miraculous insulating material, which had been used on rocket ships to the Moon. This was, in fact, the same material which gave the aluminum siding of Dwayne Hoover’s dream house in Midland City its miraculous insulating qualities.
The manager reminded Trout of what the first man to set foot on the Moon had said: “One small step for man, one great leap for mankind.”
“Thrilling words,” said Trout. He looked over his shoulder, perceived that they were being followed by a white Oldsmobile Toronado with a black vinyl roof. This four hundred horsepower, front-wheel drive vehicle was burbling along at about three miles an hour, ten feet behind them and close to the curb.
That was the last thing Trout remembered—seeing the Oldsmobile back there.
• • •
The next thing he knew, he was on his hands and knees on a handball court underneath the Queensboro Bridge at Fifty-ninth Street, with the East River nearby. His trousers and underpants were around his ankles. His money was gone. His parcels were scattered around him—the tuxedo, the new shirt, the books. Blood seeped from one ear.
The police caught him in the act of pulling up his trousers. They dazzled him with a spotlight as he leaned against the backboard of the handball court and fumbled foolishly with his belt and the buttons on his fly. The police supposed that they had caught him committing some public nuisance, had caught him working with an old man’s limited palette of excrement and alcohol.
He wasn’t quite penniless. There was a ten-dollar bill in the watch pocket of his pants.
• • •
It was determined at a hospital that Trout was not seriously hurt. He was taken to a police station, where he was questioned. All he could say was that he had been kidnapped by pure evil in a white Oldsmobile. The police wanted to know how many people were in the car, their ages, their sexes, the colors of their skins, their manners of speech.
“For all I know, they may not even have been Earthlings,” said Trout. “For all I know, that car may have been occupied by an intelligent gas from Pluto.”
• • •
Trout said this so innocently, but his comment turned out to be the first germ in an epidemic of mind-poisoning. Here is how the disease was spread: a reporter wrote a story for the New York Post the next day, and he led off with the quotation from Trout.
The story appeared under this headline:
PLUTO BANDITS
KIDNAP PAIR
Trout’s name was given as Kilmer Trotter, incidentally, address unknown. His age was given as eighty-two.
Other papers copied the story, rewrote it some. They all hung on to the joke about Pluto, spoke knowingly of The Pluto Gang. And reporters asked police for any new information on The Pluto Gang, so police went looking for information on The Pluto Gang.
• • •
So New Yorkers, who had so many nameless terrors, were easily taught to fear something seemingly specific—The Pluto Gang. They bought new locks for their doors and gratings for their windows, to keep out The Pluto Gang. They stopped going to theaters at night, for fear of The Pluto Gang.
Foreign newspapers spread the terror, ran articles on how persons thinking of visiting New York might keep to a certain few streets in Manhattan and stand a fair chance of avoiding The Pluto Gang.
• • •
In one of New York City’s many ghettos for dark-skinned people, a group of Puerto Rican boys gathered together in the basement of an abandoned building. They were small, but they were numerous and volatile. They wished to become frightening, in order to defend themselves and their friends and families, something the police wouldn’t do. They also wanted to drive the drug peddlers out of the neighborhood, and to get enough publicity, which was very important, to catch the attention of the Government, so that the Government would do a better job of picking up the garbage and so on.
One of them, José Mendoza, was a fairly good painter. So he painted the emblem of their new gang on the backs of the members’ jackets. This was it:
9
WHILE KILGORE TROUT was inadvertently poisoning the collective mind of New York City, Dwayne Hoover, the demented Pontiac dealer, was coming down from the roof of his own Holiday Inn in the Middle West.
Dwayne went into the carpeted lobby of the place not long before sunrise, to ask for a room. As queer as the hour was, there was a man ahead of him, and a black one