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.

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 plants, for example-but in general farmers stayed farmers, mechanics went on being mechanics, and bankers were still bankers. That last seems silly, but the experts claim that any "division-of-labor" economy requires an accounting system, a "money" system.

I know myself that they use money behind the Curtain, so he may be right-but I never heard of "bankers" or "money" among ants or termites. However, there may be lots of things I've never heard of.

It is not so obvious why they continued human recreations. Is the desire to be amused a universal need? Or did they learn it from us? The "experts" on each side of the argument are equally emphatic-and I don't know. What they picked from human ideas of fun to keep and "improve on" does not speak well for the human race although some of their variations may have merit-that stunt that they pulled in Mexico, for example, of giving the bull an even break with the matador.

But most of it just makes one sick at the stomach and I won't elaborate. I am one of the few who saw even transcriptions on such things, except for foolhardy folk who still held out in Zone Amber; I saw them professionally. The government monitored all stereocasts from Zone Red but the transcriptions were suppressed under the old Comstock "Indecency" Law -another example of "Mother-Knows-Best", though perhaps Mother did know best in this case. I hope that Mary, in her briefing, did not have to look at such things, but Mary would never say so if she had.

Or perhaps "Mother" did not "Know Best"; if anything more could have added to the determination of men still free to destroy this foul thing it would have been the "entertainment" stereocast from stations inside Zone Red. I recall a boxing match cast from the Will Rogers Memorial Auditorium at Fort Worth-or perhaps you would call it a wrestling match. In any case there was a ring and a referee and two contestants pitted against each other. There were even fouls, i.e., doing anything which might damage the opponent's manager-I mean "master", the opponent's slug.

Nothing else was a foul-nothing! It was a man versus a woman, both of them big and husky. She gouged out one of his eyes in the first clinch, but he broke her left wrist which kept the match on even enough terms to continue. It ended only when one of them had been so weakened by loss of blood that the puppet master could no longer make the slave dance. The woman lost-and died, I am sure, for her left breast was almost torn away and she had bled so much that only immediate surgery and massive transfusions could have saved her. Which she did not get; the slugs were transferred to new hosts at the end of the match and the inert contenders were dragged out.

But the male slave had remained active a little longer than the female, slashed and damaged though he was, and he finished the match with a final act of triumph over her which I soon learned was customary. It seemed to be a signal to turn it into an "audience participation show", an orgy which would make a witches' Sabbat seem like a sewing circle.

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.