Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  “Oh, all right,” he said. “Well. We finance our operations by tapping into other people’s bank accounts—mostly cloak-and-dagger fronts for the other sides. To open a line, the first thing I do is present my thumbprint for ID. Then there are some code words.” He went on in detail, naming all the bank accounts they were looting, reciting the codes, omitting nothing, while Subirama Reddi took notes and his brother asked questions. Finally Subirama looked up.

  “I think we have the procedure, yes. Remains the question of your thumb.”

  “I’ll help out there,” Leota said quickly, producing a flat metal box. It contained plastic. “Press your thumb in this, will you, Horny?”

  He shrugged and did as he was told. Leota offered the box to the Reddis. “You can make your own thumbprint from that,” she said.

  Subirama Reddi took it, studied it carefully, and then nodded at his brother. “The payment is complete,” he said, “apart from our one-hour lead before anyone else leaves this place, and twenty-four hours incommunicado for the Team.”

  ‘Then you better get moving,” grumbled Robling. “I want to get all these people out of our plant. Take the gags off those three while we figure out what to do with them.”

  As the Reddis disappeared, Yosper began to rage. “Traitor!” he yelled. “Boy, you’ve betrayed the Team, the U. S. of A. and the Lord God, and I pity you when we get through with you! Spreading a few disease germs in Europe, that was all you were good for.”

  Leota put in, “You mean last spring, when he was a germ carrier for you?”

  Yosper glared at her. “Shut up, slut. The sheik’ll take care of you, don’t worry about that.”

  “Not unless he wants to kidnap me again. That’s a crime, and the Italian government won’t put up with it.”

  The sheik, disdainfully allowing one of the A1 Halwani sailors to remove his gag, said in accented English, “My friend the Minister of Justice will not listen to your ravings.” He was almost a comic figure, the kohl around his eyes smeared from immersion in the water; but there was nothing comic in his expression.

  “What about you, Curmudgeon?” Hake asked. “Have you got anything to contribute to this?”

  The Team chief said with dignity, “It doesn’t matter, Hake. You’re finished. So is A1 Halwani.”

  Robling cut in, “You don’t seem to realize that you’re facing a jail term, Curmudgeon. We’re on to you now.”

  “And what good will that do you? We don’t need to blow up your tower to put you out of business. We’ve got the stuff to kill off your plants—and a new breed of sunplants of our own, resistant to the disease. You think you can stop one of our choppers from spraying your whole setup, some dark night? Forget it!”

  Hake flared, “You can’t get away with it. I’ll—I’ll talk to the President!”

  Curmudgeon laughed. “That pipsqueak! He doesn’t know about this, and he won’t believe you anyway. The Attorney General runs this show.”

  Hake stared at them, helpless captives, still belligerent. “You know,” he said wonderingly, “you people are crazy.” And so they were, there could be no doubt, crazy people running a crazy game of sabotage and destruction. They were so secure Curmudgeon and Yosper even seemed to be enjoying it! He detached himself from the surroundings, trying to reason things all out. Was there any way, ever, to put a stop to this endless cycle of mad violence?

  Vaguely he heard Leota say to the one-legged man, “I think we’ve got it all,” and saw the one-legged man nod and pick up a telephone. He waited, watching Yosper and Curmudgeon as though they were specimens in a cage, and then spoke into the phone.

  Then—“Everybody shut up,” he called. “Hake, you might want to take this call.” He switched on a loudspeaker extension.

  The voice on the other end, cackling with delight, was The Incredible Art.

  “Horny? Oh, Horny!” he cried. “It came in just fine! Somebody started jamming about two minutes ago, but it was too late—What?”

  The half-second delay made him miss Hake’s words. Hake repeated them, staring around at the others. “Art! What are you talking about?”

  Half a second. Then—“You mean you don’t know? Why, Horny, that’s funny! You’ve been on the air! All of you! For the last half hour, by satellite, all over the world!”

  XVI

  For the first time Hake could remember, it felt safe to relax. He lay bare in the healing sun. His eyes were closed and the pebbly beach stabbed not unpleasantly at his back. Cold drops on his body made him look up. Leota was kneeling beside him as she squeezed water out of her hair. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said.

  She shook her hair onto his face, laughing. “You sure looked like you were having one sweet, self-satisfied dream.” He could not look at her directly; the bright sun in the chrome-blue sky was dazzling. He propped himself on one elbow to see her better. Were the intricate tracings on her body really beginning to fade, or was he just getting used to them? He was certainly getting quite chronically used to Leota, to having her nearby, to thinking about her when she was not. To sharing the important parts of a life with her. “Actually,” he said, completing a half-dozing thought, “what I was doing was playing chess.”

  She pulled a shirt around her shoulders and regarded him critically. “You’re a weird one, Hornswell Hake,” she said, “and you’re about to have the damnedest sunburn a human being ever had.”

  Obediently he turned over to toast his other side. The sensible thing to do, of course, was to get dressed and go on in to A1 Halwani, and take up their lives. He wasn’t ready to do that. Neither was Leota; it was her suggestion that made them stop the borrowed hydrogen buggy and run down to the beach for a swim. The notion was ludicrously inappropriate to the high-stakes international gangster games they had just been playing; that was what had made it seem just right. “What did you mean, you were playing chess?” she demanded.

  “Maybe it was more like doing a jigsaw puzzle,” he said thoughtfully. “I was fitting pieces together.”

  “What kind of pieces?”

  “Well—” He craned his neck, to squint up at the burning sky. “Like up there there’s the satellite.”

  “So? There are satellites everywhere.”

  “But this one was the one we needed.” Twenty-two thousand miles straight up; it had taken the pictures from the monitoring cameras and sprayed them all over the world, along with the incriminating words of Yosper and Curmudgeon and the sheik. A chunk of metal no bigger than a piano, but it was there and it had worked.

  “I don’t quite see how that’s part of a jigsaw puzzle—”

  “And there’s the ‘thinking with’,” he said, rolling over again to face her in spite of the sun. “I was thinking, it’s part of a sort of series: Thinking with. Hypnotism. The ecstatic mystical state. Schizophrenia. The hallucinogenic-drug high—they’re all so much like each other.”

  Leota sighed. “Horny,” she said earnestly, “if we’re ever going to get married, or anything, you’re going to have to learn to get the marbles out of your mouth. What are you talking about?”

  “I’m sorry. I guess I don’t exactly know, except that what they all have in common is a sort of detachment from reality, and when I get back to Long Branch I want to talk about that. To the church, for starters. Then to anybody who’ll listen. Now that we’re all big TV stars, maybe I can get on the air to talk about it.”

  She nodded seriously. After a moment, she pointed out, “You said T.”

  “We. Us—if you’ll come along?”

  “I might give it a try,” she said cautiously. “Are you sure it’s, well, healthy?”

  He sat up and rubbed his chin. “I could be surer,” he admitted. Then he said, “That was the chess-playing part, trying to figure out what moves come next. For instance. What’s the Reddis’ move when they find out we gave the whole world the information we sold them? What’s the Team’s next move in A1 Halwani—do they come back some night and defoliate all the sun plants just to get e
ven? What’s their next move with me—do they frame me on a drug bust or get me dumped in the Hackensack River?”

  “A bunch of real good questions, Horny,” she applauded.

  “I even have some answers. As for the Reddis, our only move is to keep our eyes open. We’ve given everything away, so there’s no profit for them in us any more; I think we call that game a draw and forget it. I hope,” he said. “For the Team, that’s harder. I think I know the right move if they just kill off the sun plants, out of meanness, with those spray-cans of bacteria and fungus. There’s a resistant strain at IPF, and I think I have a flower from it tucked away. If not, at least I know where to find them. And the move to counter any personal trouble is just what we’re going to do anyway. Go public. Raise so much noise they won’t dare touch us.”

  Leota touched his shoulder and frowned. “You’re hot. You’re going to be really burned if we stay here any longer.”

  “So let’s go,” he said, standing up and beginning to put his clothes on. The sun was well up in the sky—it was not even afternoon yet, he realized with astonishment—and it was, when you considered everything, he thought, a really beautiful day. They picked their way barefoot over the sharp pebbles toward the road, Hake relaxed, Leota thoughtful. As they were getting into the hydrogen buggy she said:

  “Those sound like pretty good moves. Especially since we don’t have much choice. But did you figure out how the game comes out?”

  ‘That’s easy,” he said, climbing in after her as she slid behind the wheel. “We win.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Or else we don’t,” he added. “But either way we play it out, the best we can.”

  About the Author

  Frederik Pohl has been about everything one man can be in the world of science fiction: fan (a founder of the fabled Futurians), book and magazine editor, agent, and, above all, writer. As editor of Galaxy in the 1950s, he helped set the tone for a decade of SF—including his own memorable stories such as The Space Merchants (in collaboration with Cyril Korn-bluth). His latest novel is Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, a sequel to the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning novel, Gateway. He has also written The Way the Future Was, a memoir of his forty-five years in science fiction. Frederik Pohl was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1919, and now divides his time between Red Bank, New Jersey, and New York City.

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