"Wait a minute," the first one said. "Ski, if she goes through the streets with that thing on her back somebody is likely to burn her."
The older one scratched his chin. "That's true," he said to Mary. "I'd say you couldn't stand to have that dressing off. We'll just have to dig up a prowl car for you."
Which they did-one was just landing and they hailed it. I had to pay the charges on the rented wreck, then I went along, as far as Mary's entrance. It was in a hotel, through a private elevator; I got in with her to avoid explanations, then went back up after she had gotten out at a level lower than the obvious controls of the car provided for. I was tempted to go on in with her, but the Old Man had ordered me to come in by Kay Five, so Kay Five it was.
I was tempted, too, to put my shorts back on. In the prowl car and during a quick march through a side door of the hotel, with police around us to keep Mary from being shot, I had not minded so much-but it took nerve to step out of the elevator and face the world without pants.
I need not have worried. The short distance I had to go was enough to show me that a fundamental custom had gone with last year's frost. Most men were wearing straps-codpieces, really-as the cops had been, but I was not the only man in New Brooklyn stark naked to his shoes. One in particular I remember; he was leaning against a street roof stanchion and searching with cold eyes every passer-by. He was wearing nothing but slippers and a brassard lettered with "VIG"-and he was carrying an Owens mob gun under his arm.
I saw three more like him before I reached Kay Five; I was glad that I was carrying my shorts.
Some women were naked, some were not-but those who were not might as well have been-string brassieres, translucent plastic trunks, nothing that could possibly hide a slug.
Most of the women, I decided, would have looked better in clothes, preferably togas. If this was what the preachers had been worrying about all these years, then they had been barking up the wrong tree; it was nothing to arouse the happy old beast in men. The total effect was depressing. That was my first impression-but before I got to my destination even that had worn off. Ugly bodies weren't any more noticeable than ugly taxicabs; the eye discounted them automatically. And so it appeared to be with everybody else, too; those on the streets seemed to have acquired utter indifference. Maybe Schedule Bare Back got them ready for it.
One thing I did not notice consciously until much later: after the first block I was unaware of my own nakedness. I noticed other people long after I had forgotten my own bare skin. Somehow, some way, the American community had been all wrong about the modesty taboo and had been wrong for centuries.
When tackled firmly, it was as empty as the ghost that turns out to be a flapping window drape. It did not mean a thing, either pro or con, moral or immoral. Skin was skin and what of it?
I was let in to see the Old Man at once. He looked up and growled, "You're late."
I answered, "Where's Mary?"
"In the infirmary, getting treated and dictating her report. Let's see your hands."
"I'll show them to the doctor, thanks," I replied, making no move to take off the gloves. "What's up?"
"If you would ever bother to listen to a newscast," he grumbled, "you would know what was up."
Chapter 24
I'm glad I had not looked at a newscast; our honeymoon would never have gotten to first base. While Mary and I had each been telling the other how wonderful the other one was the war had almost been lost -and I was not sure about that "almost". My suspicion that the slugs could, if necessary, hide 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 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.