Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  “What the hell’s a tickle-taster?”

  “You’re wearing it right now, Hake.” She pointed to his silver wristlet. “Works sort of like a polygraph; it monitors your pulse and blood levels. All they had to do was wait until you went boing on the taster, and then see who caused it. Which was me. I knew they were close. They could figure I had to be working at one of three or four places on Capri, and all they had to do was plant you in them one after another until I turned up. Oh, Hake,” she said, actually smiling, “don’t look so guilty They would’ve got to me sooner or later.”

  Hake stared at the judas on his arm, shining cold blue in the diffuse light. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Yeah. Well. Listen, there’s not much they can do to me. I’m on Italian territory. I haven’t done anything against the law here, or anyway not much. Besides, I helped the Italians find Nederkoorn.”

  Hake said, “I think the way I was looking wasn’t so much guilty as just plain foolish. What will you do now?”

  Her expression became opaque. “That much I don’t trust you, Hake.” And then she added, “Actually, there’s not much I can do. I’m blown, for here and now. I’ll move to another place. There are others who will stay and carry on—” She hesitated, glanced at her watch, and then said more rapidly, “And that’s what I wanted to see you for. Will you join up?”

  “Join what?”

  “Join on the side of the good guys! What the hell do you think? You can make up for a lot of crumminess if you’ve got the nerve to take a stand now.”

  Hake brought his open palm down flat on the water, splashing the girl and startling her. He said furiously, “God damn it, Leota! How do I know your stupid games are any better than theirs? This whole situation is sick.”

  “Then don’t make it sicker! Come on, Hake. I don’t expect you to fall into my arms now. I just want you to think about it. I’ve got to go, but I’ll give you time. Overnight. I’ll call you at your hotel tomorrow morning. Early. I’m sure they’re bugging your wire, so I won’t say anything. You speak. Just say hello. Say it once for yes, twice for no—three times for maybe. Which,” she added irritably, “is about what I’d expect from you. Then I’ll get in touch, never mind how. And, Hake. Don’t try setting any traps or anything. I’m not alone, and the other people on my side right now play rougher than I do.”

  She picked up her face mask, but paused before putting it on. “Unless you’d care to say yes right now?” she inquired.

  He didn’t answer, because there was a sound like a tiny rapid-fire cap pistol from the mouth of the cave. They both turned. The little hydrogen-powered outboard came bouncing through the opening and then arrowed straight toward them, looking as if it were suspended in blue space.

  Hake grabbed an oar. He didn’t know the two men coming toward them, but it was a good bet that they worked for Yosper. “Get out of here, Leota!” he cried. “I’ll see if I can keep them busy—”

  But she was shaking her head. “Oh, Hake,” she said sorrowfully, “no, they’re not yours. They’re a lot worse than that.”

  Hake held the oar before him like a quarter-staff, but it was apparent that it would not be much use. The two men

  were not very big, and certainly not formidably dressed. Like Leota, they wore i minimi. But unlike Leota, they carried guns. The one at the motor had a pistol, the other what looked like a rapid-fire carbine, pointed directly at Hake. It was now obvious that they were the two who had been lounging on the ledge outside; more than that, they had a somewhat familiar look—like someone he had seen somewhere before, and a lot like each other.

  “Put your oar down, Horny,” Leota said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen, at all.”

  The two men did not only resemble each other, they were almost identical. They had to be twins: tiny dark bodies, no more than five feet three, long straight black hair, neat short beards, black eyes. From under the tarpaulins Hake could see them sitting in the bucket seats on either side of the chattering outboard, Leota draped across the coaming on one side of them. Two well-to-do Eastern gentlemen enjoying the Mediterranean with a pretty girl: there was nothing in that spectacle to attract anyone’s attention. He could hear the first of the party boats arriving with its tandem flywheels whining away, but one of the men had his foot on Hake’s neck. “Easy, cock,” he said, grinning conventionally. “Don’t try to sit up. You’d just get all those nice people killed.”

  “Do what they say, Horny,” said Leota. Hake didn’t answer. With a foot on his windpipe he couldn’t. And what was there to say?

  They bounced over the gentle swell for twenty minutes or more. Then the machine-gun sound of the motor slowed, one of the men wrapped a cloth around Hake’s eyes, he was kicked in the small of the back, the tarps were dragged off him and he was prodded up a rope ladder. “Stay on deck, sweetie,” said one of the men in his high, accentless voice—to Leota, Hake assumed. Then one on each side of him they shoved him through a door and down a steep companionway. He heard a door close behind them, and one of the men said: “You can take the blindfold off now. And sit down.”

  Hake unwrapped the rag from his face and blinked at them. He was in a low-ceilinged room, bunk beds at either end and a padded locker along the wall, under a porthole covered with a locked metal hatch. There was barely room for all three of them at once. He sat on the locker less because he had been told to than because it was the best way he had of establishing distance between them. But one of them pulled camp chairs from under a bunk, and they drew them up one on each side, facing him.

  Then he remembered where he had seen them, or one of them, before. “Munich! When I was sick. I thought you were a doctor.”

  “Yes, Hake, that was me. I am Subirama Reddi,” said the one on the left, “and this is my brother Rama. You can tell which is which because I am left-handed and my brother right. We find this useful. Also Rama has a scar over his eye, do you see? He got that from an American in Papeete, and it makes him mean.”

  “Oh, no, not mean!” said Rama, shaking his head. “We will get along very well, Hake, provided that you do exactly as we say. Otherwise—” He shrugged, with an expression that was somewhere between a smile and a pout. They spoke perfect English, colloquial and quick if sometimes odd. It was not quite true that they had no accents. The accents were there, but they were not identifiable. To Hake, they sounded vaguely British, but he thought that to a Brit they would have seemed American—as though they had come from somewhere along the mid-Atlantic ridge, or perhaps from Yale. Their voices were as high and pure as lead tenors in a boy’s choir, though what they said was not childish. “What you must do,” Rama Reddi went on, “is to tell us completely and quickly all of the names of the agents you have worked with, and what you know of the operations of your agency.”.

  This was not going to be a pleasant time, Hake realized. And it was all foolish, because he knew so little! He turned to Rama and began, “There isn’t much I can tell—” The next word was jolted out of his mouth as Subirama’s fist hit his ear. Hake turned toward him in rage, and Rama’s fist clubbed him on the other side. It was now clear why their opposing handedness was useful.

  Subirama moved his chair back a few inches, and switched the gun he had been holding in his free hand to his good one. He spoke rapidly to his brother, who nodded and produced a rope. While Rama Reddi was tying Hake’s hands, Subirama said, “You Americans are very confident of your size and strength. I do not, actually, think you could prevail against either one of us in bare-hand combat, much less two. But I think that you might attempt something which would make it necessary for us to kill you. So we will remove temptation.” He waited until his brother had finished with Hake’s hands, and then drove his fist into Hake’s stomach. “Now,” he said conversationally, “we will start ‘with the names of the persons you have contacted in Italy so far.”

  Before they were through Hake had told them everything they asked for. He did not try to resist, after the first few minutes. As lon
g as they confined themselves to beating him he might survive, and even recover; but they made it clear that if he held out it would cost him his fingernails, his eyes and his life, in that order. He gave them names he didn’t know he remembered. All four of Yosper’s helpers. Every member of his class Under the Wire. He even gave a physical description of the woman who had led him to his first interview at Lo-Wate Bottling Co. and the sheep-herder who had driven him to the airport bus. He could not tell which parts interested them. When some name or event led them to demand more information, he did not see why. Why would they care about a Hilo avocado-grower’s wife? But they questioned him endlessly about Beth Hwa. He told them what he knew, everything he knew, some of it four and five times. Then they let him rest. Hake didn’t think they were being considerate. He thought their fists were sore.

  He would have resisted more, he told himself, if he had had anything to resist for. But the talk with Leota had shaken him again: what was he doing working for the Team in the first place? Why had he left a perfectly comfortable, personally rewarding and socially useful life as a minister in New Jersey to involve himself in these desperate adolescent games? He climbed into one of the bunks, hungry, exhausted, feeling sick and in pain. He could not believe sleep would be possible, his head pounded so. Then he woke up with Leota sitting on the bunk beside him and realized he had been asleep after all.

  “These are aspirins, take them,” she said.

  He pushed her away and himself up, his head thundering lethally. “Get lost,” he snarled. “This is the bad-cop and good-cop routine, right? I saw it on television.”

  “Oh, Hake! You are so terribly ignorant. The boys are bad, bad enough to kill you, more likely than not. And I’m good. Mostly good,” she corrected herself, holding out the pills. She put an arm behind his head while he drank the water to swallow them, and said, “You look like hell.”

  He didn’t answer. He sat on the edge of the bunk for a moment, then tottered to the tiny toilet and closed the door behind him. In the mirror he looked even worse than he felt. His face was puffed out from chin to hairline; his eyes were swollen half shut, and his ears rang. He splashed cold water on it, but when he tried drying his face with a scrap of towel it hurt. He moved his lips and cheek muscles experimentally. He could talk, and maybe even chew; but it was going to be some time before he could enjoy it.

  When he came out Leota was gone, but reappeared in a moment with a tray. She closed the door behind her, and Hake heard someone outside lock it. “Your friends are taking good care of me,” he said bitterly.

  “They aren’t friends of mine, only allies. I told you I didn’t mean for this to happen.” She put the tray down and sat next to him. “I brought you some soup. After you eat I’ve got an ice bag for your face.”

  He could not bring himself to say thank-you. He grunted instead, and allowed her to feed him a couple of spoonfuls of the thick soup. The rocking of the boat dumped half of each on his lap, and he took the spoon and bowl away from her. The soup was a minestrone, no more than lukewarm but not bad; and he was famished. He emptied the bowl while she talked. “I’m not responsible for the Reddis! Sometimes we work together, sure. But they’re mercenaries.

  They’ll kill. They’ll do anything they’re paid to do. And they scare me.”

  “What have you paid them to do to me?”

  “Not me, Hake! We don’t pay them. They’re working for—” she hesitated, glancing at the door. “Never mind who they’re working for,” she said, but on her bare thigh, below the short terrycloth beach robe, her finger traced out the word Argentina. “Your own boys have hired them from time to time, I would guess. Right now, somebody else. What does it matter? But when my group needs help, sometimes they give it. If they hadn’t taken out your friend Dieter’s bodyguard, he never would have been arrested. So with their help we stopped your people from killing kids.”

  “And how did they take out the bodyguard?”

  She flinched. “He was a mercenary, too. What does it matter?”

  “You say that a lot,” he commented. “It matters to - me.”

  “Well, it matters to me, too,” she said sadly. “But what’s worse, Horny? What kind of people pass out poison dope?”

  He took the ice bag from her and gingerly applied it to his jaw. His head was still hammering, but it was a slower, less shattering beat. “Well,” he said, “I’ll grant you there are faults on both sides. Just for curiosity, what did you think was going to happen in the Grotto?”

  “I thought I’d try to recruit you to our side,” she said simply. “Don’t laugh.”

  “My God, woman! What do you think I’ve got to laugh at?”

  “Well, that’s it. I wanted to talk to you. The Reddis were • just supposed to stay outside and warn me if your boys came along, or if—excuse me, Horny—if you tried to bring me in, or anything like that.”

  “Um.” Hake transferred the ice bag from right cheek to left thoughtfully. What she said made sense, but did not change the fact that he had spent three hours being beaten and was now held captive, with a future outlook that at best was not to be called promising. “I guess I know what an innocent bystander feels like,” he said resentfully.

  “Innocent?” Leota closed her mouth to cut off the next words, and then, carefully, said, “I wouldn’t exactly call you innocent, Horny.”

  “Well, all right! I made some mistakes.”

  She shook her head sorrowfully. “You don’t really know what’s happening, do you? You think all this has happened at random.”

  “Hasn’t it?”

  “Random as a guided missile! Your boys go straight for the jugular every time.”

  “No, that’s ridiculous, Leota. I’ve been with them often enough to know! They’re the most bumbling, incompetent—”

  “I wish you were right!”

  “Really! They picked me out just by chance in the first place. No reason.”

  “You mean you don’t know the reason. There was one, believe me. They probably had you under surveillance for months before they pulled you in. Somebody spotted you as a likely prospect—”

  “Impossible! Who?”

  “I don’t know who. But somebody. I know how they work. First they pulled your records, then they did a full field check. You must have looked okay, but they had to be sure. So they called you in. You could have told them to get lost—”

  “No, I couldn’t! I was in the Reserves. They just reactivated me.”

  “Oh, yes, you could, Horny. You could always have just said no. What would they have done, taken you to court? But you didn’t. So you passed the first test, and then they slipped you a few bucks and gave you a dumdum assignment to try you out. Don’t look at me like that, Horny, that’s what it was. A two-year-old child could have done it, and probably better than you. But you did it, so you passed that test too, and when you found out what it was all about you passed another. You didn’t blow the whistle on them.”

  “I couldn’t!”

  The girl looked away. “Well, no, you couldn’t, Horny, because you probably wouldn’t have lived to get to a reporter. Somebody would have seen to that. Whoever fingered you in the first place probably had an eye on you. But, Horny, you didn’t know that. You didn’t even try; so you passed. Next stage: they send you to training camp. You pass with flying colors. They send you here to fink on me— Don’t tell me again you didn’t know you were doing it. If you’d thought at all you could have figured it out. Some kinds of coincidences can’t be coincidences. When you saw me you should’ve got suspicious.”

  “By then it was too late.”

  Long pause. “Yeah,” she said, and began to cry. “It’s a lot too late,” she managed to say.

  It took some time for her meaning to penetrate.

  When Leota had left him alone again Hake sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the red denim coverlet of the upper bunk across the stateroom. He did not see it. His mind and his whole body were in standby mode. It was almost a kind
of paralysis. In all the long years in the wheelchair he had never been so little in control of his own fate as he was now.

  If indeed he had ever been in command of his fate. Everything Leota had said rang true. He had followed along a course that he could not believe had been of his own choosing. Passive. Obedient. Even cooperative. A willing accomplice of people he despised, doing things he loathed. Hake was not sure who he was. The brawler who had exulted in the fight with Tigrito was a person he could not recognize as himself.

  It was murderously, densely hot in the little stateroom, and with the portholes sealed shut there was no air. At least the pain in his battered head was less. It was even bearable; Leota’s aspirins had worked. Or the bruises had dwindled in his consciousness in comparison with the implications of what she had said. Hake allowed out of his mind the thought that this smelly, steamy room might be the last place he would ever see alive, and studied it. It was not exactly frightening, but it was paralyzing. Once again he could see no handle to grip his life by, nothing he could do to change his state.

  When Leota had left, responding to three sharp raps on the door, she had gathered up bowl, tray, spoon and even the ice bag to take away. If she had left even so much as a table knife— But there was nothing like that. There was nothing in the room that was not either securely fastened down or harmless.

  He wiped sweat from his face, stood up, pulled off his shirt, kicked off his shoes, and was still sweltering. He could not even tell whether it was day or night. The questioning and beating had seemed endless, but might really have been only for an hour or two; the brief sleep could have been minutes, or could have been anything. No light came through the sealed hatch over the portholes. He did not even know whether the little ship was moving or bobbing somewhere at anchor.

  He threw his pants across one of the far bunks and stretched out. There was a quality that was almost satisfying about the total impotence of his position. As there was nothing at all he could do, he was permitted to do nothing. Even the faded pounding in his head, the tenderness of his face and the ache in his gut became only phenomena to be observed. He was very nearly at peace as he drowsed there, one arm behind his head, and he was amused to find that his impotence did not extend to all of his person. In all the time he had been talking to Leota one part of him had been very aware of her round, tanned legs and the gentle feminine smell that came from her. He could smell it now; and that, and perhaps the rocking of the boat, and perhaps some unidentified personality trait in the new Hake combined to make him want very much to make love. And when after a time Leota came in again, bearing fresh ice bag, water and aspirin, and the door was locked behind her and she sat on the edge of the bunk, he reached up toward her. Startled, she said, “Heeeeyyy—” And then, pulling her lips away from his, “At least let me put down the glass.” It was like making love in a dream, easy, unhurried and sure, and he was not even surprised to find that she was as ready as he.