The Spy in the Ointment

10

Picture, if you will, a rolling countryside green with verdant spring. A small dark-watered lake fills the center of a cupped valley, surrounded by wooded hills, forested with pine and oak and maple. On the eastern shore of the lake there are the only signs of human occupancy: a pier, a small beach, a float, a boathouse. A smooth, undulant, green lawn sweeps up-slope from these to a large sprawling house of gray fieldstone; this could be a private manor, or a rest home, or a small and exclusive resort. There are stables, occupied by real horses, to one side of this building, and a long garage, occupied by real automobiles, to the other. A narrow blacktop road continues up the face of the ridge beyond this building, into the woods, over the top, and down the other side through thick forest to a small state highway not quite three miles away. The country-side all around the lake is beautiful, wild, lush, crisscrossed by narrow trails and enclosed by electrified fencing.

The time is six-forty A.M. Because the month is April, a slow, gentle, chilling drizzle is leaking interminably from heaven, and the temperature is hovering around fifty. Through this beautiful, bleak, half-lit predawn landscape two men in gray sweatsuits are running. They are trotting end-lessly along a path that circles the lake. They are running around the lake, and around the lake, and around the lake. They must be idiots.

One of the two is a burly blocky blond-haired bloke named — or so he says — Lynch. The other, known to Lynch and everyone else around here — you can’t see them; they’re asleep — as Q, is yours truly, J. Eugene Raxford, your correspondent. Lynch, red-faced, as healthy as a moose, is trotting along like a well-oiled wind-up toy. Beside him, I am wheezing, I am puffing, I am panting, I am flailing my arms around and no longer making any attempt to keep my knees as high as Lynch likes them.

This was the morning of my fifth day at this place, which was what P had referred to as “our site.” Judging from the nighttime automobile trip Angela and I had taken here from P’s office, we were somewhere in upstate New York, or possibly in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Although it might also have been in Rhode Island, Vermont, or New Hampshire. Wherever it was, its name was Hell.

In the last five days I had learned something I’d never known before: pacifism makes one flabby. You might think walking on picket lines, marching in demonstrations, cranking mimeograph machines, and running away from mounted policemen are activities that would keep one in relatively good physical shape, but apparently they do not. At any rate, Lynch and his confreres — no letters for these people, they all had names, one monosyllabic name each — were convinced that I was in terrible physical shape, and after they’d run me around the lake a few hundred times, my tendency was to believe them.

The first day had been the worst. It had been after dawn before we’d finally arrived here, and when Angela and I were shown our connecting rooms and left alone, we were both so tired that neither of us so much as checked to see if the linking door was locked. (It was, we later learned, not.) I was awakened at noon, over my strident protests, chivvied downstairs for a breakfast of orange juice, steak, scrambled eggs, milk, coffee, toast and orange marmalade, and introduced to a beefy bunch termed, blithely, “your instructors.” The one who called them that began the introductions by introducing himself: “Karp. I handle the administrative end at the site here.”

And the others: “This is Lynch, who’ll be seeing to your physical condition. Walsh, here, is your code man. And here’s Hanks, your judo instructor. And—”

“I’m a pacifist,” I said. “Maybe they didn’t tell you.”

He looked at me with the expressionless eyes of a philanthropist doing a good deed among the lower orders. “Hanks,” he said, “will instruct you in some of the principles of self-defense.” He looked away, and continued the introductions: “This is Morse, your swimming instructor. Here’s Rowe, fencing and gymnastics—”

I said, “More self-defense?”

Another blank look, and he said, “Quite. And finally. Duff here, your electronics technician.” Turning to me full-face now, he said, “As I understand it, you are a special case, Q, not one of our normal recruits. We have been given just five days to turn you into something with at least a minimum of survival potential, and if we are to get anywhere at all we shall require your full and unstinting co-operation. We shall not, I promise you, waste any of these five days instructing you in anything useless or abstract, so please do not waste time objecting to elements of the course. I take it you would prefer to survive.”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” I said, “I’d appreciate it very much.”

“It won’t be too much trouble,” he told me. “Walsh, will you take Q along now?”

Walsh was my code man. He took me away for an hour to a small room where he filled me full of codes, passwords, signals, counteractants, emergency over-rides, and I don’t know what all. “Don’t worry if it isn’t all sinking in,” he said at one point. “We’ll have several sessions.”

“Oh, good,” I said.

Lynch had me next. Down to the locker room we went, changed into sweatsuits, and off for the first but not the last time around that bloody lake. For an hour I ran, I did calisthenics, I climbed ropes, I jumped up and down, and I did a lot of loud breathing through my mouth. When at last the hour was done, Lynch looked at me and said, sourly, “They expect miracles, don’t they?”

Duff, my electronics technician, was next. We met in a long low-ceilinged room full of electronic equipment, at which Duff generally waved, saying, “Here is some of the equipment you may be called upon to use. Our purpose is to familiarize you with it.”

Sure.

Next was Rowe, fencing and gymnastics. Rowe handed me a blunt épée, attacked me à la Douglas Fairbanks a few times, and said, “Well, the hell with that. If they come at you with swords you’ll die, that’s all. Let’s go to gymnastics.”

I said, “They don’t come at people with swords very much any more, do they?”

“Sometimes,” he said. “Not often. Swing on those rings over there.”

After Rowe came Morse, my swimming instructor, who said, “Can you swim at all?”

“I can swim very well,” I told him.

“Thank God for small favors,” he said. “I am now going to teach you to swim silently. Get in the water.”

I said, “Do you know it’s cold out here?”

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “Now, in order to swim silently—”

Then came lunch, a welcome respite, and the first time I’d seen Angela that day. The people here didn’t know her name either, but they didn’t call her by a letter, they just called her Miss. She said, “How are you doing?” and I said, “They’re trying to kill me. Nothing to worry about.”

After lunch I saw Duff again, and had another go at the electronic equipment. He also took some of my measurements, for various electronic things he intended to attach to me one way and another, and I went away from there, somewhat bemused, to be thrown around a padded floor for an hour by Hanks, my judo instructor, who couldn’t care less about my pacifism; whether or not I ever used what he taught me was not his concern. Then Walsh the code man again, and some more silent swimming with Morse, and another go at the gymnasium with Rowe, on and on, ultimately ending at ten o’clock at night with an incredible massage from Lynch. “One thing we don’t want,” Lynch said, pummeling me, “is for them muscles to tighten up.”

They wouldn’t have dared.

Dinner was relaxing, though brief, and afterward I was sent to my room with several volumes on applied psychology, with marked chapters concerning police interrogation methods, psychological manipulation of co-workers, and similar villainies. When Angela, all rested and randy, came scratching at my door a little after midnight the best I could give her was a smile, and even that was weak.

And so it had gone, for the next four days. It was a crash program, in which I was the crash, and incredibly enough it seemed to have some effect. My physical tone improved amazingly, much of what I’d been told about codes and electronics and psychology appeared to. stick with reasonable permanence in my memory, I learned to swim as silent as a gliding lily pad, and I even got pretty good on the parallel bars.

Not that there was a lot of improvement, because there wasn’t. But considering the length of time we’d all been given, the fact of any improvement was pretty astonishing.

By the third night I’d even been able to show Angela a spark of life, which pleased her exceedingly, until twenty to six the next morning when Lynch came striding in, found us both in the same bed, looked down on us with disapproval, and said, “Breaking training. No good for you.”

“Really!” cried Angela, turning red all over.

“Yes, really,” said Lynch, turned on his heel, walked out, and twenty minutes later had me running around the lake as though we were trying to get somewhere.

This was the daily routine; up at five-forty, exercise from six to seven, then breakfast and session after session for the rest of the day and halfway into the night.

Now it was the fifth and last day, opening all cold and drizzly, with Lynch pacing me as usual around the lake. At ten to seven we stopped running and switched to a cross section of push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups, various kinds of jumps, etc., etc., and at seven I staggered into the main building, took my first shower of the day, and went ravenously to breakfast.

We had a guest this morning: P, all citified and sissy in his suit. I flexed a new muscle at him, drank my orange juice, reached for my steak, and said, “Well, Coach, you just bring on da champ. I’ll knock him outa da ring.”

P smiled bleakly. “I’m glad you feel that way, Q,” he said. “Tonight you re-establish contact.”

The orange juice turned to a cold solid in my stomach. I put down a forkful of steak and said, “We’re ready?”

He tossed a pile of newspapers on the table beside me. “Take a look.”

The top paper was Friday’s Daily News, and the applicable item was on page 4. Beneath a headline reading SOCIETY GIRL VANISHES, the story announced that industrialist Marcellus Ten Eyck had reported to police that morning the disappearance of his daughter, Angela, who had not returned home the night before. Police had information that Miss Ten Eyck had last been seen in the company of one Joseph Rakford (sic), a known extremist termed by the FBI “erratic and dangerous.” Foul play was not ruled out. Accompanying this absurd story was a small grainy photo identified in the caption as Angela, but it looked more like a picture of me.

Uh huh. The second paper was Saturday’s Daily News — it figured the News would give this sort of story the biggest play — and now the story had graduated to page 3, and the accompanying photos were much larger and clearer than before. Yes, photos; one each of Angela and me. DEB DISAPPEARS; SUBVERSIVE SOUGHT ran the headline, and it was followed by essentially the same story as yesterday’s, but with additional exclamation points. A few foul lies about my part in the blowing up of customs shacks had also been inserted.

The Sunday News was next. Still page 3, the same two photos and essentially the same story — this time pegged with the headline ANGELA AND THE BOMBER STILL OUT OF SIGHT — plus a picture in the center fold of the mimeograph machine in my bedroom. “Deserted hideaway of J. Eugene Raxford [they were getting it right by now] reveals no clues to where-abouts of missing society beauty,” etc., etc.

Monday, yesterday, the story had begun to lose steam. Page 5, smaller item, no photos at all, headline POLICE STYMIED IN DEB DISAPPEARANCE. Ah, but this morning, Tuesday, quelle différence! Page 1, black headline covering half the page:

You bet the story was on page 2. A body, partially destroyed by an explosion of dynamite, had been found in a ravine in New Jersey the night before, and had been identified via dental history records as Angela Ten Eyck, missing heiress to — etc, etc. J. Eugene Raxford, bomber and terrorist being sought on other counts by the FBI, was wanted for questioning also in connection with the death — etc., etc. Anyone having any information on the whereabouts of Raxford — etc., etc.

“Well,” I said.

P took the papers back. “Realistic?”

“It’s going to be quite a job later on,” I said. “Unraveling all that.”

“It can be done,” he said calmly. “It’s been done before.”

“What about Angela’s old man? He’s co-operating?”

P’s smile turned to granite. “Reluctantly,” he said. “But fully. Take my word for it.”

“I’m surprised,” I said. “I figured the old guy wouldn’t stand still for it, this kind of publicity in the trash press. And not even true.”

“Mr. Ten Eyck,” P said carefully, “is in the munitions business, a business quite intimately connected with the federal government. The government itself is a prime consumer in that industry, and rigidly regulates the industry’s dealings with any and all other consumers. Believe me, Mr. Ten Eyck does not want the federal government to think of him as uncooperative.”

I smiled, thinking about the old walrus blowing into his mustaches, clasping his hands behind his back, saying several unprintable things, and writing out some new contribution checks to the Republican Party. (Whenever the government infuriated Ten Eyck in some particularly personal way — which was often — he always mailed off a fresh contribution to the Republican Party. He did this even if the Republicans themselves were in power — which was seldom.)

Karp, the administrative head of the site, came along then, saying, “What’s this? Not eating, Q? Best finish your breakfast, you’ve got quite a full day ahead of you.” To P he said, “Perhaps it would be best if we left him alone, sir.”

“Right,” said P. He got to his feet, tucked his bale of newspapers under his arm, and said to me, “I’ll see you later on. We won’t be leaving here till after dark.”

They left me alone. I looked at the food, which I knew I was too nervous to eat, and ate every mouthful of it. When you’ve been running around a lake for an hour before breakfast, it takes more than bad news, alarums, and intimations of mortality to keep you from packing the chow away.