by The Cool War
“People? Who’s talking about people? I mean, where’s the oil now, young man? The Communists have it all, what the Jews left us. Wasn’t for them, we’d have good times again.”
“Well, madam—”
“You know I’m right, don’t you? And all this crime and pollution!” She sank back into her seat, neck craned to stare at him triumphantly.
“Crime? I’m not sure I see how crime comes into it.”
“Plain as the nose on your face! All these young people with nothing to do! If they had their cars they could ride around with a six-pack and a couple of girls, and who could be happier? Oh, I remember those times, until the Jews spoiled it for all of us.”
Horny Hake fought back his temper. She was, of course, referring to the Israeli reprisals against the Arab League, the commando and air attacks that had blasted open every major oilfield in the Near East, causing the Abu Dabu firestorm and a thousand lesser, but immense, blazes. “I don’t agree, madam! Israel was fighting for its life.”
“And ruining mine! Talk about pollution. Do you know they increased the particulate matter in the air by seven point two percent? And it was just to be mean.”
“It was to save their lives, madam! It wasn’t the Arab armies that put Israel in danger. They proved that six times. It was the Arab oil, and the Arab money!”
She looked at him with dawning comprehension, then sniffed. “You Jewish?” she asked. “I thought so!”
Hake swallowed the answer and turned back to the window, steaming. After a moment he put the lid back on the typewriter, slid it under the seat, closed his eyes, folded his hands and began practicing his isometric exercises to relax.
The trouble with the question was that it had a complicated answer, and he didn’t like her well enough to give it. Hake didn’t think of himself as Jewish—well, he wasn’t; but it was more complex than that. He didn’t think of himself as a minister, either, or at least not the kind of person he had always thought of as a minister, back when he was a kid. Considering how his life had changed in the past two years, he wasn’t altogether sure who he was. Except that he was himself. Physically he might be somebody new, but inside he was old Horny Hake, whose choices were limited, not too lucky with women, not too financially successful. Maybe not even too smart, at least compared to the bright new kids out of the seminaries. But the center of his own personal universe, all the same.
The first memory Horny Hake had of his early life was being carried, hastily and not very carefully, through the wheat fields of his parents’ kibbutz. The sprinklers were going, and the sour smell of the grain was heavy in the sodden, sultry air. He was maybe three years old at the time, and it was way past his bedtime.
He woke up with a yell. Something had scared him. It was going right on scaring him: crunching, roaring blasts of sound, people shouting and screaming. He didn’t know what it was. Little Horny knew what rocket fire sounded like well enough, because he had heard the kibbutz militia practicing in the fallow fields every week. This was different. He could not identify these terrifying eruptions with the orderly slow fire of the drill. Neither had he heard people shriek in agony and fear when rockets exploded. He began to cry. “Sssh, bilmouachira,” said whoever was carrying him, gruff, scared, a man’s voice. Not his father’s. When he realized that neither his mother nor his father was with them, that he and the unknown man were all alone, he stopped crying. It was too frightening for tears.
At three he was still young enough to be treated as a baby, too old to like it. He also disliked the physical sensations of where they were; it was unpleasantly hot, but the mist from the sprayers was clammy cold. “Put down, magboret” he yelled, but the man who was carrying him didn’t put him down, he clamped a dirty, calloused hand that tasted of grease and salt over Horny’s mouth. Then Horny recognized the hand. It was old Ahmet, the Palestinian electrician who ran the milking machines at the kibbutz, and babysat for Horny when his parents flew into Haifa or Tel Aviv for a weekend.
By all rights Horny’s life should have ended right there, because the PLO commandos had them dead to rights. What saved them was a diversion. Horny remembered it all his life, a tower of flame that seemed to reach the sky. He got it confused in his mind, as he grew up, with the Abu Dabu firestorm, when the Israelis dumped their shaped nuclear charge into the oilfields that gave the Arabs their muscle. It was impossible, of course. Probably what had actually exploded on the edge of the kibbutz was no more than the tractor gas pumps. But it kept the commandos busy enough for long enough to save his life.
Horny never saw his father again. None of the male militia at Kibbutz Meir survived the first strike. Horny’s mother lived, but she was too seriously wounded to go back to farm life. She took the baby and returned to America, lived long enough to marry a widower with five children and bear him Horny’s half-sister. It was the best she could do for her son, and it wasn’t bad. He grew up in that family in Fair Haven, New Jersey, well cared for and well educated.
That was in the last Arab-Israeli war, the fourth after Yom Kippur, the second after the Bay of Sharks, the one that settled things forever. Growing up after it, Horny had been alternately full of resolve to return and build up Israel again (but Israel did fine without him) and determination to help his new country as a thermodynamic engineer, able to solve the problems of wiped-out oil reserves. It didn’t work out that way. It might have, if he hadn’t spent so much of his childhood in a wheelchair. But after two years of MIT he began to perceive that technology didn’t seem to deal with the kind of problems people came to him with: the invalid young man was a repository for all confidences, and he found he liked it He switched schools and objectives. The next step was the seminary, and he wound up a Unitarian minister.
He had not married. Not because he was in a wheelchair; oh, no, any number of young women had made it perfectly clear that that wouldn’t stop them. At the seminary he had paid a shrink for a dozen fifty-minute hours to find out, among other things, why that was. He was not sure he had had his money’s worth. It seemed to have something to do with pride. But why that much pride? He had learned that he was full of unresolved conflicts. He hated Arabs, who had killed his father, and ultimately his mother too. But the man who hid him out in the wheat and saved his life was also an Arab, whom he loved. He had been brought up as a Jew, a non-religious Jew, to be sure, but in an atmosphere saturated with dreidels and Chanukah candles. But both his parents had been born Protestants, one side Lutheran and the other Methodist, who had happened to admire the kibbutz lifestyle and been accepted as volunteers in the exciting years when all the second-generation kibbutzim were flocking to the cities and the agro-industrial settlements were desperate for warm bodies.
So he wound up a minister in a Unitarian church in Long Branch, New Jersey, between a pizzeria and a parking lot, and all in all he liked it well enough. At least until the last cardiac operation, two years before, that had changed things around.
Now he was not really sure what he liked. What he disliked was clear enough. He disliked crime, and filth, and poverty, and meanness; and most of all he disliked bigots like the woman beside him. He maintained silence all the way to Newark, where he got out while the bus driver stood in the doorway with his shotgun until all the passengers were safely inside the terminal, just in time to catch the Metroliner to Washington.
The Metroliner was a four-bus string, with a pilot, copilot, stewardess and conductor. From the outside it looked glittering and new. Inside, not quite so new. For one thing, in his coach section three of the windows were stuck open. For another the woman from the Long Branch bus followed him aboard, evidently anxious to renew the conversation.
For the first twenty miles Hake tried to feign sleep, but it was hard going. Not only was the window behind him open, but for some reason the air-conditioning was full on and icy drafts caught him in the temple every time he leaned back and closed his eyes.
At the rest stop at the Howard Johnson’s outside Philadelphia, he got ou
t, went to the men’s room, came out and stood gloomily surveying the Philadelphia Slag Bank until the pilot tapped his horn impatiently. He leaped in at the last minute, followed closely by a girl in a denim zipper-suit, who gave him a surprisingly inviting smile. The smile collapsed when he sat down in the front seat, next to a large black woman counting rosary beads. The girl hesitated, then went back to the next vacant seat, and gratefully Hake fell asleep.
He woke up quite a long time later realizing that someone was talking to him in a penetrating whisper. “—to bother you, but it’s important. Would you please come back to the toilet with me?”
He sat up suddenly and looked around, feeling frowsty with sleep and somewhat irritable. His black neighbor was gone, replaced by a Puerto Rican woman holding a baby with one hand and a copy of El Diario in the other.
The voice came from behind him; he turned and met the eye of the girl in the zip-suit.
“Turn back!” she whispered tensely. “Don’t look at me!”
Confused, he followed orders. Her whisper reached him. “I think you’re being watched, and I don’t want any trouble. So what I’ll do is I’ll go back in the toilet. Nobody pays much attention to that. The one on the left; it’s got a broken seat so nobody uses it much. Will you?”
Hake started to ask what for, but swallowed it. He said instead, “Where are we?”
“About half an hour out of Washington. Come on, tiger, I won’t hurt you.”
“I have to get out pretty soon,” Hake said. “I mean, I’m not going all the way into Washington—”
“Will you please come back and quit arguing? Look, I’m going back to the toilet now. Wait one minute. Then you just get up and stroll back and come right in. I’ll leave the door unlatched. There’s plenty of room, I already checked it.”
“Lady,” said Hake, “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but please leave me alone.”
“Oaf!”
“I’m sorry.”
She whispered angrily, “You don’t even know why I want you to come back there, do you?”
He paused, surprised. “I don’t? Well, then, I guess I don’t.”
“So come. It’s important.” And she got up, turned around in the aisle to scowl at him, and headed toward the back. None of the other passengers were watching, having reached the terminal phase of mass transit where they were asleep or engrossed in whatever they were doing or cataleptic.
For a moment Horny Hake seriously thought of following her, just on the chance that it would be interesting. She really was rather a nice-looking woman, years younger than he was but not so young as to be embarrassing. There was very little chance that she intended to cut his throat or infect him with a communicable disease. He didn’t have a lot to lose, he was sure; but just at that moment the bus slowed and the driver leaned over, eyes still on the road. “Here’s your stop,” he called.
Would have been interesting; should have taken a chance, thought Hake, but that’s the story of my life. As he got out of the Metroliner, at a private driveway marked Lo-Wate Bottling Co., Inc., he looked back and saw the girl emerging hurriedly from the toilet, staring at him with resentment and rage.
Hake opened his sealed instructions and read them again to make sure:
Debus at Lo-Wate Bottling Co. entrance. Proceed on foot V4 mi. to entrance marked Visitors. State name to receptionist and follow her instructions.
Clear enough. The building marked Visitors—Market Analysis—Sales & Promotion was two-story, ivy-covered, a veteran of the decentralization years of the ’60s and ’70s, but well maintained. The receptionist was a young man who listened as Hake gave his name, then asked, “May I see your travel orders?” He did not trouble to read them, but put them, backside up, under a hooded bulb that emitted a faint bluish glow. What the receptionist saw Horny could not see, but evidently it was satisfactory. “The gentleman with whom you have an appointment will see you in about ten minutes,” he said. “Please be seated.”
It was almost exactly ten minutes, by Hake’s watch. The receptionist had been nice enough to let him use the waiting-room john—he hadn’t dared, in the bus, although the girl’s talk had put the idea strongly in his mind. Then the receptionist beckoned to him. “The gentleman with whom you have an appointment will see you now. This lady will escort you there. Please follow the following instructions. Walk ten paces behind your escort Do not look into any offices. Check any camera, film, microphones or recording devices here. If you have any undeveloped film or magnetic tape on your person it will be damaged.”
“I don’t have anything like that,” said Hake.
The young man nodded, unsurprised. Thinking it over, Hake remembered the thirty-second pause in the vestibule on the way in, waiting for the automatic door to open; no doubt at the same time capacitators probed for metal on his person.
His escort was a little old lady, motherly and smiling, who tottered along at slow-march, crying in a thin, piercing voice: “Uncleared personnel coming through! Uncleared personnel coming through!” Hake didn’t look into the offices because he was getting the uneasy feeling that something was going on that had high stakes involved and orders had better be followed; but he was aware of a rustling of papers being covered and charts being turned to the wall from every doorway they passed.
It did not surprise him that “Lo-Wate Bottling Co.” was some sort of government installation. Even if he had not expected it, “follow the following instructions” would have been a dead giveaway.
All the walls were bare, except for what looked like ventilators but might have concealed surveillance equipment; government-issue cream-colored paint; no windows visible anywhere. Hake wondered about the outside of the building. Surely there had been windows in it? But maybe they were dummies.
The motherly woman reached her destination—a closed door that bore a frame for a nameplate, but instead of a name it had a number: T-34. The guide carefully checked it against a card in her hand, knocked twice and waited. When the door opened she averted her eyes and stared at the ceiling. “The gentleman with whom the gentleman had an appointment is here,” she said.
Hake walked in and shook the hand of the gentleman, accepted a seat and a cigarette and waited.
The gentleman slung himself into a fat leather chair behind a steel drawerless desk, and lit a cigarette of his own. He was short, slim and hairy: not only a Waspro that fluffed out in all directions, but a sloppy beard and sideburns. His general appearance was not of a man who had decided to grow long hair and facial hair, but of someone who simply stopped doing anything about it at some remote point in time. He wore chinos and an Army jacket, without insignia, over a blue work shirt open at the throat; and around his waist he had a gunbelt with a holstered .45.
“I imagine,” he said, “you’re wondering what you’re doing here, Horny.”
Horny let out a long breath. “You are very right about that, Mr.—”
The man waved a hand. “My name doesn’t matter. I suppose you’ve already figured out that this is some kind of cockamamie cloak-and-dagger operation. If you haven’t, you’re pretty dumb. So we don’t give real names to people like you, but you can call me—” he paused to lift a corner of one of the papers on his desk—“ah, yes. You can call me Curmudgeon.”
“Curmudgeon?”
“Don’t ask me why, I don’t decide these things. Now, the first thing we have to do is recall you to active service. Please stand up and repeat the oath.”
“Hey! Hey, wait a minute. I’m thirty-nine years old and draft-proof, and besides I’m a minister.”
“Oh, yes, you certainly are. You’re also a fellow who took ROTC in college, right?”
“Now, that’s ridiculous! I wasn’t really in Rotsy. I was in a wheelchair. It was just some kind of public relations thing, for extra credit—”
“But you took the oath, and when you signed up you signed for twenty years in the Reserve. And that hasn’t changed, has it? So stand up.”
“No,” said
Horny, for whom things were going much too fast. “I mean, can’t you let me know what this is all about first? I guess it’s some kind of CIA thing, but—”
“Oh, Horny, you’re tiresome. Look. The CIA was disbanded years ago, after the scandals. Didn’t you know that? There’s no such thing any more. What we have here is just a team. With a job to do.”
“Then what kind of job—”
The man stood up, and suddenly looked a lot taller. He said in a flat voice, “You have two choices, Hake. Take the oath. Or go to jail for evasion of service. That’s only a five-year sentence, but they’ll be hard years, Hake, they’ll be very hard years. And then we’ll think of something else.”
It took about three seconds for Horny Hake to catalogue his alternate choices and realize that he didn’t have any; reluctantly and sullenly he stood up and repeated the oath.
“Now, that’s much better,” the man said warmly. “The first thing I have to do is give you three orders. Remember them, Horny. You can’t write them down, but I’m recording the orders and your responses—which, in each case, are to be, ‘I understand and will comply.’ Got it? All right, first order: This project and your participation in it are top secret and are not to be discussed with anyone at any time without the specific authorization of me or whoever replaces me in the event I die or am removed. Got that?”
“I guess so—”
“No, that’s not it ‘I understand and will comply.’ “
“I understand and will comply,” said Hake thoughtfully.
“Second order: The declassification of any material relating to this project can be only at my explicit order in writing, or that of my successor. It is without time limit You are bound to it for the rest of your life. Okay?”
“Right,” said Hake dismally.
“Wrong. ‘I understand—’ “
“All right. I understand and will comply.”
“Third: This security classification also applies to the fact that you are recalled to active duty. You may not inform anyone of this.”