The Cool War

XIII

Having stuffed herself, gauze pants, harem vest and all, into one of Alys’s baggier suits, Leota was now trying to make her face look more civilized in Alys’s mirror with some of Alys’s cosmetics. Rama Reddi, in the copilot seat, was busy with a notebook, studying what and writing what Hake did not want to imagine. The pilot was obviously consumed with curiosity. He had put the plane on autopilot long since and was trying to strike up conversations with the passengers.

At least he had gotten over being indignant at being forced to take off in a locust swarm, but now he wanted to chat. “It was quite exciting, was it not, effendi?” he called to Hake, enunciating each syllable with care for Hake’s practicing ear. “But what a pity! These people know nothing of locusts. They will capture only a few. The rest willfly on. If it would rain— Then they would stay on the ground and could be scooped up. But it will not, I think.”

In spite of himself, Hake was intrigued. “Why do you want them to stay on the ground?”

“Why does one want to eat? They are excellent protein. And nearly gone, like your whooping crane. This pitiful remnant! In the time of my father the swarms would blacken the sky for days, horizon to horizon. When they alighted they would break the limbs of trees. Then the Europeans came with their insecticides, and our children fall to kwashiorkor for lack of protein.”

He would have chatted on forever, but Reddi snapped his notebook closed and fixed the pilot with his stare. “Now you will shut up,” he said. “Here. These are coordinates for where you are to land. I will then go on with you, while these two remain.” When the pilot looked stubbornly blank, Reddi added, “Hake, translate.”

Hake scowled. “Why do you want to split up? Why are we going there instead of A1 Halwani?”

“Because I wish it.” He did not wait for a reply, but straightened up and fastened his seat belt again. Only the top of his head was visible over the seat-back, shiny black hair slicked straight back, and it did not invite discussion.

Hake recognized the wisdom of at least part of what Reddi had said—the pilot had already had to be taken into their confidence far more than was reasonable, for what was supposed to be a super-secret operation. But he didn’t like it. He leaned to Leota’s ear. “Do you know the bit about Mahomet and the camel?”

She looked at him. “He let the camel’s nose into his tent, and the rest of the camel followed? Yes, that’s the way it is with the Reddis, Hake. I thought you found that out in Italy.”

“Well, I did. But I didn’t have much choice—”

She grinned suddenly, the first smile he had seen from her since her rescue. She leaned forward and kissed him quickly. “I’m not complaining!”

She dabbed at her face once more with a wet-packed tissue, then sighed and gave up. Putting the cosmetic case away, she said, “I was real ready to get out of there,

Horny. Mean bugger, that old sheik. Do you know how he got me out of Rome? With one of his boys holding a knife at my throat as we went through the port at Ostia. He had me believing he would have used it, too.” The smile was completely gone now. She said, “I hope Alys is going to be all right.”

“She said she could handle any man alive, Leota.”

The girl looked at him. “Yeah. That sounds like her.”

The pilot looked around, having returned to indignation. “Effendi, you and the woman should now have your safety belts secured,” he pointed out in Arabic. He did not wait to see that they complied, but slammed the plane into a tight turn.

Twisting to keep his seat while fastening the belt, Hake could get only glimpses out of the tiny window: sand and wide, empty roads; dunes, and the broad sea beyond them; a cluster of one-story buildings that looked as though they had been put together out of used gasoline tins. They bounced in to a rough and ill-kept runway, and the pilot swerved off it at high speed toward a small building next to the stilted control tower. He cut the engines and turned around. “Now what?” he demanded. “If you wish me to take off, we must do it within a half-hour. This pig-pen is not equipped for night operations.”

“How lawful you are,” Reddi commented, when he understood. “Have the kindness to bring the luggage in— all but my own bag, the brown one.” He opened the door and crawled out over the wing, gave one contemptuous glance at the airport structures and then ignored them. When the pilot was safely away on the far side of the nose of the plane, grumbling as he pulled the baggage out of the compartment, Reddi said, “I will leave you here. I will take the plane; please pay the pilot whatever is necessary, including an extra three hours of flying time.”

“For God’s sake, why?” demanded Hake, managing not to add that it was, after all, his plane.

“You and Pauket will go to the city by ground. There are buses, but perhaps you will want to walk; it should take you no more than a day, and you can purchase hiking equipment at the hostel here. This is best. First, because your objective is along the coastal road and you can study it. Second, the customs will be far less thorough here than in the city airport, and I do not suppose Pauket’s credentials are in very good order. Third, I have arranged to meet my brother there, and it is not desirable that you be present.”

“And, fourth,” said Leota, “you want a chance to conspire with him in private.”

He glanced at her. “Do you blame me? I have done as I undertook, and I have not been paid. My brother and I must make arrangements to be sure we are not cheated.”

“I’d give something to know what those arrangements are,” she said.

He was silent for a moment, regarding her. Then he sighed. “In spite of our occasional association, Ms. Pauket,” Reddi said, “you have learned very little. Would you have four of us go in with guns? It would not succeed. But much can be done. Persons the Team considers their own are not. Parties of opposed interest may be induced to work together. This is where I am in charge, and when it is necessary you will be told what to do. Of course,” he added, “all depends on my brother’s decision.”

“The hell you say, Reddi!” Leota flared. “A lot depends on what we decide.”

“No. Very little. What choice do you have?” He waited for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. I will be in the Crash Pad tomorrow night—”

“Crash Pad?”

“The hotel,” Reddi said impatiently. “The sign on it says Intercontinental, but ask anyone for the Crash Pad and they will direct you to it. Do not ask for my room. Go to it. It will be high up, on the top floor if I can arrange it, otherwise as close as possible to the top. You will know the room because it will have a Do Not Disturb sign on the door with the opposite corners bent back. Is that understood? Good, now pay the pilot.”

Hake looked at Leota, who nodded. He shrugged and moved to intercept the Egyptian as he returned from dumping the luggage at the door marked, in several languages, Customs and Passport Control. They haggled for the obligatory few minutes, then returned to the plane. Hake was beginning to feel actively good. The desert afternoon air burned his lungs and throat, but it was a good heat, familiar from his childhood; and Leota was beginning to seem more at ease.

Reddi was already standing on the wing of the plane, impatient. He said, “Are you quite sure that the pilot understands he is paid in full and that there will be no gratuities?”

“He understands,” snarled the pilot, adding a sentence in Arabic that Reddi did not comprehend and Hake tried not to. He had no desire to learn of the pilot’s sudden death.

The hostel had probably once been something else; at least, it was not very good as a hostel. Its advantage was that neither the veiled Bedouin woman who showed them their room nor anyone else seemed to care much about IDs. It had very few other advantages. Two cots with Army blankets. Bare walls. Two sand-frosted windows that did not open. Signs in ten languages—not all of them repeated in all the languages: “No Alcoholic Beverages” was only in three Near Eastern languages and, curiously, in German; “No Smoking in Bed” was only in English.

Leota gathered up an armful of clothes and headed for the showers, pausing only because Hake insisted on taking her photograph first. He heard the distant tinny rattle of the pipes as he laid out the rest of the contents of Jessie’s do-it-yourself ID kit. Passport and visas, no problem; he sealed the photographs on them and added appropriate stamps. He assembled metal type to read JFK-CAI and CAI-KWI, added airline and flight indicia, tapped the type into alignment and pressed them onto a ticket form: result, a perfect ticket showing that one Millicent Anderson Self-ridge had flown from New York to Kuwait; he then threw away the ticket itself and left the used carbon copy to add to Leota’s documents. For the sake of completeness he made her a set of credit cards, a Massachusetts driver’s licence, a Blue Cross card and one for Social Security. It took three-quarters of an hour to finish it.

And Leota was still in the shower, the water gurgling intermittently. What was taking her so long? Didn’t she know the concierge would be raging at the waste of water —if, that is, the concierge was bothering to listen?

He rubbed the cards between his palms to age them, bent a few corners artistically and studied the result. They looked good to him, for a first effort; he hoped they would look as good to any inquiring official.

He had stowed away the blank cards and kit, undressed and lay back on one of the bunks, almost falling asleep, before Leota returned. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. She wore Alys’s familiar long print housecoat and, queerly, heavy knee-length socks; as she moved, he caught a glimpse of thigh and discovered that she still seemed to be wearing the embroidered stockings beneath them. He said, “Welcome back, Millicent.”

“Millicent?” Her expression was calm and detached as she put the traveling bag down and began to towel her hair.

“That’s your new ID,” he said, getting up to show her the documents. She inspected them carefully, and then said:

“You do good work, Horny. Horny? Alys must have a blow-dryer somewhere in those bags. See if you can find it. And tell me what we’re doing now.”

Hake did his best to fill her in, aware that he knew less than he needed to know. Leota listened abstractedly, her expression remote, as she dried her hair, and brushed it, and began to sort out the contents of Alys’s baggage. She asked a few questions, but did not press when Hake’s answers were unsatisfactory.

She seemed, in fact, to be moving in a dream. When she had all Alys’s possessions laid out on the cots—two long dresses, five pounds of cosmetics, even a titanium-rutile tiara among them—Hake saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

He said awkwardly, “You’ve had a pretty hectic time. Maybe I should just think about getting you back to America, or wherever. I can deal with this alone.”

She looked up at him. “Hell you can, Hake.”

“Well… I guess you’re worried about Alys. But I think she’ll be all right. She was looking for an adventure.”

“Adventure!” she exploded. “What do you know about adventures?” Then she calmed, and the glacial, detached expression returned. “Well, actually,” she said, “I suppose Alys is better suited to that life than I was. He’s an interesting old bastard, the sheik. Very artistic. And very technological. And if it gets too bad, she can always get out of it, sooner or later—she’s in a better position to yell for help than I was. But still—”

Hake was finding the conversation uncomfortable. He wanted to know. He did not want to ask. He could feel a queasy pelvic sensation that he did not like, and did not even want to allow himself—after all, he pointed out to himself, Leota’s sexual activities were not any of his concern. As she herself had told him. He was, however, entitled to feel compassion, surely. He said, stumbling over the words, “Was it, ah, really bad?”

She looked at him in silence for a moment, and then said only, “Yes.”

He could not think of a response, and after a moment she said, “Or, actually, no. I haven’t got things sorted out yet, Horny.”

He nodded without saying anything—it did not signify understanding, only acceptance. He stood up, helped her repack Alys’s bags, and began to get ready for bed, all in silence. And then, as he was taking off his shirt, Leota touched the great broad welts on his chest.

“Horny? Those are your scars, from something that almost killed you.”

“Yes?”

She dropped her robe. What he had thought to be embroidered stockings were tracings in blue, green and yellow on her legs, and they covered her entire body, a tattooed explosion of surreal color. She said, “These are mine.”

Before dawn they were on the road, the rented A-frame awkward on Hake’s shoulders. The “objective” was four miles down the road, and it would be hot, broad daylight before they reached it; now there was a faint slipperiness of dew on the paved road and the occasional greenery. For most of these plants, most of the year, that would be the only water they saw. Or needed.

Neither Hake nor Leota spoke much. For Hake, he had too much on his mind—or none of it really on his mind, because he could not keep his attention on any one question. There were a dozen trains of thought slithering inconclusively around his head: the Team; what the Reddis were up to; the broad sand hillocks to one side of them and, now and then, a look at the sea to the other. And, over and over again, Leota. None of them came to a climax, and perhaps he did not want them to; they were less uncomfortable where they were.

When the oil sheiks owned this part of the world, they had climbed to the top of their mountain of petrodollars and looked toward the west. What they saw, they copied. Hospitals and libraries. Museums and shiny convention hotels. Beaches, with marinas that now rotted empty. Roads that would have done credit to Los Angeles, divided by parkway strips that would have graced Paris. The plantings along the parkway strips were dead now, because no one had chosen to spend the money to bring them water. But the long, wide, silent highway itself stretched endlessly along the sea.

It was not quite deserted. As it came near to daylight occasional traffic shared it with them. A bus like the Metroliner, whispering past a train of camels—not like the Metroliner, because its exhaust was only a thin plume of steam, that disappeared almost at once in the morning light. Hydrogen-powered. Reasonable enough, here where it came from. Hake felt a moment’s envy. And some worry, too, because there were signs along the road with troublesome implications. Bleached old metal ones in Arabic, with messages like:

Military Reservation Keep to Road Passage Prohibited After Dark

And one in English, carelessly lettered on a painted-out road-traffic sign, but quite new:

HAUL ASS If you can read this, you don’t belong here.

No one challenged them. No one seemed to care. But Hake was glad when the sun was up, at least, even though the heat began at once.

They walked on in silence through the morning, the heat building up with every hour. When the sun was directly overhead they paused in the ruin of an old bus stop and drowsed for an hour or two, drinking sparingly from their canteens, and then moved on. A few minutes later Leota broke the silence. “Have you been thinking about my question?”

Hake had been thinking about everything but—more than anything else, about the implications of Leota’s body paint. It took him a moment to remember what question she had asked him. “You mean about why I do all this? God,” he said fervently, “have I not!”

“And?”

He thought for a moment. “If you mean am I aware of ever being hypnotized into being a spook, no. I did some reading up on hypnotism, and none of it seems to fit. In fact, I’ve still got some stuff in my bag.”

“But you aren’t convinced. You don’t believe anybody did this to you. You’d rather think you were a villain than a dupe.”

He looked at her sharply, but her tone was not contentious, only thoughtful.

“I’d rather,” he said, “know exactly what is going on. In my head, and in my life. Whichever way it came out. But I don’t.”

She nodded and was silent, eyes fixed on the empty road ahead. The highway was bending away from the coast now, and the dunes between them and the sea were higher.

Leota said something, so faintly he could not hear it against the hot on-shore wind and had to ask her to repeat it. “I said, do you know, I almost didn’t go with you when you turned up?”

“For God’s sake, why? Did you like it in the harem?”

She looked at him quickly—not with anger, he saw. She said placatingly, “I don’t know why. But when you and Reddi and Alys turned up, you looked like—invaders. You didn’t belong there. I did, and it felt wrong for me to let you capture me.”

“Capture you!”

“I know, Horny. I’m telling you the way it was in my head. You were on the other team. And I don’t think I was hypnotized, either—just kidnapped at a knife-point,” she said bitterly. “I don’t know how I could have escaped from the harem. But I didn’t even try.”

They drew off the road to let one of the tandem buses whine past, the passengers half asleep in the heat, paying no attention to them. Hake studied the map thoughtfully for a moment. “We’ve only got a couple of miles to go, near as I can figure it,” he said.

“Shall we get on with it?”

“I’ve got a better idea. If we’re going to snoop, I’d rather do it at night, and it’ll be sundown in a couple of hours. Let’s go for a swim.”

“Swim?”

“Up there.” He pointed to the now distant dunes, a few hundred yards ahead. There was a sand-covered side road leading between two of the larger ones. “Let’s take a look.”

The quarter-mile of coast behind the dunes had once been developed as a beach; there were abandoned cabanas and dressing rooms and the wrecks of refreshment pavilions. And no human beings in sight. They dropped their packs and their clothes in the shade of what had once been a lifeguard tower and ran down to the bright blue water. There was no surf to speak of, only gentle foot-high waves moving diagonally in from the sea, but the two of them splashed the water into foam. Leota’s painted skin made her look like a naiad in the crystal sea, and Hake could feel his parched tissues soaking up moisture as they floated and dove in the shallow water. They did not go out far, or stay in long. But when they returned to the lengthening shade and sprawled out, their bodies drying almost at once in the hot breeze, Hake felt a hundred times better, and Leota dropped off to sleep. —

He let her rest for an hour, and then they dressed, resumed their packs and started off again, with the sun now low behind them. Before they had gone a mile it set, quickly and definitively. There was a minute when their shadows were long and clear before them, and another minute when the shadows had gone entirely. The darkness did not hinder their walking. There was a more than half-moon already in the sky, ample to see where they were going. As the dry earth gave up its heat the night wind began to blow toward the sea and the temperature dropped. They stopped to add sweaters to their covering, and pressed on, with the moon bright before them and the dunes interrupting the spread of stars to their right. There was no one else on the road now, not even the occasional bus or truck.

But when Leota spoke it was almost in a whisper. She tugged Hake’s arm. “What’s that up ahead?”

Hake had been more intent on her than on the road, but he saw at once what she was pointing to. The old road ended only a few hundred yards ahead. It seemed to be swallowed up in an immense dune; and before the dune there was a wall of waist-high concrete set with reflectors, leading to a newer, far less elaborate detour that struck off at an angle into the desert. The dunes that covered the old road did not seem to be there by accident. They were buttressed by cement and faced with stone. They had not blown there at the whim of the winds. Someone had put them there.

“I think that’s it,” he said.

“This place? I don’t see any kind of generating plant.”

“It’s got to be on the far side of the dunes.” He hesitated. “We’re going to have to climb them. It’d be easier if we left the knapsacks here—”

“All right.”

“—but we might want to take pictures or something when we get to the top.”

Leota stopped, with the A-frame straps half off her shoulders. “Make up your mind, will you, Hake?”

“We’ll take them,” he decided. “But it’s going to be a tough climb.”

And it was, harder than any climb Hake had made in his post-invalid life. Even harder than the grueling exercises Under the Wire. The sand slipped away under their feet, so that they were constantly sliding back at almost every step, and where there was rock or concrete there were few footholds. To Hake’s surprise, however, the going became easier as they neared the top. The sand was firmer and more cohesive, and there was even a growing scatter of vines and stunted plants. There was a smell in the air that Hake could not identify. Partly it was the sea. But part of it was like the church lawn new-mown in the early spring: the smell of cut grass and stalks of wild scallions. And there was also a pungent, half-sweet floral odor that he had experienced somewhere before (but where?), which seemed to come from the scraggly volunteer growth. He did not understand these plant?. They were oddly succulent for this arid part of the world. Parched and half-dead, they still seemed improbably frequent on the dune; were they some sort of planting designed to keep the dune from moving in on the road?

And then they topped the ridge and looked out on the moonlit sea.

Panting from the climb, Leota found breath enough to whisper, “What’s that?” Hake did not have to ask what she meant. The same question was in his own mind. A quarter-mile out to sea, rising from the water and braced with three moon-glittered legs like one of H. G. Wells’s Martian fighting machines, a tall tower rose. Its head was a squashed sphere, and it shone with a sultry crimson, like the heart of a dying fire. It was not only light that came from it. Even at the top of the dune, they could feel its heat. Around its legs were a cluster of metal domes, awash in the sea, and what looked like barges moored to them.

Hake stood up for a better look around. Below him, the reverse slope of the dunes made an immense open bowl facing the sea. It could not have been all natural. Bulldozers and blasting had helped that shape along. It was more ovoid than spherical, and not entirely regular, but a mile-long bite had been taken out of dunes seventy feet high. And the seaward face of the dunes was no longer barren. It looked like an abandoned suburban yard, with the honeysuckle gone wild. Here and there along the slope shrubs and bushes were scattered. Hake was no gardener, but he could not have identified them anyway. They were choked under coils of ropy vine. The vines were everywhere, glossy leaves, gray-green in the moonlight, furled flowers, vines that were thinner than wire or thicker than Hake’s forearm. The mown-grass smell came from them. It was stronger now, and with a smoky aroma like marijuana burning, or candles that have just been blown out.

The logic of the design spoke for itself. As the Texas Wire sloped to face its geosynchronous satellite, this receptor cupped to confront the sea. “It has to be solar power,” said Leota, and Hake nodded slowly.

“Of course. But where are the mirrors?”

“Maybe they take them in at night? For cleaning?”

He shook his head. “Maybe,” he said. “But look at the way this whole area is overgrown—it’s almost as if they used to have something here, and then abandoned it.”

Leota said simply, “That thing out there doesn’t look abandoned.”

Hake shrugged, and then came to a decision. “The best way to look at a solar power plant is when it’s working. I’m going to stay here till sunrise and see what happens.”

Leota turned to look at him. “Wrong, Hake. We’re going to stay.”

“What’s the point? You’ll be more comfortable down by the road. And maybe safer. If this thing is operational, there are bound to be crews putting up the mirrors and so on—it’s easier for one person to stay out of sight than two.”

She did not answer, only began pulling the thermal sleeping bag out of her pack. “It’s too cold to argue,” she said. “And this thing is big enough for two. Are you going to join me or not?”

Hake gave in. Leota was right—right that it was too cold to argue, and right that the sleeping bag was big enough for two. Inside the bag it was no longer cold at all, as soon as their combined body heat began to accumulate. They wriggled out of their sweaters, then squirmed out of their pants and then, without transition, found that they were beginning to make love. In the absolute silence of the Arabian shore, with the bright moon peering through the vines over their heads and an occasional star, it seemed a very good place for it. They remembered to be hungry, afterwards, and divided a couple of chocolate bars, and then rested, sleeping and waking, with no clear distinction made between the states.

The only way Hake was certain he had been sleeping was that he woke up, with Leota tense in his arms. She had said something. He was no longer warm. The bag was wet and chill, soaked with cold water; and the silence was gone, replaced by a distant thumping sound of a pump and a slithering, creeping sound like a forest in a gentle wind. He blinked and beheld Leota’s face peering out toward the sea, lighted with a strange violet radiance. “It hurts,” she complained, squinting.

It was almost dawn. The moon and stars were gone, and the sky had turned blue, with a rosy aurora toward the east. The sullen red glow from the top of the tower was gone now; obviously it had cooled through the night, and was now only a black ellipsoid, no longer radiating. But something new was in the sky. A poorly defined, purplish splotch of light hung above the horizon. It was not bright, but as Hake looked at it his eyes began to ache. “Don’t look that way!” he ordered, clapping a hand to his eyes, then squinting between his fingers.

“What is it, Horny?”

“I don’t know! But I think it’s ultraviolet, and it’ll blind you if you let it. Look around you, Leota!”

The slithering noise came from the myriad tangled vines. Their furled flowers were opening and turning themselves toward the sea. Amid the glossy, green-black leaves, pearly white flower cups were swelling and moving, new ones smaller than his thumbnail and huge old ones the size of inverted beach umbrellas, and each pearl-white cup, tiny or immense, was pointing the same way.

Hake and Leota stared at each other, then quickly crawled out of the sodden sleeping bag and began to dress, careful not to look toward the spectral violet glow. The reason for the wetness revealed itself; under the vines there was a tracery of plastic tubing, squeezing out a trickle of water to irrigate the plants. None of this was accidental. A great deal of design and an immense effort of work had gone into it.

“Good God,” said Hake suddenly. “I know where I’ve smelled these flowers before! IPF had some of them in Eatontown.”

But Leota wasn’t listening. “Look,” she said, barreling her fingers to make a fist-telescope and peering out toward the sea. The sun had come up, as abruptly as it had set the night before, and it was blindingly bright. But it was not alone! It had two companions in the sky, the purplish glow, now comparatively fainter but no less painful to look at, and a tinier and fiercer sun atop the metal tower. Careful as he was, Hake could not avoid an occasional split-second glance at one or another of the three suns. Even with eyes closed the after-images were dazzling in green and purple.

“The flowers are the mirrors!” he cried. “Like morning glories! They ton toward the sun, and reflect it to the tower!”

“But what’s that purplish thing?” Leota demanded.

He shrugged. “Whatever it is, we’d better get away from it. But—but this is perfect! You hardly even need machines —just the tower, to generate electricity, or hydrogen, or whatever. Why is it secret?”

“Because we don’t have it ourselves,” Leota said bitterly. “Because your friends don’t want to give foreigners credit for it. Because they’re pathological liars. What difference does it make?” She squinted down toward the base of the tower. “Regardless,” she said, “there are people working down there now. I move we get out of here and see if we can catch the morning bus to the city.”

They made their way to the highway nearly blind, and even hours later, when they had succeeded in stopping a bus and were looking for the hotel called The Crash Pad in the city, Hake could still see the after-images, now blue and yellow, inside his eyes. They had come within measurable distance of blindness, he realized. If Reddi had known where the installation was, he had known enough to warn them of the danger, too. And he had not elected to do so. Which said something about their relationship with the Reddis.

The hotel was the only one available for transients in the city. It was set back from the roadway in a little park (now bare, because unwatered), and the entrance was behind a three-tiered fountain (now dry). The lobby was a ten-story-high atrium, with its space filled with dangling ropes of golden lights (now dark) and with a pillar of outside elevators at one side, only one of which seemed to be working. They used their faked passports to register for a room and were relieved to find that the desk clerk did not seem to care that they were in two different names. There was no bellboy to help them with their baggage, but as their baggage amounted only to the two knapsacks the problem was not severe.

Hake’s notions of luxury had been formed in Germany and on Capri, and they added up to a really large room with an auto-bar. This Was a suite. There was no soap in the bathroom, and the ring around the bidet suggested that someone, sometime, had mistaken its purpose. To offset that, it had its own kitchen (not working) and dressing room; and if the bed was bare, it was also oval and a good ten feet across. Its sheets and covers were stacked on top of it, along with half a dozen huge towels, and when Hake knelt on it to reach them he was surprised to find that it gave gently under his weight in a fashion quite unlike anything he had ever experienced before. “Silicone foam,” Leota explained. “Like Silly Putty. I’ve seen them, but I’ve never actually slept on one.”

It was clear that the hotel was willing to allow them whatever luxury they liked, as long as they didn’t expect any of the hotel staff to provide it. Hake carried towels to the bathroom and checked out the kitchen. A strange fermenting odor led him to the refrigerator which turned out to hold two half-gallon jugs of fresh orange juice, fresh no longer; he dumped them down the sink and discovered it was plugged up. The twin TV sets on either side of the immense bed didn’t work, either, until he crawled behind the head of the bed to plug them in. The room had been neither dusted nor swept in recent times, but there was a vacuum cleaner with attachments at the bottom of one of the immense closets. There Leota drew the line. When she had finished making up the bed she said, “That’s good enough. We’re not going to be living here forever, after all. I saw some shops in the lobby; are any of those credit cards good enough to get me some clothes of my own?”

“Let’s hope so,” Hake said grimly; and while Leota was re-outfitting herself he prowled the top three floors of the hotel, looking for the room with the bent Do Not Disturb sign on the door.

There wasn’t any. The Reddis either had not yet arrived or did not choose to be contacted.

When Leota returned Hake was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching an old American private-eye movie on the television. “Are you having a good time?” she asked.

He looked up and switched the set off. It was no loss; he had not seen any of the last twenty minutes of it. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to contact the Reddis. They’re pure poison.”

“And your friends on the Team are better?”

“No, they’re not. I should be applying for a job at Hydro Fuels right about now, and I’m not sure I want to do that either. Do you want to know what I am sure of?”

She sat down and waited for him to answer his own question. “I’m sure I like this. Being here. With you. And I’d like it to go on.”

He stood up and paced to the window. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’m willing to do what’s right, Leota—my God, I want to. But I don’t know where right is, any more, and I guess I understand how people give up. Take what they can get for themselves, and the hell with everybody. And we could do that, you know. We’ve got unlimited credit. Anywhere in the world. We can do anything we like, as long as the credit cards last. We could catch a plane to Paris tonight. Or Rio de Janeiro. Anywhere. We can milk the cards for a million dollars in cash and put it in a Swiss bank, so if they ever catch up with us we can go right on with real money.”

She said thoughtfully, “The Reddis wouldn’t let us. We owe them. They’d find us, even if your friends didn’t.”

“So we give the Reddis what they want. The Team—” Hake shrugged. “I guess they would catch us, sooner or later,” he admitted. “But what a great time we could have until they did!”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Hake said slowly, “Leota, I don’t know what I want to do. I know what would be nice. That would be to marry you and take you back to Long Branch, and get busy being minister of my church again. I don’t see any way to do that.”

She looked at him appraisingly, but did not speak.

“Even better. We could change the world. Get rid of all this crumminess. Expose the Team, and put the Reddis out of business, and make everything clean and decent again. I don’t see any way to do that, either. I know how all that is supposed to go, I’ve seen it in the movies. We defeat the Bad Guys, and the town sees the error of its ways, and I become the new marshal and we live happily ever after. Only it doesn’t work that way. The Bad Guys don’t think they’re bad, and I don’t know how to defeat them. Mess them up a little bit, sure. But sooner or later they’ll just wipe us out, and everything will be the same as before.”

“So what you’re saying is we should have a good time and forget about principle?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding, “that seems to be what it comes down to. Have you got any better ideas?”

Leota sat up straight in the middle of the bed, legs curled under her in the half-lotus position, looking at him in silence. After a long time, she said, “I wish I did.”

Hake waited, but she didn’t add anything to what she had said. He felt cheated, and realized that he had expected more from her. He said belligerently, “So you’re giving up too!”

“Shouldn’t I?” She was beginning to cry. Hake moved toward her but she shook him away. “Give me a minute,” she said, drying her eyes. She gazed out at the bright harbor, marshalling her thoughts. “When I was in school,” she began, “and I first got an idea of what was going on, it all looked simple. We got our little group going, the Nader’s Raiders of international skullduggery, and it was really exciting. But the whole group’s gone now. I’m the only survivor. Some got scared off, two wound up in jail, and it isn’t fun any more. Sometimes I get help from volunteers. Sometimes I work with people like the Reddis. Usually I’m all by myself.”

“Sounds like a lonely life.”

“It’s a discouraging life. The world isn’t getting any better from anything I do. Mostly it seems to be getting worse. And every time I think I get a handle on the roots and causes of it all, it turns out wrong. Like hypnotism. I thought that might account for it and, do you see, if it did, then there might be something I could do. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t even account for the way I acted in Hassabou’s harem.”

Hake got up awkwardly to stare out the window with her. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear any details of how Leota had acted in Hassabou’s harem. He said, “Why didn’t you go public?”

“Aw, Horny. First thing I thought of.”

“So did you try it?”

“Ha! Did we not! My PoliSci professor had a friend on a TV station in Minneapolis, and she got us a five-minute spot on the news. We taped it. Everything we knew, or deduced—but it never got on the air. And the Team got on us. The professor lost tenure—for ‘corrupting a student’— me! And I took off. The trouble was the station wouldn’t believe us, and the people who did believe us called Washington to check.” She moved restlessly around the room; then, facing him, “For that matter, why didn’t you?”

He said, “Well, I thought of it. As a matter of fact, I left some stuff in New Jersey—a complete tape of everything I knew up to the time I got back from Rome.” He told her about International Pets and Flowers and his visits to Lo-Wate Bottling Co., and about The Incredible Art. She listened with some hope.

“Well, it’s a try at least,” she conceded. “Is there anything in the tape that you could call objective proof? No. Well, there’s the rub, Horny. Of course,” she said thoughtfully, “this fellow’s in entertainment, so he’s got more media access than you or I. Maybe somebody might listen —especially if it comes out the way you told him, and you get killed or something.”

“Now, that’s a cheerful thought.” They were both silent for a moment, thinking about that cheerful thought. “I told him about you,” he mentioned.

“Oh? Saying what?”

“Well, not about you personally, so much, but I asked him about hypnotism. He knows a lot about it. In fact, he gave me some tapes. Do you want to look at them?”

“What good would they do?”

“Maybe none, how do I know? But we don’t have an awful lot else to do, do we?”

She sighed, and smiled, and came over to kiss him. “Sorry, Horny. I guess I’m still up tight. Let’s see if that TV set has a viewer.”

It did—for, Hake thought, the primary purpose of displaying the equivalent of filthy postcards. But it would work as well for Art’s tapes and fiches. He pulled them out of the bottom of his knapsack and stuck one at random into the scanner.

The first panel was a page of a technical journal, with a paper by two people on the resemblance between sleep and hypnotism. It seemed that people who napped easily were, by and large, also easily hypnotizable.

Hake looked at Leota. Leota shrugged. “I don’t take naps very often,” she said. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything, anyway.”

“Let’s try another,” Hake said, and dumped the rest of the microfiches on the floor. Among them was a cassette, home-made by The Incredible Art. Hake clicked it into the player and turned it on, and Art’s voice came to them.

“I don’t know how much of this stuff is going to be useful to you, Horny,” it said, “but here’s the whole thing. What I started with was my own magic act. You remember how I did it. I get maybe thirty people to come up on the stage and I give them the usual ‘you are getting sleepy-sleepy -sleepy’ stuff. Most of them will act as if they’re really going to sleep. The ones that don’t I scoot right off stage, so I have maybe twenty left. Then I command them to try to raise their arms, but I tell them they can’t. The ones that don’t respond, off. So I have about a dozen. I keep going until I have maybe half a dozen that will do any damn thing I tell them to.

“Now, are they hypnotized? Beats me, Horny. I wondered about that, so I looked in the literature and this is some of the stuff I found. The key papers are, hold your breath, Hypnosis, Suggestion and Altered States of Consciousness: Experimental Evaluation of the New Cognitive-Behavioral Theory and the Traditional Trance-State Theory of ‘Hypnosis’—that’s in quotes, quote Hypnosis unquote— by Barber and Wilson, and Hypnosis from the Standpoint of a Contextualist, by Coe and Sarbin.

“Read them if yqu want to. I’ll tell you what they say—- or, anyway, what I think they say. The Barber and Wilson paper is about an experiment they did. They took a bunch of volunteers and divided them up into three parts. One third they did nothing special for; they were controls. One third they hypnotized, putting them into trance state in the good old-fashioned way and giving them suggestions. The last third they just talked to. They didn’t hypnotize them. There was no trance state. They didn’t even ask them to do anything. They just said things like, ‘Have you ever thought of what it would be like to not feel pain, or to remember your first day in school, or to be unable to raise your arm? If you want to, maybe you’ll think about these things.’ They call it ‘thinking with.’ So then they did the experiments. Arm heaviness, finger anesthesia, water hallucination—I think there were ten different things they tried. And then they matched the responses of the three groups, scoring them so that the highest response—the ‘most hypnotized,’ you would call it—would be 40, and the total bomb-outs, no response at all, would be zero. No group came out with zero, in fact no individual did. They took a score of 22 as the cut-off point, and this is what they found out:

“For the control group, 55 percent of the subjects scored 23 or better—so even if there isn’t any preparation at all, a lot of people will act as if they’re hypnotized anyway.

“For the hypnotized, trance-state group, 45 percent scored 23 or better. Forty-five percent! Less than the controls.

“And for the thinking-with group, you know how many scored 23 or better? A hundred percent. All of them.”

The voice on the tape paused for a moment, and then continued. “Ah, here it is. So then I did some more reading, and I came across the Coe and Sarbin piece. They have a theory about hypnotism. They call it the ‘dramaturgic’ view, i.e., hypnotic subjects are acting out a part. You ought to read the paper, but, here, let me just read what it says at the end. ‘We underscore the proposition (long overlooked) that the counterfactual statements in the hypnotist’s induction are cues to the subject that a dramatistic plot is in the making. The subject may respond to the cues as an invitation to join in the miniature drama. If he accepts the invitation, he will employ whatever skills he possesses in order to enhance his credibility in enacting the role of hypnotized person.’

“Get it? They’re playing a part. And what makes me think there’s something to it is, I know that’s what I do when I get up on a stage. I play a part. I’m not me, the fellow who. lives in Rumson, New Jersey, and keeps parakeets. I’m The Incredible Art. If you look at it in one way, I’m sort of hypnotizing myself into behaving, what do they call it, counterfactually. And not just me. All actors. They get up there night after night. The corns don’t hurt, the cough doesn’t hack, whether they’re exhausted or not the step is spry—until the curtain comes down, and that glorious, radiant creature schlumps away to the dressing room and the Bromo-Seltzer and the Preparation H.”

He was silent for a moment. Then, “Well, there it is. I hope you find the stuff interesting. If you ever get through all this, come by the house and have a drink and we’ll talk it over.”

“The more I try to understand what’s really happening in the world,” Hake said, getting up to click off the player, “the more I find out I don’t know anything. The hell with it.”

Leota curled her legs under her on the bed, straightened her back and stared him down. “What do you mean, the hell with it?”

“I mean I get lost in the complications. And I don’t have time for them. I was supposed to apply for a job two hours ago.”

She flared, “Do you think I’m going to marry a nincompoop?”

“Who said anything about getting married?”

“You did! Just a few minutes ago. And I even thought about it, but I made that mistake once and I’m not going to do it again.”

Hake was getting angry, too. “I’m Hornswell Hake, minister,” he snarled, “and I do the best I can. I can’t do everything. I don’t know everything. I wish Art were here —he knows more about some of this stuff than I do. I wish I could see what’s right and best—but I can’t. If that makes me a nincompoop I’ll just have to live with it.”

Leota stood up for emphasis, moving toward the window. She said, “Anybody can do the right thing when it’s perfectly clear what the right thing is! But how do you ever know that? You don’t, and you have to act anyway.”

“I know that.”

“Then—”

“Then,” he said, “I do what I can see I damn better do, which is to get my tail over to the place I was supposed to be at two hours ago and apply for that job.”

They stared at each other for a moment, then Leota broke eye contact. She turned and gazed out the window.

A sudden rigidity in her stance, the way she held her head, the set of her shoulders, alarmed Hake. “What’s the matter?” he demanded.

She said, “Did I ever tell you how we left Rome?”

“What’s that got to do with what we’re talking about?”

“Hassabou wouldn’t live in a hotel. Not him. He had his yacht at Ostia. One day we just went for a sail—and didn’t come back. When the yacht got to Benghazi his boys took me to the airport. With a knife at my throat. Come look.”

Hake peered out the window, past the bright gold mosque and the minarets toward the harbor. “See the sailing yacht out there, the big one? That’s the Sword of Islam. It’s Hassabou’s yacht.”