Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  “I don’t need to be excused from anything,” the nun said angrily. “I’m only saying I hate it.”

  “Sure you do. But you’ll thank me for it some day. Why, the time will come when you’ll all look back on these good times Under the Wire and say— Hold it!”

  A loose stone slid down the arroyo slope, followed by Tigrito, sulking back from his patrol. “No cowboys anywhere I could see,” he reported. “Hey, man. Let me get some of that heat.” He sat down next to Mary Jean on the other side, and put his arm around her.

  “What about the herd? Did you find them?”

  “Oh, sure, man. Nice and sleepy, ‘bout half a mile away.”

  “Then we go. You too, Tiger. On your feet, Mary Jean, and from now on no talking. Tiger leads, I go last. When he has the herd in sight he stops and you all take a handful of this gunk and start smearing.”

  “How do we tell which is a heifer? In fact, what’s a heifer?”

  “If you can’t tell you just do them all. Move out, Tiger. Glasses on, everybody.”

  Through the IR spectacles Hake saw the scene transformed. There was residual heat in the slope of the hill, so that they were moving over dully glowing rocks; Tigrito, ahead of him, was bright hands and head moving around a much darker torso, and the wire overhead was a dazzle of bright spots, obscuring the stars. He could not even see the red and blue-green laser beacons through it, and when he took his eyes away it took some time to adjust to the relative darkness. It was a long, hard downhill crawl, then a harder uphill scramble. There the top of a ridge had been shaved away to accommodate the rectenna and the wire was no more than ten feet above the ground. They all walked stooped and half-crouched across the ridge and didn’t straighten out until they were sliding down the loose fill the bulldozers had pushed onto the other side. It was said that touching the rectenna might not kill. None of them wanted to find out.

  The three-eighths buffalo-five-eighths cattle hybrid herd was resting peacefully at the bottom of the slope, uninterested in the human beings creeping toward them. The three-fives were bred for stupidity as well as for meat and milk, and the breeding had been successful all around. What they liked to eat was the blossom from yucca—which is why, Hake learned, the yucca’s other name was “buffalo grass”—and on that diet they fattened to slaughter size in three years.

  Deena gathered the troops around her and, one by one, squeezed a sticky, oily substance into each palm, and waved them toward the herd. They picked their way down the sliding, uneasy surface. Hake slipped and fell, and as he recovered himself he heard Tigrito whine, “Hey, man! You wasn’t here before!”

  A bright light overwhelmed the IR lenses—Deena’s; it showed a man in a stetson and levis, pointing a gun at Tigrito. “Got ya,” the man crowed. “Y’under arrest, ever’ one of you, get your hands up!”

  Mean rage filled Hake’s skull. The bastard had a gun! If Hake had had one of his own— He didn’t finish the thought, but his fingers were curling around a trigger that wasn’t there. And he wasn’t alone. Tigrito, still whining and complaining, was moving slowly toward the man; and behind the cowboy, Sister Florian reached out for his throat. Not quietly enough; the man half heard her and started to turn, and Tigrito launched himself on him, bowled him to the ground. The gun went flying, Tigrito’s hand rose and fell.

  And it was all over. Tigrito rose to his knees, still holding the rock he had caught up to bash the man’s skull with. “Did I kill the fucker?” he demanded.

  Deena was bending over him with the light. “Not yet, anyway. Hellfire. All right, let’s get on with it. Sister, you stay here and keep an eye on him. The rest of you, go get those cows!”

  What Hake retained longest of the incident was a startling fact. He had been willing to kill the cowboy. If he had been asked the question as a theoretical matter, before the fact, he would have denied the possibility emphatically. Ridiculous! He had no reason. He had nothing against the man. There was no real stake riding on the incident. He was certainly not a killer! But when the moment came, he knew that if he had had a gun he would have pulled the trigger.

  Actually, the man had not died. They had gone about their farcical task of slapping goo under the cattle’s tails, and then taken turns to carry the still unconscious man all the long way Under the Wire to the barracks. As far as Hake knew, he was alive still; at least he had been when the truck from Has-Ta-Va carried him away with a concussion and possible skull fracture, but breathing. The six of them looked at each other in the barracks, hands, faces and clothes smeared with green paint—it was not until they reached the lighted dugout that they knew what Deena had spread in their palms. As Hake fell into bed, for the forty-five minutes before reveille, he thought there might be repercussions. He also thought he knew what had been so strange about the expressions on the faces of all his comrades. They had all been very close to grinning.

  But in the morning, when Fortnum fell them out in the pre-dawn light, no word was said about the incident. They ran their mile, swilled down their breakfast, spent their hour on the obstacle course and showed up for Deena’s class in computer-bugging. After ten minutes of drill on the nomenclature of the machine Hake could not stand it any more. “Deena,” he said, “how is the guy?”

  She paused between “bit” and “byte” and looked at him thoughtfully. “He’ll be all right,” she said at last.

  “Are we in trouble?”

  “You’re always in trouble until you get out of this place,” she said. “No special trouble that the Team can’t handle. It’s happened before.”

  The whole group knew about what had happened, and one of the ones who had stayed behind put his hand up. “Deena, what the hell were you-all doing out there, anyway?”

  Deena glanced at her watch. “Well— Tell you what Pegleg’s off with the plane, Fortnum’s gone to pick up supplies and I have to make a report. I’m going to leave you on your own for, let’s see, ninety minutes. Only, so you shouldn’t waste your time, you’ve got two assignments, with prizes for the winners. First, see if you can figure out what the exercise was last night. Second, I want each one of you to think up an Agency project. You’ll be judged on originality, practicality and effectiveness, and so you’ll know it’s fair I’m going to let Fortnum do the judging.”

  “How do we find out about the exercise?” asked Beth Hwa.

  “That’s your problem,” Deena said agreeably.

  “What are the prizes?” Hake asked.

  “That’s easy. Everybody but the first prize-winner in each category gets punishment duty. So long; you’ve got eighty-eight minutes left.”

  They had never been on their own before in the middle of the day, were not sure how to handle it. A dozen of the group drifted toward the scuba pool, Hake included; included also, most of the six who had gone on the exercise. The reasons had nothing to do with the problems. It was a way of getting some of the paint residue off, and a way, too, of waking up that underslept part of their brains that wanted more than anything else to crawl back into the bunkhouse. They stripped down to the all-purpose underwear and quenched themselves in the tepid and stagnant water.

  Then the guessing began.

  “Maybe we were practicing how to immobilize, I don’t know, cavalry or something. With like sleeping drugs.”

  “Shee-it, man! What cavalry?”

  “Well—race horses, maybe. Sometimes they give you anesthetics through an enema, don’t they?”

  “Or maybe it was going to be some kind of poison, to kill off somebody’s beef supplies.”

  “Come on, Beth! You think the Team’d send people around to massage ten or twenty million cows’ asses? Wait a minute. Maybe in a real job it wouldn’t be paint but—I don’t know. Honey? And it would attract flies, and they’d spread disease—?”

  Fanciful ideas. The group seemed to generate a lot of them. Sprawled in the sun, under the shadeless wire, Hake’s tired brain was not up to the task of trying to guess whether any of those ideas were more fanciful
than what he already knew the Team had done. Sitting near him, Mary Jean leaned over and whispered in his ear. “You got any better ideas?” He shook his head. “Then maybe we should start on the other project, I mean thinking up a real job. Wait a minute, I’ve got some paper.”

  While she was rummaging in her shoulder bag Hake leaned back and closed his eyes, letting the talk drift over him. Some of the things they had guessed as explanations for the mission last night might work as project proposals, he thought. They were still going at it avidly—as though each and every one of them had taken it as a personal challenge. How had they all become so bloodthirsty?

  “—some kind of irritating acid, make them stampede—” “—constipate them till they bloat up and die—” “—smells bad to the bulls, or, heyl Maybe bulls get turned off by green paint!”

  “No, wait a minute, Tigrito. Look at it the other way. Suppose it was some kind of chemical that interfered with intercourse. Maybe made the bull lose its, uh, erection.”

  The Hawaiian woman sat up straight. “Better idea!” she cried. “Why waste it on bulls? I’m going to try that out for the other assignment: some kind of chemical that you give women, I don’t know, put it in their food maybe, that sterilizes them. Or makes them unattractive to men.”

  “Or it wouldn’t have to be a chemical, Beth,” said the black professor. “Subsidize the fashion industry, get them to go back to the bustle or the maxiskirt or something like that.”

  “Or better! How about starting a back-to-religion thing? Get all the women to become nuns.”

  The professor said thoughtfully, “That actually happened, you know, back in the Middle Ages. So many people taking vows of celibacy that the French kings got worried about the population drop. Only that would take pretty long to be effective—twenty or thirty years before it mattered much, and who knows what the world would be like then?—Oh, hi, Sister. We were just talking about nuns—”

  Sister Florian sat down, looking pleased with herself. “I heard what you were talking about.” Her usually severe face was conspicuously good-humored.

  “Okay, Sister,” said Tigrito. “You got something goin’ for you. What is it? You figure out what we was up to last night?”

  “No,” she said cheerfully, “I didn’t figure it out. I found it out. You all took off and left me alone with the computer. I gave it the unlock command and ordered it to look up Team projects involving large-mammal genital areas.”

  “Come off it, Sister! How’d you do that?”

  “Well, I set up a matrix of large-mammal genitals, chemical or biological agents, Team projects—•”

  “No, no! I mean about the unlock command.”

  She smiled sunnily. “I watch what she does, Tigrito. She types out the date of the month, plus two, and then her own last name. Then it’s open. So I did exactly the same thing. It took it a little while to hunt, but it came up with equine gonorrhea.”

  “Equine gonorrhea?”

  “There was an epidemic of it in America back in the 70s. Now there’s a new strain that’s infectious for all large mammals, and antibiotic-resistant, too. I guess what we’re going to do, some of us, sometimes, is infect breed cows, so that they’ll infect stud bulls, so we’ll knock out a big chunk of a cattle-breeding program. Somewhere. My own guess is maybe Argentina. Maybe England or Australia? Could be anywhere. Anyway,” she said, “I wrote it all down and time-stamped it and left it on Deena’s desk, so that’s that.” And she folded her hands in her lap and beamed around at them.

  But Hake was no longer listening. A chain of associations had formed in his mind. Nuns. Convents. People flocking to religious orders. A back-to-religion movement. He began to write quickly with the stub of a pencil Mary Jean had provided him: “Religious leaders like Sun Myung Moon, Indian gurus, Black Muslims and others have effectively taken significant numbers of persons out of the work force in America. Proposal: Charismatic religious leaders be identified and evaluated. Where they may be effective they can be subsidized or—”

  He pulled his feet back just in time to avoid having them stepped on as Tigrito, stalking furiously around the scuba pool, stopped in front of him. The youth grinned down at Mary Jean. “Hey, let’s pick up where we left off,” he said, clumping himself down between them. Hake instinctively made room as the boy took Mary Jean into his arms.

  “Watch it,” Hake said irritably.

  “Oh, man! I am watchin’ it, been watchin’ it a long time, now I’m ready for touchin’ it and squeezin’ it— Shit, lady!” He went sprawling into Hake’s lap as Mary Jean’s elbow, traveling no more than eight inches, got him just under the ribs. Hake shoved him away.

  “Fuck off, Tigrito,” said Mary Jean.

  “Yeah,” said Hake. The youth glared at him, then rolled to his feet and came up with his arms spread and curved.

  “Lady tells me to fuck off, that’s her business,” he said, moving toward Hake. “Ain’t yours, mother-fucker.”

  Hake was on his feet by then too, his arms automatically responding by coming to the grappling position, but he took a shuffling half-step back. It wasn’t really his fight, he told himself. If anyone’s, Mary Jean’s, who could handle it fine by herself.

  “Chickenshit too,” jeered Tigrito, and feinted a kick at Hake’s belly.

  Hake had an immense respect for Tigrito as a brawler, having lost a dozen falls to him in the ritualized hand-to- hand on the training field. But the part of his mind that evaluated and weighed was not operative then. When Tigrito’s foot came up Hake sidestepped and caught it; as Tigrito spilled backward he gripped Hake’s arms and pulled him over his head, flying; Hake twisted in mid-air and kneed the boy in the chin. In ten seconds it was all over, Hake kneeling on the boy’s chest and lifting his head to thump it on the rough cement.

  “Dear God,” came Deena’s voice from behind. “Leave you guys alone for a few minutes and what do I find? Hold it right there, killer. Fight’s over. You’re all on punishment detail tonight.”

  When he finally reached his bed that midnight Hake was so exhausted that sleep was out of reach. He tossed for a while and then stumbled into the latrine to write his compulsory postcards. One for Jessie Tunman, a picture of a gorge on the Pecos River: Having a fine time, getting a lot of rest, see you soon. One to go on the church bulletin board: Miss you all, but will be back full of energy for the church year; that was a picture of a herd of three-five hybrids, with a cowboy in a helicopter moseyin’ them along. They were each supposed to send three postcards a week, but Hake had fought it out and got the number reduced. He didn’t have three people to send postcards to. Apart from the church, he hardly had anybody.

  Crawling back to his bed, he wondered what the church would have thought of their battling minister that day, street-fighting with a barrio kid. Alys, at least, might have been delighted. And it would be very nice to have Alys delighted, in some ways, he thought, tossing angrily and very aware of Mary Jean’s tiny snores two bunks away. He counted up. He had been Under the Wire for eleven days. It seemed longer. He was not exactly the same person who had flown west from Newark. He was not at all sure what person he was, but the old Reverend Hake would not have brawled over a woman.

  And the twelfth day, and the thirteenth day, and the fourteenth day came and went, and everything outside the state of Texas receded farther and farther from his thoughts. The people who mattered were Deena and Tigrito and Beth Hwa and Sister Florian and Pegleg and Mary Jean, especially Mary Jean. On the fifteenth day, behind the bunkhouse, they kissed. There was no conversation. He simply followed her around the building. When she turned, his hands were on her. For three or four minutes their tongues were wild in each other’s mouths; and then he released her and they trotted to the lecture on ChemAgents, Use of.

  Hake’s glands were aflame, and concentration on Peg-leg’s drone wasn’t easy. When Hake became conscious of the youth’s suspicious glower he sat up straighter and tried to get Mary Jean (not to mention Alys and Leota and the nurse fro
m International Pets and Flowers) out of his mind. “You got these agents,” Pegleg droned, staring at Hake while he drummed on his artificial limb, “and you will be conversant with your use of them when you leave here, any questions? Right.”

  Thankfully, one of the others was smothering a yawn and Pegleg’s glare was diverted. Hake listened, trying to square what the instructor was saying with what he had been told was basic gospel. The Team’s charter did not permit the taking of human life.- All the instructors had emphasized that. Other kinds of life, though, were not protected, and Pegleg seemed to be giving them guidelines for extermination. “You take your agent V-12,” he was droning, “along with your Agent V-34 and you dump them in a pond, any questions? Right. Next day you have a solution of your O-ethyl S-diethylaminoethyl methylphos-phonothiolate, what you used to call your Agent VM, any questions? These here quantities are adjusted to your average barnyard pond of 100,000 gallons and produce your concentration of zero point two parts per million, which will kill your fish and your frogs and your small mammals, any questions?” He gazed challengingly at them, drumming on his leg. “Right. Your concentration increases with time,” he said, “and so after the first day it becomes toxic to your larger mammals as well.”

  He rose painfully to his feet and limped over to the blackboard. “That’s for your what you call your aqueous dispersants,” he said, beginning to draw what looked like a bowling ball, pierced on either side with fingerholes. “Now this here,” he said, “is your schematic of these here little things in the dish. Come up one at a time and take a look.” When it was Hake’s turn, he saw half a dozen tiny pellets in a glass petri dish. He had to squint to see them; they were no more than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. He could not see the holes at all. “These here,” droned Pegleg, “are your pellets for your spring-loaded or your carbon-dioxide-propelled devices, like your Bulgarian Brolly and your Peruvian Pen. Your pellets are platinum. Each of your little holes—” he pointed to the diagram on the blackboard—“will take two-tenths of a microliter of ChemAgent, whatever you put in them. Anybody want to guess what that is?”