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  "Okay. Better aim to the right; that's downwind." Thunder rolled overhead. "Boy, there was a big drop on my hand. Looks like we're sure gonna get soaked tonight. But what the hell. I'd ruther be wet outside a hopper house than dry inside one any day."

  12

  "Oh, thank you, Howard, thank you ever so much. I've always wanted one."

  Not a bad reaction, he thought, especially considering that the pup didn't cost me anything, except that damned one-dollar deposit. I wonder what a new bicycle would do. Let's see—good bicycles are expensive—maybe I could get one wholesale. Oh, so he's here again, the knight thought disgustedly.

  Lediacre appeared and began making French noises at the puppy, who seemed bewildered by all this attention.

  "I don't know," said Elsmith. "If he can be trained properly, he'll be an asset, but if he turns out to be a yapper we'll have to get rid of him. He'd attract attention. Well, Weier, what have you to report?"

  They went in, and Sir Howard spread out the papers he had found, meanwhile giving his story.

  Elsmith stared hard at the pieces of paper. "We'll test these blank ones for invisible writing, just to make sure, though I don't think there's anything on them. The sentry just disappeared, eh, leaving his hat and rifle? That's funny. What do you know about what your brother was doing with his insects? Remember, we were out of touch with him for two months before his death."

  "Not a great deal," said Sir Howard. "I was away from home during most of those two months, too, and he never took me into his confidence. I didn't even know about the laboratory until I came home after I heard the news. And by that time they'd smashed up everything and confiscated what they hadn't smashed. They turned the bugs loose in our yard. We had a regular plague of insects for a week."

  "Hm-m-m. Hm-m-m." Elsmith lit a cigar. "Somehow I think your brother, and his insects, and the sentry's disappearance are all connected, though I don't see how."

  Sir Howard picked up the scrap with the cryptic heading "Pulex irr." "Have you any idea what this means, sir?"

  "I suppose it stands for Pulex irritans, the common flea. The M-146 might be the number of an artificial mutation, assuming that your brother was working on mutations. You know what they are, don't you? The thing to the right of it probably means 'attrition factor point one seven,' meaning that after a given length of time under certain conditions only one-sixth as many of a given batch of fleas were alive as would be with the normal nonmutated type. The exclamation marks opposite the M-149 presumably mean that he had found a type of flea that would stand those conditions, whatever they are, as well as the normal type stands normal conditions."

  Sir Howard thought. "Fleas don't bite hoppers, do they? Everybody says that flies and mosquitoes never bother the things. There's—WOW!" Sir Howard thought afterward that it was the greatest moment of his life. He couldn't explain, how he had done it. One moment there was confusion and bafflement, and then in a flash everything was clear. He saw in his mind the now-familiar picture of a small gray animal, scratching—scratching. "It's the pup!"

  "What? What? Don't ever do that again, my boy. At least, not indoors, unless you want to give me heart failure."

  "The puppy, the dog. Suppose Frank had found a mutation of the flea that liked hoppers. When they dumped all his bugs out, some of these special fleas found their way into the kennels, and were on the pup when I gave him to the sentry to hold. A couple of them went exploring and got on the sentry."

  "Well?"

  "Well, what would you do if you had a hat on and a flea crawled up under it and bit your scalp?"

  "I'd take the hat— By Jove, I see. It's fantastic, but it seems to fit. Ordinary insects don't bother the hoppers because the haemocyanin in their blood gives them indigestion. But if your brother developed a flea that thrived on haemocyanin blood as well as haemoglobin blood—and the hopper, never having suffered from insect bites, would be driven half crazy by them—they didn't bring any special arasitic insects from their own world—he'd take his helmet off and then not have sense enough to put it back on. With those synthetic minds of theirs concentrating on something else, they'd pull their helmets off to scratch without thinking—Where are you going?"

  Sir Howard was already at the door. "Lediacre!" he shouted. "Where did the dog go?"

  "He went with Sally, my friend. Or rather, she took him. She said she was about to give him a bath."

  "Where? Where?"

  "Up by the spring. You wish—"

  Sir Howard didn't hear the rest of it; he was racing up the path to the spring. His heart pounded. At the end of the path a pretty picture came in view, framed by the trees; Sally Mitten on her knees, the sun in her hair, before a wash- tub. Over the washtub she held at arm's length a half-grown, smoke-gray, apprehensive-looking terrier.

  "Sally!" His frantic yell, with all the power of his huge chest behind it, made the forest hum with echoes.

  "Why . . . Howard, what is it? Have the hoppers found our place?"

  "No . . . it's the dog." He paused to catch his breath.

  "The dog? I was just going to wash him. He's simply covered with fleas."

  "Thank God!" Puff, puff, puff.

  "That he's covered with fleas?"

  "Yes. Have you dunked him in that stuff yet?"

  "No. Howard van Slyck, are you crazy?"

  "Not at all. Ask your Uncle Homer. But I've got to have those fleas. C'mere, Mutt or Spike or whatever your name is."

  "I'm going to call him Terence."

  "All right. C'mere, Terence."

  Terence looked at the knight, wagged his tail doubtfully, sat down, and scratched.

  By the time he got the dog back to camp, ideas were sprouting like toadstools after a rain. Elsmith said: "It's probable that only a fraction of Terence's fleas are the kind we want. We shall have to find some way of selecting them from the mass. There seems to be quite a mass, too." Terence was nibbling at his silky flank.

  Sir Howard said: "If we had some of that haemocyanin blood, we could feed it to them, and the ones that didn't pass out would be the right ones."

  "Yes," mused Elsmith, "and that would give us a check on the validity of our theory. I don't know how we could get a supply of hopper blood, though."

  Haas drawled: "Maybe we could kidnap one of the critters and take his hat off so he'd be harmless."

  "Bravo!" said Lediacre. "That is the true American spirit, that we read about in France."

  "Too risky, I'm afraid," said Elsmith.

  "So," continued Lediacre, "does anything else have this special kind of blood?"

  "It's almost identical with that of the arthropoda, especially the crustacea."

  "Crustacea? You mean like les homards, the lobsters?"

  "Yes."

  "Then, my friends, our problem it is solved! One of our men is the manager of Vinay Freres, a restaurant in New York. Have you ever eaten there? But you must! Their onion soup—magnificent! I shall arrange with him to bleed his lobsters to death before cooking them. It will not harm them as food. And the blood we can smuggle up here. But how does one raise fleas? One cannot call, 'Here, flea; here, flea,' at meal time."

  "One way," said Elsmith, "is to put them under a glass on your wrist. They eat whenever they want to then. But perhaps if we had the blood in thin rubber bladders, that they could pierce and suck through—"

  Once started, the flea farm grew by leaps and bounds. It took an average of five weeks to raise a generation to maturity, but there seemed to be no limit to their reproductive powers, at least when they were coddled as they were at the Adirondack camp. Sir Howard never had a chance to go to Amsterdam for a bicycle. Men came and went. Little Fitzmartin departed happily with instructions to have as many electrostats as possible built, and talking about how they'd absolutely smear the bally blighters. Lediacre was at the camp often. It was a crumb of comfort to Sir Howard that if he was too busy to squire Sally Mitten, the Frenchman was also. They drove from morning to night. A chamber had to be cut out of
the hillside to accommodate thousands of fleas.

  There was a colored man from a place called Missouri, who departed with several thousand peculiar pets concealed in the lining of his battered grass suitcase. There was a red-skinned man from the Southwest, a Novvo, who proved to be an old friendly enemy of Haas. Whereat there was much backslapping and reminiscing: "Say, remember the time we beat the pants off you guys on the South Platte?" "What do you mean, beat the pants off us? You had us out-numbered two to one, and even so we retreated in good order!" There was Maxwell Baugh, the new head of the Hudson-Mohawk branch of the Organization, to report that the local hoppers hadn't shown any signs of suspicion, but that they were still worried about the sentry, who had been picked up wandering idiotically, and was unable to give any coherent account of his actions after his helmet had been put back on.

  Sir Howard began to appreciate what a big place the world was. He'd have liked to question these men of odd sizes and colors about their homelands. But there wasn't time; they came and left by stealth, after staying but a fraction of an hour. A bark from Terence, a shadowy form in the dark, passwords and mutterings, and the man was gone.

  "And now," said Elsmith, "we sit and wait. It's the damnable time lag."

  "What do you mean, sir?"

  "The time it takes for our messengers to get to all parts of the world. In prehopper times you could get to any part of the world in a few days, by flying machines and ground vehicles. But with the fastest means of transportation available to us, it takes a full month to get to places like Central Asia. So we have to wait. Fortunately most of the messengers to the faraway countries got away early; we sent a lot of our own men to save time. But one of them, our man to Iberia, was picked up by the hoppers. He jumped into the Bay of Biscay and drowned himself before they got any information out of him. But we had to send another load of fleas.

  "So, my boy, for the next five weeks you can plan to spend most of your time hunting, fishing, and gardening."

  "Sir, I'd like to run down to Amsterdam tomorrow—"

  "I'm afraid not, Van Slyck. We'll have to lie very low for the next month. It would be intolerable to have something go wrong at the last minute. The hoppers haven't acted suspicious, but how do we know they're not playing cat-and-mouse with us?"

  So, there wouldn't be any bicycle for Sally Mitten. And Lediacre was coming up again in a few days. Oh, to hell with it!

  "About how many fleas have we raised altogether, sir?"

  "I don't really know. Something like fifty million."

  "That doesn't sound like enough. There are twenty million hoppers. Seems as though we ought to have more than two hoppers per flea—I mean two fleas per hopper. Though the fleas hop, too."

  "We shall have. The messengers will establish stations for raising more generations of fleas in various parts of the world. Though one more generation is about all they'll have time for. Some of them are raising their fleas on the way."

  "How will they keep them?"

  "If everything else fails, there are always their own bodies."

  "When is M-day?"

  "October 1st."

  The wait proved more difficult than the work, though Sir Howard did everything he could to make the time pass quickly. He threw himself into such occupations as were open to him with vicious energy, as when he walked five miles through the woods carrying across his shoulders an eight-point buck he had shot. He did little fishing. It wasn't active enough, and besides he was likely to arrive at Sly Pond to find the boat bobbing serenely in the middle of the lake with Sally Mitten and Lediacre in it. There was no fun in standing sullenly on the shore, and after the second occasion he hadn't taken any more chances. He'd rather take his bird glasses down to Little Moose Lake, and watch the local pair of ospreys dive for fish. He read voraciously.

  Toward the end of September, when the maples were breaking out in scarlet and gold, Maxwell Baugh arrived to discuss detailed plans for the York State uprising. Sir Howard discovered to his surprise that he had been picked to lead a contingent of heavy cavalry against such of the Albany hoppers as were not affected by the fleas. The plans had long been drawn up; it remained but to fit individuals into their places in the pattern.

  Sir Howard held up his helmet. "This part," he said, "is the bowl. This is the visor. This is the bib or beaver."

  "Goodness!" said Sally Mitten. "I suppose all those other pieces of armor have names, too."

  "Well, well, don't tell me that I've found one subject I know more about than you, my sweet? Yes, they all have special names, and they all have special purposes. And I know 'em all."

  "That's too bad, Howard."

  "Huh?"

  "I mean, if we're successful, armor will go out of use pretty quickly, won't it? People will have guns then."

  "Good Lord, I never thought of that! I guess you're right, though."

  "And they'll have power vehicles, too. You wouldn't want to go somewhere on a horse when you can go a hundred miles an hour in a car."

  "I guess you win again, young lady. Here I've spent years learning to sit a horse, and hold a toothpick, and swing a sword, and jump around with fifty pounds of armor on. More tricks than a dead mule has flies. And now, I'm helping to make all that expensive knowledge useless. I suppose it's too late to do anything about it now."

  "Oh, I'm sure you'll get on all right. You're a resourceful young man. By the way, I never could see how men in full armor got around the way they do. I should think they'd be like turtles turned on their backs."

  "It isn't so bad. The weight's distributed, and all these joints and little sliding plates give you a good deal of freedom. But if you try to run upstairs with a suit on, you know you're carrying something."

  "I should think men would prefer chain armor. Isn't it lighter and more flexible?"

  "That's what a lot of people think who never wore any. For equivalent protection it's just about as heavy. And there's the padding."

  "Padding?"

  "Yes. Without an inch or two of cotton padding underneath, it wouldn't be much good. A blow would break your bones even if the edge didn't go through. And by the time you get all that padding on, the suit isn't much more limber than one of plate, and it's hotter than the devil's private fireplace. Chain's all right for a little mail shirt like Lyman Haas'. That's just to keep some kind friend from slipping a dagger between your ribs on a dark night."

  He buckled his last strap, picked up his helmet, and stood up. The fire threw little red highlights on his suit. "You boys ready?"

  "Yeah," said Cahoon. "We be."

  "Been ready half an hour," said Haas. "That'll be a lesson to me, to allow more time for lobsters to get into their shells."

  "Howard—"

  "Yes, Sally?"

  "I wanted to ask you something—"

  "Yes?"

  "Be careful how you expose yourself. People who have never faced guns have no idea how deadly they can be."

  "Oh. Don't worry. I'm scared to death of the things myself. Be seeing you. I hope."

  13

  Plop-plop-plop-plop went the hoofs. The fog was still rising off the Mohawk. You couldn't see anything but the other men in the troop and the glistening black road ahead. The mist condensed on their plate and ran down in little streaks.

  Out of Schenectady, they passed the huge masts of the broadcasting station. A small fire near the base of the nearest mast made a spot of orange in the grayness. Three men were standing around the mast, and a fourth was kneeling at its base. He was chopping at a cable with a butcher's cleaver. Chunk went the cleaver. Chunk. Chunk. Chunk.

  "Here's McCormack Corners," said a man.

  "What's Weier taking us around this way for?" asked another. "It's shorter by Colonie."

  "Dunno. Maybe they want to keep the Mohawk Pike open for somebody else."

  They halted. Up ahead was a pattering of many hoofs.

  "Single file," came back Sir Howard's baritone. "Walk."

  They straightened out, and saw
that a large troop of unarmored men with crossbows dangling from their saddles was trotting past along the Cherry Valley Pike. One of them called: "Hey lobsters! What are you coming for? You'll be about as useful as real lobsters. We're the ones got to do the real fighting!"

  "We're to fight the hoppers when they come out, and you guys pull foot," retorted one of the armored men. "Seen any hoppers?"

  "Just one," a crossbowman called back. Near Duanesburg. Funniest thing you ever seen. He just sat there on his cycle watching us go past. Didn't do nothing. Thought we was just a local war party, I guess."

  "Local war party! That's good!"

  "He didn't do nothing. Didn't even say, 'Halt, men!' I bet he was surprised when Schuyler, up front, put a bolt through him."

  "What'd he do then?"

  "Just keeled over and squeaked for a while. Then he didn't squeak any more."

  The crossbowmen pulled up ahead. It was getting quite light. The mist faded. In front of them the sun, orange on top shading to deep red underneath, threw cheerful lights on the plate.

  "I see the Office Building," said a man. "Suppose any hoppers are in it now?"

  "Prob'ly," replied another. "They get to work early. One reason I never liked the hoppers is the early hours they keep."

  "You call getting to work at seven early! You oughta work on a farm, mister."

  "Maybe they'll see us."

  "Maybe. They'll know something's wrong. That static machine oughta be going on any time."

  "They got guns in the Office Building?"

  "Ayuh. I think so."

  "I mean big ones—artillery, they call 'em."

  "Well, this ain't Watervliet."

  "No. But the guns at Watervliet could shoot clear down to Albany if they had a mind to."

  "Huh? There ain't nothing can shoot that far."

  "Oh, yes. They can shoot clear down to Kingston if they got a mind to. But that's why they have the static machines. So the hoppers can't radio back and forth to tell where to shoot."