Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  Tigrito waved a hand. “Arsenic?” he ventured.

  Pegleg gave him a glare of contempt. “Arsenic! You got to have a hundred milligrams anyway to do any good with arsenic; you got two hours’ latrine duty for dumbness. No. There’s three things could go in there. You can use your biologicals, like germs. Or you can use your plutonium-239, only then they can find your pellet easy with a radiation detector. Best thing is one of your neurotoxins in your phosphate-buffered gelatin, any questions?”

  “How do you get anyone to swallow it,” Beth Hwa asked uncertainly.

  “You got two hours too, who said anything about swallowing it?” Pegleg reached under the table and brought out what looked like an ordinary brightly colored woman’s umbrella. “This is your Bulgarian Brolly. There’s a spring-loaded gun in the shaft. You put your pellet in, load the spring, point it at the, uh, the subject and push the button. If you poke the, uh, animal with the Brolly while you push the button all he feels is the poke from the umbrella.

  “Or,” he went on, stooping to pick up a large ballpoint pen, “this here is your Peruvian Pen. It’s gas loaded. You charge it with your ordinary COz soda-water capsule. It hasn’t got the range of a Brolly. And it won’t go through, like, clothes, unless you give it a double charge, and then it makes more noise. It takes your average, uh, subject about four or five days to die, because the stuff has to get out of the pellet and into his bloodstream. So you can be long gone. Other side of it is, it’s no good to stop.anybody fast, any questions?”

  Hake raised his hand. “I thought the charter of the Team didn’t allow killing human beings?”

  “You got two hours too. Who said anything about human beings?”

  “You said it would go through clothes.” “I meant like a horse blanket,” the instructor explained. “Or like fur. But that’s not to say,” he went on darkly, “that the Other Side wouldn’t use these same things on you. It was the Bulgarians invented the Brolly in the first place, and they didn’t use it on no Airedales. You stick around, Hake. I got some little jobs for you besides the latrines. Any questions?”

  But even the little extra jobs passed, and on the sixteenth day the whole crew was assigned to spraying defoliant on the three-five pasture—the animals cropped the yucca so heavily that every once in a while the inedible plants had to be killed off, to give the “buffalo grass” a chance to come back. By the time they came back Hake had solved his sexual problem, and so had Mary Jean. Wolfing down their food that night they sat touching on the wooden bench. Deena was amused. Sister Florian was tolerant. Tigrito was sulky. And Beth Hwa, that quiet, middle-aged wife of an avocado shipper from Hilo, intercepted Mary Jean on the way out of the mess hall and handed her something. Mary Jean showed it to Hake, grinning; it was a pillbox. “In case we got caught short,” she explained.

  The remainder of the three weeks began to look more attractive. But on the seventeenth day Fortnum told them the Congressional Oversight Committee was coming around for its annual inspection, and they all better look sharp, and that night everything was changed. Pegleg tucked them in with the news that there was going to be a special assignment for the morrow, and in the morning he told them what it was:

  “This is not, repeat not, a training mission,” he singsonged. “This is the real thing. You will be given full gear for an extended stay in the open, and the whole class is going to participate. Five of you will go by plane to Del Rio. The rest will be trucked to Big Bend National Park. We gonna have ourselves a wetback huntl” “Wetbacks?”

  “Hell, yes, Tigrito! You ought to know what a wetback is. Got too many Mexes coming in and taking our jobs, you know? And it’s up to us to stop them.”

  Hate said, “Wait a minute. I thought the presidential directive limited us to actions outside the United States.”

  “Shit, man. They come from outside the United States, don’t they? You’re never gonna get anyplace on the Team, you keep coming up with stuff like that. Now, you listen to me. We’re going to go down to the border and we’re going to make friends with the wetbacks. Then we’re going to track back to find out where they’re coming in, and track forward to where they’re going. Any of you do good, you’ll likely get yourselves sent to St. Louis and Chicago and maybe even New York to find where they’re going there. There’s not going to be no direct action against them, that’s for the Immigration. We’re just going to locate them and get the evidence. That’s good duty. So don’t fuck it up.”

  Ten minutes to pack. They looked at each other, and Tigrito announced that he was going to get to Chi if he had to kill for it, and Sister Florian suspected that it was all just a scheme to get them out of the way while the Oversight Committee inspected the installation, and Hake and Mary Jean tried to estimate their chances of being on the same truck. Or plane. But, in the event, Hake never saw the wonders of wetback life in the big cities. Just as the trucks were about to leave he was pulled off the detachment and ordered to the office of the training director and there, sitting on a wicker chair on the second-floor porch of the main building of Has-Ta-Va Ranch, talking on a hush-phone, was hairy, fidgety Curmudgeon, his gun strapped to his side.

  “I didn’t expect to see you here,” said Hake.

  “Course you didn’t,” said Curmudgeon, putting down the phone. “You’re going back to Europe.”

  “I am? Why am I? What have you got for me to spread this time, leprosy?”

  Curmudgeon looked at him thoughtfully. “Leprosy? Oh, no, Hake, that wouldn’t be any good. Hard to infect anybody. And the incubation period’s much too long. That job you did last month, that was the kind of thing. Did you know German absenteeism’s up eighty percent for the month? And, naturally,” he said, “our laboratories have just announced a real breakthrough in immunization. We’ve got enough material for sixty million shots right now. We’re selling it all over the world, and making a nice few bucks for the balance of payments. But anyway, that kind of thing was only your first mission, Hake. You couldn’t really be expected to do anything independently. No. But now we think you’re ready for the big time, and I really liked your religion proposal.”

  It took Hake a second to remember the project he had been outlining next to the scuba pool, just before his fight with Tigrito. He had turned it in and heard no more about it. “I—I didn’t think anyone paid any attention to it.”

  “Hell, yes, Hake! It’s a fascinating idea. If we could find a European Sun Myung Moon, or even some good messianic leader, why, we’d back him to the hilt. There are new sects springing up in Europe all the time. The important thing is somebody who has enough personal charisma to make a good pitch. Any thoughts on what sort of thing we should look for?”

  “Well— Actually,” Hake said, warming up, “I did think more about it. It would be good to find someone with a special appeal to industrial workers. Or miners.”

  “That’s the idea, Hake!”

  “Of course, I’d need some research facilities, to look up proselytizing religions—”

  “Sure you would, but not now. You won’t have time. You’ve got to catch a bus out on the highway in two hours. Then you’ll fly to Capri.”

  “Capri? What the hell do I want in Capri?”

  “That’s what the orders say,” Curmudgeon explained. “You’ll be met. When you get there they’ll tell you why that has to be where you’re going.”

  “But— My books, for research! I’ll need them. And clothes. I’m not dressed for a trip to Italy.”

  “The clothes are all taken care of, Hake. There’s somebody in Long Branch packing a suitcase for you right now—we’ve, you know, arranged a letter with your signature for your housekeeper. The clothes’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”

  “But my church is expecting me back next weekl And what about the rest of the training course here?”

  “You’ll probably be there in a week,” said Curmudgeon. ‘Two or three at most, probably. And as to the course— why, you’ve just graduated.”

&nb
sp; VII

  Bus to Odessa; prop plane to Dallas-Fort Worth; jet to Rome (where Hake spent ninety minutes racing back and forth on the back of a moped to collect a suitcase); jet to Capodichino Airport; monorail to the Bay; hovercraft to Capri. Hake had left Has-Ta-Va Ranch at two in the afternoon. Fourteen hours and eight time zones later, he was bouncing across the Bay at what local time said was noon but what his interior body clock could not identify at all. What he was sure of was that he was very, very tired. He was also rather close to being seasick. He had not expected a hovercraft ride to be so choppy. Each wave-top slapped fiercely against the bottom of the vessel, and his queasiness was not helped, as he landed, by the fact that the hovership terminal stank of rotting fish.

  As promised, he was met. A young woman in a black ruffled shirt and black velvet cutoffs pushed her way past the would-be guides and the vendors of Capri bells and said, “Father Hake? Yes? Give me the ticket for your bag, please. I will meet you at the car park.”

  Her voice seemed familiar to Hake, and so did her soupbowl hairdo. But in his precarious condition he could not identify her. When she arrived at the car park it was in a three-wheeled electric scooter, open to the air, and any impulse toward conversation was quelled by the noise of the traffic. Capri was hot. Steamy hot and smoggy hot. The fish smell was from tens of thousands of dead little finger-lings floating belly-up in the Bay or washed on the sand, and it stayed with them all through the drive up a precipitous road. Then, at the top of a bluff, they reached a pink stucco hotel, and the smell was less fish and more oil.

  The woman marched Hake through the lobby and into an elevator, shushing him until they got to the fifth floor. A Chinese couple was just coming out of a room across from the elevator, and evidently having trouble with the lock. The woman leaped to help them, closed it securely, rattled the knob, returned their key and accepted their thanks, and then let Hake into the room next door. “Get some rest, Father Hake,” she advised. “I will call for you in the morning.”

  She gave him his key, and closed the door behind her.

  Hake found himself in a room roughly the size of his parsonage porch in Long Branch, long enough for two normal rooms and with a balcony stretching out into the Italian sun to make it longer. Piggery! It was more luxury than Hake had ever been used to. He detected a faint twinge in the place where he kept his social conscience, while another part of his conscience was telling him that he really should be getting down to thinking about the question of proselytizing religions. But he also found that it was not hard to convince himself that, after more than two weeks Under the Wire, a person was entitled to a little comfort. He kicked off his shoes and explored the room.

  The bed was oval, and covered with tasseled red velvet. When Hake sat on the edge of it to rub his feet it gave his bottom no resistance. A water bed! He wound up with his posterior at about ankle level and a rigid board under his knees, and the returning ripples dandled him ut> and down for minutes. Next to the bed was what looked like the instrument panel of an airplane: buttons, dials, switches. Some were clear enough. The sunburst was for the lights. The stylized figures of a maid and a waiter for calling service. The remote control was for the television set. Others were opaque to Hake’s perceptions. But there would be time for that. He switched on the television and lay back on the rippling bed, gratefully chill beneath him after the hot ride from the hoverport.

  At that moment the lights and TV went out.

  It was not just his room. The liquid-crystal illuminated hotel sign over the reflecting pool was out, too; so was the golden glow-panel over his balcony that recklessly had been going even in the middle of the day. There had been a power failure.

  Since power interruptions were so familiar a part of Hake’s everyday life he began at once to catalogue what problems it might bring. Lack of heat, not a problem. Lack of reading lights—well, apart from the fact that it was broad daylight outside the window, he was starved for sleep anyhow. Lack of air-conditioning? Maybe that would be a problem. He opened the French doors to the balcony, just in case. Elevators, TV, telephones were no immediate concern of his.

  So there was, really, no problem. It seemed a heavensent injunction to catch up on his rest. He threw his clothes off, stripped back the velvet spread and summer-thin blanket and in a moment was wholly unconscious on the delightfully cool and quivering bed.

  He woke up with the sound of an angry Italian voice bellowing at him, and discovered at once that the cool was no longer delightful.

  It was the middle of the night. The lights were on, in his room and outside. The voice was from the television set, which had come on along with the lights and air-conditioner. The breeze outside had turned cool, and the air-conditioner was making it cooler still. In fact, he was freezing. He fumbled the sound of the TV down, and the voice of the Italian man in the commercial, who appeared to be enraged because his wife had put the wrong brand of cheese on his pasta, dwindled to a furious whimper.

  Hake puzzled over his watch—the bedside clock was of course useless—and decided that he had slept the clock around. It seemed to be about two in the morning, local time. He did not feel rested, but he was awake and, worse, shivering cold. He managed to get the air-conditioner turned off and the window closed, then climbed back on the bed with thin blanket and stiff spread pulled around him. It was not enough. The water under him sucked the heat away, and there was no heat in the room. Not surprising. Who would have expected to need central heating in Capri in the summer? He told himself that his body warmth would soon enough make the bed comfortable, and to distract himself he tried to decipher what was happening on the television set. It seemed to be showing straight commercials: cheese, wine, then a sports car, then the national lottery; a deodorant, an aphrodisiac (or perhaps just a perfume; but the bulge in the trunks of the handsome male model was pretty explicit), and then what appeared to be an institutional propaganda piece. It showed a young Italian youth, clearly stoned out of his mind. A sad baritone voice-over sighed, “Ecco, guaio perche fare cost?” The youth shrugged and giggled. The scene dissolved to the great cellar of a winery. In the vaulted room plastic kegs of wine were tumbling majestically off a conveyor belt, while at the far end of the chamber was a loading dock with a waiting and empty truck. The camera’s eye narrowed down on an abandoned forklift truck, alone in the middle of the room. Hake could not understand the sorrowful Italian-language voice-over, but the message was clear enough. The forklift operator was away from his post. The wine was not getting-onto the truck. The deduction that the missing operator was the blind-stoned kid was confirmed at once, as the scene changed to the following morning. The young man, no longer stoned, now repentant, stood humbly beside a white-haired man carrying a clipboard. Hake recognized the man at once, him or his double. He had seen him a hundred times on American television, tapping his glasses on a desk as he sold everything from stomach-acid neutralizes to hemorrhoid salve. By the end of the commercial the prodigal forklift operator had cleared away the backlog, the trucks were loaded and rumbling away, and the conveyor belt once more brought in its endless chain of kegs. Marijuana si—PCP no, said the fatherly baritone, as the same legend appeared on the screen.

  Interesting enough, but Hake was still freezing. His body warmth was not up to the demands imposed on it by the heat-sink of twelve hundred liters of cold water.

  He was still exhausted, but he accepted the fact that there was no way for him to get back to sleep without Something Being Done. He got up and dressed. By and by he began to feel less chilled, but no less sleepy. And every time he lay down on that bed, even through clothes, spread and covers, he could feel the heat soak right out of him into the water.

  It was no good.

  He turned on the light and opened his bags. The little shoulder-carrier he had brought from Under the Wire had a sweater in it, but as neither it nor he had been washed for some time when he last wore it he was not anxious to put it on. The suitcase Curmudgeon’s minion had packed for him in Long Br
anch had nothing at all. Almost nothing he could wear, in fact. The Agency expediter had packed as full a Capri wardrobe as Hake’s closets permitted, but unfortunately had not known that his measurements had changed. No doubt it was Hake’s own fault for not throwing out what he could no longer wear. But the shorts, tank tops and sports jackets that had served him well enough as a 145-pound weakling in a wheelchair would no longer go around him, and the few newer garments were not warm.

  Still, as long as he was up and moving about he was warm enough. And as long as he was awake he might as well be doing something.

  Among the other things he had brought from Under the Wire were his microfiches—musty, dinged at the edges, but no doubt still serviceable if he could find something to read them with. Was there a fiche scanner on the television set?

  There was. The instructions varnished to the top of the set were unfortunately in Italian, but the mechanism looked simple enough. What he also found was that the television set was a lot fancier than any he had seen in Long Branch. There was also something described as Solo per persone mature—film interattivo. It appeared to have a handset controlling it, but it did nothing at all until he realized that the coin slot next to it needed to be fed. It was just the right size for a cinquenta lire nuove piece, and immediately he had inserted the coin the broadcast channel disappeared and was replaced by an extremely good-looking Oriental girl reclining in the pose of the Naked Maja.

  Technically the set was astonishing. Hake by trial and error found that the handset would let him view a whole catalogue of nude women, and men, too; that another control on the set allowed him to rotate the figure and zoom in and out on any desired part; and even that he could bring two figures together and manipulate them around each other. While he was trying to discover whether the picture showed them actually in contact or merely superimposed photographically his coin ran out and the screen went dark.