by The Cool War
“What am I supposed to tell my church?” Hake demanded. The man wagged his head. “Oh, all right: I understand and will comply. But what am I supposed to tell them?”
“You’re very sick, Horny,” Curmudgeon said sympathetically. “You have to take time off.”
“But I can’t just leave—”
“Certainly not. We’ll supply you with a replacement And,” he went on, “there are certain advantages to this from your point of view. For payroll procedures, you will be placed on retainer by Lo-Wate as a consultant at an annual salary equal to a GS-16—which, if you don’t know, is currently about $83,000 a year, counting bonuses and cost-of-living. That’s, let’s see—” he took a notebook out of his inside shirt pocket—“looks like better than thirty thousand more than you’re making now from your church. And we’ll take good care of you in other ways. The Team takes care of its people.”
“But I like being a minister!” Even as he was saying the words, he felt their total irrelevance. “Why me?” he burst out.
“Ah,” said the man, all sympathy, “how many people have asked that question? Men dying on a battlefield. Girls being raped. Children with leukemia. Of course,” he said, “in your case it’s a little easier to explain. We put through a sort for persons on active service or capable of being activated for our team. Age at least twenty but no more than forty-five, of Middle Eastern but non-Jewish and non-Moslem extraction. I guess there weren’t all that many, Horny. Then we evaluated in point scores. Point scores,” he said confidentially, “usually means that we don’t really know who we want. We figure out a couple of things— Eastern-Mediterranean languages, knowing the customs of the area, free of obligations that would interfere with leaving for parts unknown for prolonged periods. That sort of thing. And you won, Horny, fair and square.”
“You want me to go be a spy in the Middle East?”
He coughed. “Well, that’s the funny part. It says here your first mission will be in France, Norway and Denmark. It’s a strange thing,” he said philosophically, “but every once in a while the system screws up. Well. It’s nice talking to you, but you’ve got two other people to see before you leave. Let me have you taken to your next appointment.”
The next person was a plump and rather pretty woman, who said at once, “How much history do you know?”
“Well—”
“I don’t mean Romans and the Dukes of Burgundy, I mean over the last couple of decades. For instance. Why hasn’t there been a shooting war in the last twenty years?”
Well, he knew the answer to that. No one had the heart for a shooting war any more, not since the brief violent bloodbaths that had splashed up and smeared twenty small countries in a couple of decades. For one thing, they were bad for business. Oil roared with pain when the Israelis demolished the Arab fields. Steel screamed under the squeeze of price-fixing. Banking wept under currency controls.
“I would say,” he began judiciously, “that it’s because—”
“It’s because it’s too dangerous,” she said. “Nobody wins a war any more—if the enemy knows a war is going on.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There are two ways to win a race, Hake. One is to beat your opponent by sheer force. The other is to trip him up. They’re playing trip-him-up with us. Why do you think we’re so short of energy in this country?”
“Well, because the world is running out of—”
“Because they manipulate our balance of payments, Hake. The mark is up to three dollars, did you know that? And what about crime?”
“Crime?”
“You’ve heard of crime, haven’t you? It’s not safe to walk the streets of any city in America today. Even our highways aren’t safe, there are bus robbers in every state. Do you know why you can’t get an avocado for love or money? Because somebody—some body!—deliberately brought in insect pests that wiped out the crop.”
Horny said, “I think you jumped over something about crime. I didn’t quite get that part.”
“It’s plain, Hake! Somebody’s encouraging this lawlessness. Cheap Spanish and Algerian porno flicks that show muggers and highwaymen doing it to all the girls. They look crude. But, oh, how carefully engineered! War is not all bombs and missiles, my boy. It’s hurting the other fellow any way you can. And if you can hurt him so he can’t prove it’s happening, why, that’s one for your side. And that’s what they’re doing to us, Hake. Here, have a look at this tape.” And she threaded a cassette into a viewer.
Horny stared at it, bemused. It started way back, back before the Big Wars entirely. The peace-loving British had pioneered in this immoral equivalent for war as far back as the nineteenth century: they found a good way to discourage resistance in subject populations by encouraging them to trip out on opium. America itself had exported cigarettes and Coca-Cola around the world. Now, according to the tape, it was becoming state policy, and William James was turning in his grave. China flooded the Soviet Union with Comecon vodka at half the market price. It was not a weapon. No one died. But twenty percent of the steel-workers in Magnitogorsk were absent with hangovers on an average working day. Tokyo flooded the Marianas with cheap, high-quality sukiyaki noodles, reminding the voters of their ancestry just before the referendum that rejoined the islands to Japan. During the London water shortage just before the completion of the Rape of Scotland waterworks, Irish nationalists went around turning on hydrants and covert sympathizers left their taps running. It worked so well that Palestinian refugees, circumcized and trained for the occasion, repeated the process in Haifa to such an extent that two hundred thousand acres of orange groves died for lack of irrigation.
By now such tactics had become well institutionalized, and wholly secret. Everybody did it. Nobody talked about it.
Horny Hake was horrified. As soon as he began to understand the thrust of what he was being shown he burst out, “But that’s animal. Wars are supposed to be all over!”
The woman replaced the cover over her projector and sighed, “Go through that door, there’s somebody who wants to study you.”
The somebody turned out to be a sandy-haired young man with spectacles, who looked a little like Hake. “Jim Jackson,” he said, standing up. “I’m your replacement.”
“Replacement for what?” Hake demanded.
“You’re going on a sabbatical,” said Jackson, watching Hake’s expression thoughtfully. “Right word?”
“Sabbatical? It’s a minister’s vacation. I thought I was supposed to be sick.”
“Oh, shit,” said Jackson crossly, “have they changed the plans again? Well, anyway, I’m going to take over for you while you’re on active duty.”
Hake looked at him jealously. “Are you a minister?”
“I’m whatever they tell me to be,” Jackson shrugged. “They say ‘You’re an account executive’ or ‘You’re a TV producer,’ and I do it. You’d be surprised how easy it is when you’re a boss. When somebody else is the boss it’s harder, but I manage. Sometimes I screw up but usually nobody notices.”
Hake was horrified. “A minister has a tough job! How can you possibly take over a congregation?”
“Oh, I think it’ll work out,” said Jackson. “They told me this assignment might be coming up so I went to a church last Sunday. Doesn’t look so hard. I picked up a batch of mimeographed sermons on my way out that ought to keep me going for the first few weeks anyway. Of course,” he said, “that was a Baptist church and I understand you’re Congregational. Or something like that. I suppose there are doctrinal differences, but I’ll manage. I already checked out some books from the library: oldies but goodies like On Being a Woman and stuff by Janov and Perls. What else do you do?”
“Counseling,” said Hake immediately. “The sermon’s nothing by comparison. All the people in the church can come to me with their problems, any time.”
“And you solve them?”
“Well,” said Hake, “no, I don’t always solve them. That’s a sort of structure
d old-fashioned kind of way to look at it. You can’t force solutions on people. They have to generate their own solutions.”
“How do you get them to do that?”
“I listen,” Hake said promptly. “I let them talk, and when they come to the place where the pain is I ask them what they think they could do about it. Of course there are some failures, but mostly they perceive what they have to do.”
Jackson nodded, unsurprised. “That’s how I handled it when I was a judge, too,” he remarked. “Get the two lawyers into chambers and ask them not to waste my time, tell me what they really think I should do. They’d almost always tell me. I hated to give that job up, to tell you the truth.”
By the time the little old lady returned to conduct Hake out into the real world he was reconciled to the fact that this fantasy had forced itself into reality. Incredibly, he was about to become a spy in a war that he had not even known was going on. Mad he thought, following the lady’s leper cry down the hall, while the offices around him slammed doors and bustled with the hiding of secrets from his eyes-front gaze. Mad
He waited by the side of the road for his bus to pick him up. It was wholly mad, but interesting; Hake found himself accepting it as a sort of lunacy high. At least for some time he would not have to worry about blowing his overload fuse or dealing with Jessie Tunman’s temper. And the extra money would be welcome enough. Hake was not overpaid. Like most preachers, he had moonlighted at a number of occupations over the years—hustling magazine subscriptions and ghosting masters’ theses in school, when he was still chair-ridden; later, when he became a jock, he was counselor at a camp for delinquent boys one summer, and the year following had even driven the little hydrogen-propelled truck that squirted detergent on the heliostats for the local solar power facility. There were important requirements for a minister’s sideline job. It should be either dignified or inconspicuous. No parishioner wanted to see the shepherd of his soul checking out soup cans at the supermarket.
Being a spook might not qualify as dignified, but it was guaranteed to be inconspicuous. There was, of course, the question of right and wrong. That was hard to handle. Hake dealt with it by postponing it. He saw no way out of doing what he was told, so he would do it—trusting that anyone who charged him with evil-doing later, even his own conscience, would forgive it as a temporary aberration in a life otherwise not too bad.
And viewed as madness—i.e., as a sort of penalty-free vacation from the irritating world of objective reality—it was certainly exciting enough! Almost pleasurable, in fact. Anything might happen. He told himself, with a little thrill of excitement, that he had to expect the unexpected… and so he was not even surprised when, instead of the bus, a three-wheeled telephone company repair truck whined to a halt in front of him. Not even when the double doors opened to reveal four people in masks, two of whom pointed guns at him while the others jumped out, grabbed him and threw him inside.
There were no windows in the van, but Hake couldn’t have seen out of them anyway. He was made to lie down on a collection of only approximately level toolboxes and cases of repair parts. He was not allowed to get up until the truck stopped and, now polite and unviolent, the men led him into a normal-looking split-level ranch home in the timeworn style of sixty years earlier. It did not astonish him that he recognized the girl in the doorway. She was tall, slim and really quite pretty, if you didn’t mind some strange behavioral quirks; she was, in fact, the one who had tried to pick him up in the bus.
They moved him like a puppet, talked about him as if he weren’t there. “Search him,” said the girl, and one man held him while another expertly turned out his pockets. The holding wasn’t necessary. Horny had no intention of resisting while the two other men still had their guns pointed in his direction. “Give me his stuff,” she said.
“Bunch of junk, Lee.”
“Give it to me anyway.” She filled her cupped hands with the litter from his pockets. It was not very impressive. Wallet, return ticket on the Metroliner, keys with a rabbit’s-foot chain, summons for power-piggery, the folded sheets that were supposed to be his sermon—
“Hey,” he said. “Where’s my typewriter?”
The girl looked furiously at one of the men, who ventured, “I guess we left it in the truck.”
“Get it! Bring it in the kitchen. You keep an eye on him, Richy.” And the man with the bigger gun pushed him face down on a lumpy couch, while the girl and the other two retired from the room. The couch smelled of generations of use, and when Hake tried to move his face away from it the man called Richy warned, “Don’t try it, pal.”
“I’m not trying anything.” Stubbornly Hake kept his face averted. Now he could study the room, though there was not much to study. It was dark because the picture window had been covered long since with translucent, then opaque, plastic to conserve heat Which he could have wished they had conserved better because, now that he was not moving, he was cold. In the feeble light from two candles Hake worked at trying to memorize Richy’s face. A perfectly ordinary face, youngish, with a red-brown beard. He wondered if he would be able to identify it in a police lineup, and then wondered if he would live to try. Although he was past being surprised he was not past being scared, and this was beginning to scare him.
“Bring him in,” called the girl.
“Right, Lee. Get up, you.” Horny let himself be shoved into the kitchen. It was brighter than the other room, but smelled, if anything, even worse, as though the ghost of long-dead garbage-disposal units had left their greasy deposits to sour in the drain.
The girl was sitting on the edge of a chrome and plastic kitchen table, older than she was. “Well, Reverend H. Hornswell Hake,” she said, “do you want to tell us who you really are?”
It caught him by surprise. “That’s who I am,” he protested.
She shook her head reproachfully. “You a minister? Cripes. Worst cover I ever saw.” She poked through the litter on the table: his papers and his typewriter, opened, with the roller lifted out and inches of the ribbon unrolled—to look for microfilms, maybe? “Look at this driver’s license! It’s dated three days ago. Real amateurish. Anybody would have known to backdate it a year or two, so it wouldn’t look so phony.”
“But that’s when it had to be renewed. Honest, that’s me.
Horny Hake. I’m minister of the Unitarian Church in Long Branch, New Jersey. Have been for years.”
Richy nudged him with the gun, into an aluminum-tube chair. “I suppose you’ve never heard of yo-yos,” he sneered.
“Yo-yos?”
“Or hula hoops. Don’t even know what they are, do you?”
“Well, sure I do. Everybody does.”
“And you know about them better than other people because you’re a toy designer, right? Don’t crap us, Hake, or whatever your name is. What we want to know is, what kind of toys are you exporting these days?”
Hake sat and blinked up at them, silent because he could not think of any answer that he was sure he should make. Except, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Lee sighed and took over. “Just start out by admitting you’re a toy designer, why don’t you? In fact,” she said helpfully, “that would be smart, don’t you see? If you don’t admit that much you’ll cause curiosity, which would lead people to suspect that some security matter is involved.”
“But I’m not! I’m a minister!”
“Oh, God, Hake, you’re such a pain.” She glanced morosely toward the bigger of the armed men, who was standing by the door with a .32 automatic hanging loosely from his hand in an ostentatious kind of way. It had a long tube attached to it that Hake supposed to be a silencer. That was also ostentatious, as well as highly unpleasant.
“Want me to try with him?” the.32-automatic man rumbled.
“Not yet. Not unless he keeps this up. Listen, Hake,” she said, “I can see you’re new at this game. Damn Team, they don’t give you proper briefing. Let me tell you the rules, all right?”
“Would you tell me the name of the game, too?”
“Don’t be a wise-ass. Here’s how it’s supposed to go. We’ve kidnapped you, so obviously we’re breaking the law. You’re okay as far as the law goes, but you don’t want to stay kidnapped. Got it so far? That’s the first level of meaning to what’s happening here. Now, on the second level, let’s say you’re really just an ordinary toy designer—”
“I’m not!”
“Oh, shut up, will you? Let me finish. Say you’re a toy designer, and you never heard of the Lo-Wate Bottling Company, alias the Team. Why do you think we kidnapped you? You might suspect we’re from Mattel, or say Sears Roebuck or somebody, maybe. Just plain old industrial espionage, you know, trying to get your new designs. A little rougher than most. But still just commercial, right? Well, in that case there’s a special way you should act. You should cooperate with us. Why? Because your boss wouldn’t expect you to for God’s sake risk your life just to protect a new yo-yo design, even if you were expecting to ship a hundred million of them to the Soviet Union. Got it so far? There’s a limit to what you should put up with just to keep the new fall line from a competitor.”
“Well, that’s probably true, but—”
“No, Hake, no ‘but’ yet. That’s if you’re just a toy designer, really. But now let’s go to the third level. Let’s suppose you’re a toy designer who is actually working for the cloak-and-dagger boys. Let’s say you know these yo-yos carry a subsonic whistle that drives people crazy when their kids play with them. Not fatal. Just enough to make them tense and irritable. Let’s say you’ve figured out that the adult hula hoops are going to cause more slipped disks and sacroiliac disorders than the Soviet economy can put up with—just for instance, right? So what do you do in that case? Why, you act just the way you would on the second level, because you wouldn’t want us to know you weren’t just an ordinary toy designer. What you don’t do, on either level, is lie to us about what you do for a living, because, you see, we already know that; that’s why we brought you here,” she explained.