by Dean Ing
And all she had to do was show up there and claim it. That and one other detail, really the simplest detail of all. Because Maurice Everett trusted her.
It was a hell of a world, she reflected: you search until you are tired of searching for a man who has the virtues of machismo without its vices, and then they won't let you alone with him. They tangle him up in flags and finance, play political hockey using him as the puck, hound him finally into becoming something and someone he never wanted to be. And even that wasn't enough.
Better for her if she had never heard of Everett. She could have come to terms with a lower-middle-class life eventually, when the special jobs ran out. Everett, she was certain, had no intention of marrying. It hadn't been too late to leave Everett as he was when she'd met Charlie George, not even when she'd received the call, the only time she ever passed out from a telephone message, saying Everett was alive and en route from Moorpark to Beverly Hills in an unmarked FBI vehicle. It was not too late until the KGB, by some means she might never discover, connected her with Kenton, and Kenton with Everett. That was when the offer had come. All she had to do was kill Simon Kenton.
Why? No answer. Perhaps he had information connecting Fat'ah with the Soviets. Perhaps they only thought he might have it. Perhaps, after all, Maurice Everett was only a symbol to them; a flag the KGB would like to see at half-mast.
It wasn't fair. The act would be so simple with his trust, so unspeakably complex because of that trust. She still had not decided, could not decide without Maury's unwitting help. There was plenty of time, weeks of it, and several directions to go across the high country if she should choose Baia over snowshoes.
Then she looked out the single window and saw him, standing tall in his leathers, staring across, probably at her tracks and the smoke from the chimney. He leaned back on the snow-shoes, jogging down in his easy lope, the skis still high on his back. He could easily have switched to skis, she knew,_sweeping down and around to impress her. And of course he would never dream of such a display, and this impressed her. She would ski better than he did, beat him six-oh in a million consecutive sets, and he would still be ready to take up the challenge. She would kill him, but she could not defeat him.
She had decided. She threw open the cabin door, squinting in the dazzle, smiling as he approached.
"I knew it, I goddam knew it," he puffed, grinning back, shaking his head as he removed the snowshoes. "Boy, did I have a surprise for you." Well, he still had a surprise for her, unless she expected his proposal already.
"What a coincidence," she said, the laugh throaty as she knew he liked it.
He stamped snow from his heavy shoes, swung the door shut behind him and lowered his pack to the floor. "Hey," he said, as she unsnapped his down jacket to run her hands inside.
She kissed him hungrily. "You'll run out of those one day," she murmured. "I'm gettin' it while it's good."
"Better than Kleenex," he grinned, "you randy bitch, you."
She persisted. "Another one, lover. The second thing you do is take off your coat."
He enjoyed her hunger; it matched his own. "Sorry I haven't shaved," he said into her ear. "I'll get handsome for you later."
She pulled back, the fire shining in her hair, amusement in her face. "You look," she said, "like a million dollars."
AFTERWORD
It's not always a joy to murmur, "I told you. so." For the record, the trade edition of Soft Targets was on bookshelves before Iranian extremists stormed our embassy in November, 1979. A few people have asked whether the book may have even taught Middle-East militants to hold Americans hostage so that they could use our own media against us. It's a fair question.
Thank God I can live with the answer: trained political extremists already knew. The Soviets gleefully focus on any facet of our way of life that lends itself to our destruction—and carefully explain those facets to `students' recruited to Moscow's Patrice Lumumba University for graduate work in subversion and terrorism. For nonfictional details on Lumumba Tech, I refer you to John Barron's KGB, and Ovid Demaris's Brothers in Blood.
Not that our enemies have to attend Muscovite seminars for their tactics; the KGB opened branch schools in other countries a long time ago. It's an ill-trained extremist who hasn't al-ready learned that our laissez faire media—when their decisions are short-sighted—are ripe for his exploitation.
I first chewed on the problem during post-graduate work in media theory in the early 1970's. Terrorists were already gaining world-wide media forums by brutalizing innocents; it seemed to me only a matter of time before they'd do it to Americans. I didn't write about it then. I didn't have a remedy that would work in a free society.
Yes, I knew Orwell had written his future vision of 1984 without offering detailed remedies. I also knew that some critics deny that Orwell's book is science fiction, although it contained stunningly original work in the psychology of language, not to mention political science. I felt that, if psycholinguistics theory and media theory are sciences, then speculative fiction in those disciplines must be science fiction.
Well, I was already a writer of sf. I was also frustrated at my own terrorism/media scenarios because, at first, I kept cobbling up government control remedies in my head; and none of them were exactly models of free enterprise. Gradually, seeking alternative controls, I contrived the `media war' thesis that was woven into Soft Targets. But nobody wants to be harangued in a piece of entertainment (sorry, Ayn Rand); so the book is only five per cent media theory. If I've done my job, the rest is entertainment.
Some of my colleagues in communication theory warned me, "It's hopeless, Ing. You can't succeed in commercial media, grabbing it by the short hairs. You're biting the hand before it feeds you."
I said, "You're forgetting science fiction." Few of my scholar friends believe there are commercial media people like Jim Baen and Ben Bova, agents provocateurs of speculation.
And almost everyone said, "For God's sake don't admit you wrote Soft Targets with intent to commit message!" Well, the hell with lying about it. But my implied charter was to write an sf thriller and, if 1 failed in that, I was (at most) only five per cent successful. You judge.
Dean Ing, February 1980
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