us capturing them, and it seemed best to close up shop before they could return with reinforcements. A National Guard unit did sweep into the town the following Monday, but the sheriff's office welcomed them most cooperatively, and then we had a cohort of Guardsmen to help patrol our streets and beat back any more unwanted counter-strokes.
Later in the week the President took to the airwaves for a major speech. But he had only just gotten out the phrase "hostile interstellar species" before the telescreens went black; when they came back on, all the stations claimed that the feed had been interrupted by technical malfunctions, and nothing more was heard in Iowa from Washington, New York City, or the West Coast. We were on our own.
* * * * *
A turning point came ten days after Brett and I had lugged that first ice chest into the school office. I had started going in to school early, and this day was no exception. But Mr. Paulson, who taught History first period, gestured me into his room, and handed me a slug from a stock he had in his desk. "For Emma Blanchard," he said. "When we stand for the pledge." I thought nothing, for I had no thoughts, but it was clear that we in the student body were going to stop pretending, and would now move brutally and openly against those who had been free up to now.
Mr. Paulson handed slugs to some others who came in early, and then the room began to fill up. I took a desk behind Emma. I felt nothing, of course. The bell rang, and we all shuffled to our feet for the pledge of allegiance. Emma had a thin scarf about her pedestal-like neck, but her sweater rode low in the back. As voices rose in a chant, I pulled her sweater back with a crooked finger and put the Titan on her. From the corner of my eye, I saw half a dozen of my classmates execute similar maneuvers on students in front of them. I propped Emma up until she had mastered her balance. Then she pulled her sweater off, exposing her bra-straps and her milky-white back and the thing that hung there. I took off my own shirt, and turned, and was enveloped by that blankness that falls on you when your Titan is communing with another.
Mr. Paulson delivered a lecture, but I think we all took fewer notes than was normal.
Similar scenes occurred sporadically in classes before lunch, but that was enough. At the end of fifth period Mr. Horn got on the intercom and announced an assembly to be held in the gym. Everyone wordlessly trooped through the halls and quietly lined up outside the doors. One by one Mr. Horn and some of the other teachers checked us against a clipboard of names and sent us in. There was no pushing, no talking, no horseplay, except at one point, when loud whispering could be heard from the back. There was a brief scuffle, and Coach Wirthlin hurried off. Apparently a few victims had been overlooked and were making noises about how weird everything had suddenly turned. But their classmates quickly got them pinned down, and after a few more slugs got fetched there was no more trouble.
The gym doors closed behind us, and everyone stripped to the waist--the girls even removed their slips and brassieres, so that everything stood exposed--and we milled around, making and breaking off contact with whoever happened to be around. By the end of sixth, I'm pretty sure that every Titan had absorbed everything from every student, including all the knowledge that the other Titans had absorbed outside of school from all the Titans they had been in contact with.
That would explain some of the odd jobs that many of us picked up. After the closure of the "flying saucer" attraction I had nothing to occupy myself with after school, but I helped out in the strangest places. Most of it was just manual work, like going down to a warehouse where shipments of Titans were prepared. Some of the manual work was of a technical variety. The Titans had no affection for their mounts, and if someone was hurt in a serious accident, they would simply destroy the host and move the slug to another mount. It was probably one such accident that led me to spend a week operating a camera inside the TV station, expertly moving it about according to the director's instructions as we filmed a locally produced farm report.
Some have argued that the Titans were themselves intelligent, but I'm not so sure. If they were intelligent, they had a conceptual pattern quite different from ours, and I don't think they understood us. I mentioned before that they seemed to "read" us as though our minds were a template for transforming inputs into outputs: If someone does this then the human mount should do that, and they didn't really know what this or that were. They certainly seemed to have some peculiar ideas about what was and what wasn't necessary human behavior.
In the matter of physical well-being they were remarkably slovenly. People ceased to bathe, and if we'd been in control of ourselves we'd certainly have remarked on the foul odors that sat heavily on the nose wherever a small crowd had gathered in an enclosed space. We didn't "sleep" either, not in the normal sense. I think probably we were asleep the entire time we were being ridden, but no one went to bed, and many mundane tasks got performed at the most god-awful hours of the morning simply because there was no more reason for human society to shut down at night. Nutrition was another matter toward which the Titans were careless. People went days without eating, and when they became weak they would scarf down anything that was at hand. I remember once, when my Titan had finally noticed the hunger pains, I went into the kitchen and ate a box of raw, uncooked macaroni elbows and drank down half a jar of spaghetti sauce. Many people became emaciated during the occupation; others became fat. Everyone's teeth rotted.
But in other places the Titans were extraordinarily fastidious about keeping up appearances. Newspapers continued to be published and delivered promptly, though the contents were senseless and sometimes weren't even English. Crops were tended and produce shipped, and people even paid using checks and credit cards at the supermarkets. Once, I saw a woman and a clerk arguing vehemently about a coupon; it only ended after the two took off their clothes and let the Titans settle the matter privately between them.
* * * * *
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