The Cool War

VI

When Hake emerged from the slow-jet at Fort Stockton the heat wrapped itself around him at once. He was sweating before he got to the bottom of the ladder, panting as he walked the twenty yards from aircraft to the opening in the fence marked “Gate 1.” (There was no Gate 2.) He was met by a young black woman—black as to ethnicity, not skin color, which was a sort of sunny beige. There was no exchange of recognition signals. Clearly she had been briefed with description and photograph, perhaps also with fingerprints, genetic code and retina-prints, for all Hake knew. There was also the consideration that no one else got off the slow-jet. She came up to him unhesitatingly and said, “You’re Hornswell Hake and I’m Deena Fairless. Let’s go to the plane.” Also unhesitatingly, he went along. She didn’t ask if he had checked any baggage. She knew he had not. He had been instructed to take only toilet articles and personal items not to exceed four kilograms, and she assumed he had complied. Fairless pointed to the passenger side of what looked like an old electric golf cart, got in on the driver’s side and was in motion before Hake had fully settled himself in. There was no top. The drive to the end of an auxiliary runway, where a small plane was waiting for them, was only about two minutes, but it was long enough for Hake to think of sunstroke. He followed the woman up a retractable ladder into what he recognized as some sort of old military plane; he did not know enough to be sure of model or function, but it seemed to be one of the vertical-takeoff counter-insurgency gunships that had been popular in the old brushfire wars.

Hake’s guide turned out to be Hake’s pilot as well. She checked Hake’s seat belt, spoke briefly into the radio, went through a thirty-second checkoff against a printed list, and launched the plane in a climbing turn that made no use of the runway at all. It was a brute-force takeoff in a brute-force kind of airplane, and Hake knew that the fuel that got them into the air would have been enough to have kept his rectory warm all the last winter.

It stuck in his craw. He leaned over and yelled in the pilot’s ear, “Isn’t this a terrible waste of fuel?”

She looked at him with mild astonishment. “You mean this SHORTOL? Depends on how you look at it, Hake,” she yelled. “These are the planes we’ve got.”

“But a lighter plane—”

“Sit on it, Hake,” she yelled good-humoredly. “I knew you were a conscientious type the minute I saw you, but you haven’t worked out the figures. How much energy do you think it takes to build a plane? Don’t guess. I’ll tell you. Quarter-million kilowatt-hours or so, so if we junk this to get a little one it’s like peeing away ten thousand gallons of fuel. Anyway,” she finished obscurely, “every now and then you need what this plane can give you. Now shut up and let me fly.”

It was clear that Deena Fairless didn’t want conversation, so Hake forbore to ask her where they were flying. He knew that it was generally southwest, at least. Fairless hadn’t said, but Hake could estimate direction well enough from the position of the sun. They flew low, under ten thousand feet, and updrafts from the dry mesas kept them in bouts of turbulence. Fairless didn’t talk, or at least not to Hake. She kept moving her lips into the radio; he could not hear what was said, but granted it enough importance to refrain from offering conversation. Only as they began to climb over a ridge of hills she leaned toward him and said, “Have you got a lot of fillings in your teeth, Hake?”

“No. Not too many.”

“Lucky,” she said, looking over the hills. “There’s the Wire.”

There was something there to look at. He could not identify it, was not even sure he was seeing what he saw. It — looked like pencil-thin searchlight beams winking on and off, tinged with color, one red, two bluish-green. The beams were very faint except for high patches where they impinged upon wisps of cirrostratus, and even there they existed only as split-second impressions. As they topped the hill he saw what looked like a tilted plain of chicken wire sloping away on the far side. But he had only a glimpse, and then they were dropping to a short, black-topped landing strip next to a cluster of buildings. Painted on the roof of one low, long shed were the words HAS-TA-VA RANCH. He saw what looked like a row of small and unprosperous motel cabins, a corral with a clump of horses milling around one end, a few stables. The horses did not even look up as the plane screamed down to a rolling stop on the airstrip, which was the only indication in sight that the place was anything other than an attempt at a tourist attraction, rapidly going broke.

“Welcome to your new home,” said Deena Fairless, unstrapping herself and flipping switches off. “You’ll love it here.”

Hake didn’t love it there. He didn’t hate it, either; he didn’t have time. Or energy. Up at 4:45 a.m., and a quarter-mile run before breakfast, snaking among the supports for the wire-field overhead. Ten minutes to go to the toilet, and then out again. Sometimes for an hour’s hand-to-hand combat instruction, flinging each other into hillocks of sand or clumps of buffalo grass—the buffalo grass was softer, but once in a while there was a snake in it. Sometimes for calisthenics. Sometimes for scuba-training, practicing clearing the mask, practicing snatching the mask away from each other—those were good times, because with water-discipline enforced it was about the only time any of them got an all-over bath; but not so good, because with water-discipline a necessity the pool was never changed. Then something sedentary for half an hour’s rest: learning to use bugging equipment, learning to know when it was being used on themselves. Making repairs in equipment. Morale—over and over, morale. Then lunch, twenty minutes of it. Then more. And more and more. Hake had tucked a dozen microfiches into his “personal effects” bag, but he never learned if there was a viewer on the premises, because he never even found time to ask.

Hake ‘s fellows included three dozen persons, most of them new trainees like himself, a few old-timers being brought back on line for reassignment, a cross-section of humanity. Hispanic teenaged boys, a glowingly long-legged California blonde, one elderly black professor, a nun. They all shared the same bunkhouse, tucked in the lee of a dune Under the Wire. They all, somehow, kept up. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they had little in common—beyond, of course, the purpose of their presence here. If Hake had looked around his commuter bus one morning and seen all of them there he would have considered them a perfectly normal busload of average Americans. The group changed. Some came, some went. The San Diego blonde was the first to go, to Hake’s regret, but a day or two later a New Orleans brunette turned up, along with two middle-aged Japanese ladies from Hawaii. The only constants were the instructors: a one-legged youth for surveillance and debugging, a whipcord and vinegar senior citizen for hand-to-hand and physical training, Deena Fairless for scuba and instrument repair, all of them, taking turns, for the morale lectures. In the first ten days Under the Wire, Hake never did the same thing twice, and never came to the end of a day without falling instantly into exhausted sleep, regardless of hunger, pains, itches or the occasional mad singing of the wire overhead.

He had not, as it turned out, stayed at Has-Ta-Va Ranch any longer than it took to get into a truck and bounce half a mile under the power rectenna that he had glimpsed from the air. By the time he had been dropped off and set about drawing two sets of underwear, ten pairs of socks and the stoutest hiking boots he had ever had on his feet, he had figured out both what he had seen and why he was there.

The training base was hidden under the microwave receiver that supplied most of three states with electricity. The power came from space. Twenty-two thousand miles straight up from the equator a magnetohydrodynamic generator hung in geosynchronous orbit, sucking electrical energy out of plasma, transmuting it into microwaves, pumping five gigawatts of it down to the Ok-Tex-Mex grid. The trouble with a “stationary” orbit is that it can only be stationary directly over some point on the equator, so the rectenna had to be tilted toward the south: thus the slope of the hill. At 30° North Latitude the tilt did not have to be extreme. And, as a valuable byproduct, there was all that land under the wire that was, if not immune, at least resistant to airborne or satellite inspection. Some was used for grazing forty-acre cattle, or the three-five buffalo hybrids that survived better and gained faster, if you could get used to the gamey, sweetish taste of the meat. Some was used, or was sometimes used, for irrigated crops—soy, sorghum or alfalfa. (But not this year, with the water tables sinking.) And some was used by Curmudgeon’s people, for the purposes that brought Hake there. Ok-Tex- Mex was not the only huge rectenna bringing down MHD power to pop American toasters and light American homes. SCALAZ, on the Gila River, handled more energy. Three or four others were the same size, and the new one in the Gulf of Mexico off Cape Sable was much larger (when it wasn’t being ripped up by tropical storms). But Ok-Tex-Mex had a special advantage. It was a long way from anything more populous than a dude ranch. There were reasons for that. That part of Texas, south of the Permian Basin, had never had much to make anyone want to be there, at least above ground; and the stuff that had been below ground had long since been pumped into the tanks of American cars and burned away.

Being Under the Wire was not so bad, once you got used to a couple of things. The Wire itself was not your average snow fence. It was three hundred square kilometers of dipole elements, each with its own filter, gallium-arsenide Schottky barrier diode rectifier and bypass capacitor. Put them all together and they were supposed to be something over eighty percent efficient at sucking in low-density microwaves and spitting out 10,000-volt DC into the Ok-Tex-Mex power grid. It was eight percent transparent to sunlight, and a hundred percent leaky to rain—when there was any rain. It was also hot and noisy. Most of the eighteen percent loss came off as heat, and convected harmlessly away into the Texas air. Most of what was left appeared as a dull, faint hum, like a toy-train transformer spread out over the sky. Living Under the Wire meant that where the Wire came down low to the ground you felt its radiance like a toaster element overhead; where it was high, the convection sucked in surface winds; and always it droned at you. It did other things. The support columns got in the way of moving around. And there was the little problem with the microwave energy itself. There was a good chance it damaged DNA. The cattle grazing under it were raised for slaughter, not breeding; there was some question about what sort of descendants they would have. (And the people in the camp underneath? No one seemed to want to discuss it.)

The satellite transmitter was constantly locked onto a comer-reflector at the center of the rectenna’s spread. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the time it stayed centered there, or no farther from it than the wire could accommodate. The average power density of the beam was comfortably low. Unfortunately, it didn’t always stay average. Atmospherics intervened. The interface between air layers became lenses. Focusing one way, the beam spread over more area than the rectenna accepted, and some of the power was lost. Focusing another, the power density climbed. That was when dental fillings became significant. In a dense beam, the result was the damnedest toothache anyone could have. For this the management of the training camp offered aspirin, or even rough-and-ready extraction if desired, and nothing else. (The good part was that the worst lumps in the beam seldom lasted more than an hour or two. Only enough to drive a sufferer out of his mind for a while. Not enough to interfere with his training.)

What was left of Hake’s convalescent frailty was sweated out of him in running, knee-bends and hand-to-hand combat, an eclectic discipline that seemed to include judo, la savate, sapping-and-stabbing and the dirtier kinds of Saturday-night punchups. That wasn’t bad. Hake hadn’t had his strong male body long enough’to take it for granted, and when he sent the Louisiana charmer flying and dropped one of the professors to the ground, his knee on the man’s throat, two seconds after they had jumped him from behind, he heard himself growling with pleasure. There was a session on how to make plastic explosives on a base of Vaseline, with ingredients purchasable in any drugstore, and one on the use of Blue Box and Black Box penetration of telecommunication networks. They weren’t bad, either. The technology was fascinating to the MIT dropout who had not thought of any of those things for years. They trained with a large selection of electronic cameras and microphones, and each of the trainees in turn took the equipment to spy on the others. The prize was when the nun came up with a two-minute sniperscope tape of one of the teenagers masturbating behind a cluster of yucca. Hake was impressed. Not so much by the nun’s technical skill as by Tigrito’s energy. Hake did not seem to have the energy left after a day to think of sex. (Or not in the first week; but then, Tigrito had been there for four.) When Hake thought of sex, or indeed when he let his mind drift in any direction at all away from remembering to spit into his facemask and rehearsing the nomenclature of the parts of the rifle-microphone, was only during the indoctrination lectures. Sprawled out on the sparse grass, the sun beating through the wire overhead, they listened to Deena or Fortnum or Captain Pegleg going on and on about their purpose in being there:

“The United States is threatened as never before in its history—” Pegleg drumming on his outstretched artificial limb with the fingers of one hand, while the words droned out of him as if he were himself a tape—“by a world in which our rightful defense forces are stymied by red tape and international agreements, any questions? Right.” There weren’t any questions. There was a difference of viewpoint, to be sure, but Hake did not feel a necessity to air it, and besides Mary Jean was stretched out before him with her hands folded behind her head and he was enjoying what he saw.

Or, “Under the constitution and laws of our land—” this was old Fortnum, who stood up when he talked to them and insisted on alert posture from his audience— “we are charged with securing the blessings of democracy to ourselves and our posterity, which we got to do by keeping our nation strong and secure, any questions?” There weren’t any questions for Fortnum, either. He was the only one of the instructors who had the habit of imposing extra duty for misdemeanors. Attracting his attention was usually a misdemeanor.

Deena Fairless was the only one who held Hake’s attention as a speaker. For one thing, she didn’t sit or stand but moved around among them, sometimes rousting them awake with a toe when the after-lunch heat began to put one or another of them away. For another, she talked about more interesting things. “By presidential directive, we are limited to covert, nonlethal operations on foreign soil only. All three things, remember. Covert. Nonlethal. Foreign. Now, if there are no questions—” she barely paused, but there weren’t any questions then, either—“let me explain some of the things you’ve been seeing around here.”

And that was how Hake found out that agent training was only one of the functions of the installation. There was a research-and-development underground—literally underground, dug into the side of the slope itself—a few miles away, and that was where things like the IR spectacles and the foamboats came from. There was a place euphemistically called “debriefing.” None of them were ever to go near it. Nor likely to, since it was constantly patrolled with attack dogs. Deena Fairless didn’t say who was “debriefed,” but the trainees formed their opinions; and if any of them happened to be taken out by the Other Side, decided they could expect to wind up in some other “debriefing” place at some other point on the surface of the Earth. There was even a small writers’-colony place—that was the one that was actually housed at the Has-Ta-Va Ranch itself—where psychological warfare texts were prepared.

And then, when God was kind, they were permitted to watch films. They saw notable agency triumphs of the past, the counterfeiting operations that broke the Bank of England and the price-rigging that bankrupted ten thousand Indian, Filipino and Indochinese rice growers. Those, they were given to understand, were only a tiny fraction of the successful ventures of the agency. Those were the blown ones, where the Other Side, or more often the Other Sides, knew what had happened. There were still huger projects that had never been detected. And that, they understood, because they were told so day after day, with relentless insistence, was the Optimal Project: to do something that weakened some part of the rest of the world relative to the United States without ever being found out.

And, of course, at the same time the Other Sides were doing all they possibly could to the United States. The water lilies that were choking out every slow-moving stream in the Northeast, the “Hell, No, I Won’t Mow!” revolt of condominium owners in Florida, the California stoop-labor strikes and the truckers’ go-slow that jointly had kept fresh vegetables rotting in the fields and warehouses while consumers paid triple prices for canned goods •—all had been traced to foreign intervention, playing the Team’s game from the other side of the board. They were doing it now. Even under the microwave antenna, even fresh and new to the Southwest as he was, Hake could see that the sparse grass was browning and dying. The Other Side, they said, was cloudnapping again, projecting bromide smoke into the big cumulus over the Pacific and stealing their rain before it ever reached America.

Perhaps Hake’s microfiches could have told him when the game had begun, if he had had time to read them. Peer as hard as he could into the future, he could not see where it all would end.

Even Southwest Texas got cold at two in the morning. Surprising cold, mean cold. Overhead the ten thousand Texas stars winked through the moaning wire, and the north wind that strummed the rectenna froze Hake at the same time. And froze Tigrito and Mary Jean and Sister Florian and the two Hawaiian ladies; they were worse off than Hake, not being New Jersey-bred. Deena Fairless seemed comfortable enough, but then she was the one who had rousted them all out of bed at midnight for this training exercise. She had had time to prepare for the night march—including, Hake was pretty sure, wool socks and thermal underwear.

Mary Jean, propped against the same three-cornered pillar as Hake, wriggled closer to him. He did not suppose that it was affection. She was a long way from Louisiana. What she was after was warmth. Nevertheless he glanced at Deena, who said, “Stay awake, that’s all.” But Hake’s problem was not sleepiness. Hake’s problem was that Deena had shattered one of the truly fine erotic dreams of his recent memory when she came in with her flashlight and twisted him awake by the toe. He still wasn’t quite out of it. Mary Jean certainly did not smell like a dream girl— more like a real one who had been worked hard and bathed insufficiently—but some synapse, cell or process in his brain unerringly identified a yin for his yang, and the real person drowsing against his shoulder merged with the dream one he had abandoned so reluctantly.

“Stay awake, I said!”

“Sorry, Deena,” Mary Jean apologized, shifting to a more alert posture. “When are we going to get moving?”

“When it’s clear.”

“When will it be clear?”

“When Tiger comes back and tells us so.” Deena hesitated, then said, “Move around if you want to. Keep your voices down.” They were in an arroyo that bent sharply just ahead of them; good cover from sight, as the sighing wire overhead was good cover for sound. At this point the antenna was at least seventy feet above them, but Hake could see it as a winking tracery of scarlet spiderwebs, faint but clear, as it reflected the pulse of the radar corner beacons. In fact, it was astonishing how much he could see by starlight, now that his eyes had had two hours to adapt. Deena Fairless was unscrewing what looked like a huge tube of toothpaste, head cocked in concentration, squeezing out a dab of what it contained onto her finger.

“What’s that?” asked Beth Hwa, sitting cross-legged, spine straight and alert.

“That’s what we’re going to stick up a cow’s ass,” said Deena. There was the sort of silence that follows a wholly unsuccessful joke, until Deena said, “No kidding. That’s the job for tonight. We’re going to move in on the three-five herd, locate the heifers and smear some of this on their, excuse the medical terms, their private parts. I don’t mean rectums, I mean vaginas. But if you can’t figure out which is which you have to do both.”

The silence protracted itself, but changed in kind; now it was the silence that surrounds a group of persons wondering if somebody was playing a very bad joke of which they were the butt. Deena chuckled. “It’s a simulation,” she explained. “Represents an actual operation, of which you may, or may not, hear more before you leave here.”

“Some operation,” snarled Sister Florian.

“Well, you’re excused from that part,” said Deena. “You’re going to be our lookout.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are we in trouble?”

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

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

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

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

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

“What are the prizes?” Hake asked.

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

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

Then the guessing began.

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

“Shee-it, man! What cavalry?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Equine gonorrhea?”

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

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

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

“Watch it,” Hake said irritably.

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

“Fuck off, Tigrito,” said Mary Jean.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”