Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  He would have chatted on forever, but Reddi snapped his notebook closed and fixed the pilot with his stare. “Now you will shut up,” he said. “Here. These are coordinates for where you are to land. I will then go on with you, while these two remain.” When the pilot looked stubbornly blank, Reddi added, “Hake, translate.”

  Hake scowled. “Why do you want to split up? Why are we going there instead of A1 Halwani?”

  “Because I wish it.” He did not wait for a reply, but straightened up and fastened his seat belt again. Only the top of his head was visible over the seat-back, shiny black hair slicked straight back, and it did not invite discussion.

  Hake recognized the wisdom of at least part of what Reddi had said—the pilot had already had to be taken into their confidence far more than was reasonable, for what was supposed to be a super-secret operation. But he didn’t like it. He leaned to Leota’s ear. “Do you know the bit about Mahomet and the camel?”

  She looked at him. “He let the camel’s nose into his tent, and the rest of the camel followed? Yes, that’s the way it is with the Reddis, Hake. I thought you found that out in Italy.”

  “Well, I did. But I didn’t have much choice—”

  She grinned suddenly, the first smile he had seen from her since her rescue. She leaned forward and kissed him quickly. “I’m not complaining!”

  She dabbed at her face once more with a wet-packed tissue, then sighed and gave up. Putting the cosmetic case away, she said, “I was real ready to get out of there,

  Horny. Mean bugger, that old sheik. Do you know how he got me out of Rome? With one of his boys holding a knife at my throat as we went through the port at Ostia. He had me believing he would have used it, too.” The smile was completely gone now. She said, “I hope Alys is going to be all right.”

  “She said she could handle any man alive, Leota.”

  The girl looked at him. “Yeah. That sounds like her.”

  The pilot looked around, having returned to indignation. “Effendi, you and the woman should now have your safety belts secured,” he pointed out in Arabic. He did not wait to see that they complied, but slammed the plane into a tight turn.

  Twisting to keep his seat while fastening the belt, Hake could get only glimpses out of the tiny window: sand and wide, empty roads; dunes, and the broad sea beyond them; a cluster of one-story buildings that looked as though they had been put together out of used gasoline tins. They bounced in to a rough and ill-kept runway, and the pilot swerved off it at high speed toward a small building next to the stilted control tower. He cut the engines and turned around. “Now what?” he demanded. “If you wish me to take off, we must do it within a half-hour. This pig-pen is not equipped for night operations.”

  “How lawful you are,” Reddi commented, when he understood. “Have the kindness to bring the luggage in— all but my own bag, the brown one.” He opened the door and crawled out over the wing, gave one contemptuous glance at the airport structures and then ignored them. When the pilot was safely away on the far side of the nose of the plane, grumbling as he pulled the baggage out of the compartment, Reddi said, “I will leave you here. I will take the plane; please pay the pilot whatever is necessary, including an extra three hours of flying time.”

  “For God’s sake, why?” demanded Hake, managing not to add that it was, after all, his plane.

  “You and Pauket will go to the city by ground. There are buses, but perhaps you will want to walk; it should take you no more than a day, and you can purchase hiking equipment at the hostel here. This is best. First, because your objective is along the coastal road and you can study it. Second, the customs will be far less thorough here than in the city airport, and I do not suppose Pauket’s credentials are in very good order. Third, I have arranged to meet my brother there, and it is not desirable that you be present.”

  “And, fourth,” said Leota, “you want a chance to conspire with him in private.”

  He glanced at her. “Do you blame me? I have done as I undertook, and I have not been paid. My brother and I must make arrangements to be sure we are not cheated.”

  “I’d give something to know what those arrangements are,” she said.

  He was silent for a moment, regarding her. Then he sighed. “In spite of our occasional association, Ms. Pauket,” Reddi said, “you have learned very little. Would you have four of us go in with guns? It would not succeed. But much can be done. Persons the Team considers their own are not. Parties of opposed interest may be induced to work together. This is where I am in charge, and when it is necessary you will be told what to do. Of course,” he added, “all depends on my brother’s decision.”

  “The hell you say, Reddi!” Leota flared. “A lot depends on what we decide.”

  “No. Very little. What choice do you have?” He waited for a moment, then nodded. “Very well. I will be in the Crash Pad tomorrow night—”

  “Crash Pad?”

  “The hotel,” Reddi said impatiently. “The sign on it says Intercontinental, but ask anyone for the Crash Pad and they will direct you to it. Do not ask for my room. Go to it. It will be high up, on the top floor if I can arrange it, otherwise as close as possible to the top. You will know the room because it will have a Do Not Disturb sign on the door with the opposite corners bent back. Is that understood? Good, now pay the pilot.”

  Hake looked at Leota, who nodded. He shrugged and moved to intercept the Egyptian as he returned from dumping the luggage at the door marked, in several languages, Customs and Passport Control. They haggled for the obligatory few minutes, then returned to the plane. Hake was beginning to feel actively good. The desert afternoon air burned his lungs and throat, but it was a good heat, familiar from his childhood; and Leota was beginning to seem more at ease.

  Reddi was already standing on the wing of the plane, impatient. He said, “Are you quite sure that the pilot understands he is paid in full and that there will be no gratuities?”

  “He understands,” snarled the pilot, adding a sentence in Arabic that Reddi did not comprehend and Hake tried not to. He had no desire to learn of the pilot’s sudden death.

  The hostel had probably once been something else; at least, it was not very good as a hostel. Its advantage was that neither the veiled Bedouin woman who showed them their room nor anyone else seemed to care much about IDs. It had very few other advantages. Two cots with Army blankets. Bare walls. Two sand-frosted windows that did not open. Signs in ten languages—not all of them repeated in all the languages: “No Alcoholic Beverages” was only in three Near Eastern languages and, curiously, in German; “No Smoking in Bed” was only in English.

  Leota gathered up an armful of clothes and headed for the showers, pausing only because Hake insisted on taking her photograph first. He heard the distant tinny rattle of the pipes as he laid out the rest of the contents of Jessie’s do-it-yourself ID kit. Passport and visas, no problem; he sealed the photographs on them and added appropriate stamps. He assembled metal type to read JFK-CAI and CAI-KWI, added airline and flight indicia, tapped the type into alignment and pressed them onto a ticket form: result, a perfect ticket showing that one Millicent Anderson Self-ridge had flown from New York to Kuwait; he then threw away the ticket itself and left the used carbon copy to add to Leota’s documents. For the sake of completeness he made her a set of credit cards, a Massachusetts driver’s licence, a Blue Cross card and one for Social Security. It took three-quarters of an hour to finish it.

  And Leota was still in the shower, the water gurgling intermittently. What was taking her so long? Didn’t she know the concierge would be raging at the waste of water —if, that is, the concierge was bothering to listen?

  He rubbed the cards between his palms to age them, bent a few corners artistically and studied the result. They looked good to him, for a first effort; he hoped they would look as good to any inquiring official.

  He had stowed away the blank cards and kit, undressed and lay back on one of the bunks, almost falling asleep, bef
ore Leota returned. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. She wore Alys’s familiar long print housecoat and, queerly, heavy knee-length socks; as she moved, he caught a glimpse of thigh and discovered that she still seemed to be wearing the embroidered stockings beneath them. He said, “Welcome back, Millicent.”

  “Millicent?” Her expression was calm and detached as she put the traveling bag down and began to towel her hair.

  “That’s your new ID,” he said, getting up to show her the documents. She inspected them carefully, and then said:

  “You do good work, Horny. Horny? Alys must have a blow-dryer somewhere in those bags. See if you can find it. And tell me what we’re doing now.”

  Hake did his best to fill her in, aware that he knew less than he needed to know. Leota listened abstractedly, her expression remote, as she dried her hair, and brushed it, and began to sort out the contents of Alys’s baggage. She asked a few questions, but did not press when Hake’s answers were unsatisfactory.

  She seemed, in fact, to be moving in a dream. When she had all Alys’s possessions laid out on the cots—two long dresses, five pounds of cosmetics, even a titanium-rutile tiara among them—Hake saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

  He said awkwardly, “You’ve had a pretty hectic time. Maybe I should just think about getting you back to America, or wherever. I can deal with this alone.”

  She looked up at him. “Hell you can, Hake.”

  “Well… I guess you’re worried about Alys. But I think she’ll be all right. She was looking for an adventure.”

  “Adventure!” she exploded. “What do you know about adventures?” Then she calmed, and the glacial, detached expression returned. “Well, actually,” she said, “I suppose Alys is better suited to that life than I was. He’s an interesting old bastard, the sheik. Very artistic. And very technological. And if it gets too bad, she can always get out of it, sooner or later—she’s in a better position to yell for help than I was. But still—”

  Hake was finding the conversation uncomfortable. He wanted to know. He did not want to ask. He could feel a queasy pelvic sensation that he did not like, and did not even want to allow himself—after all, he pointed out to himself, Leota’s sexual activities were not any of his concern. As she herself had told him. He was, however, entitled to feel compassion, surely. He said, stumbling over the words, “Was it, ah, really bad?”

  She looked at him in silence for a moment, and then said only, “Yes.”

  He could not think of a response, and after a moment she said, “Or, actually, no. I haven’t got things sorted out yet, Horny.”

  He nodded without saying anything—it did not signify understanding, only acceptance. He stood up, helped her repack Alys’s bags, and began to get ready for bed, all in silence. And then, as he was taking off his shirt, Leota touched the great broad welts on his chest.

  “Horny? Those are your scars, from something that almost killed you.”

  “Yes?”

  She dropped her robe. What he had thought to be embroidered stockings were tracings in blue, green and yellow on her legs, and they covered her entire body, a tattooed explosion of surreal color. She said, “These are mine.”

  Before dawn they were on the road, the rented A-frame awkward on Hake’s shoulders. The “objective” was four miles down the road, and it would be hot, broad daylight before they reached it; now there was a faint slipperiness of dew on the paved road and the occasional greenery. For most of these plants, most of the year, that would be the only water they saw. Or needed.

  Neither Hake nor Leota spoke much. For Hake, he had too much on his mind—or none of it really on his mind, because he could not keep his attention on any one question. There were a dozen trains of thought slithering inconclusively around his head: the Team; what the Reddis were up to; the broad sand hillocks to one side of them and, now and then, a look at the sea to the other. And, over and over again, Leota. None of them came to a climax, and perhaps he did not want them to; they were less uncomfortable where they were.

  When the oil sheiks owned this part of the world, they had climbed to the top of their mountain of petrodollars and looked toward the west. What they saw, they copied. Hospitals and libraries. Museums and shiny convention hotels. Beaches, with marinas that now rotted empty. Roads that would have done credit to Los Angeles, divided by parkway strips that would have graced Paris. The plantings along the parkway strips were dead now, because no one had chosen to spend the money to bring them water. But the long, wide, silent highway itself stretched endlessly along the sea.

  It was not quite deserted. As it came near to daylight occasional traffic shared it with them. A bus like the Metroliner, whispering past a train of camels—not like the Metroliner, because its exhaust was only a thin plume of steam, that disappeared almost at once in the morning light. Hydrogen-powered. Reasonable enough, here where it came from. Hake felt a moment’s envy. And some worry, too, because there were signs along the road with troublesome implications. Bleached old metal ones in Arabic, with messages like:

  Military Reservation Keep to Road Passage Prohibited After Dark

  And one in English, carelessly lettered on a painted-out road-traffic sign, but quite new:

  HAUL ASS If you can read this, you don’t belong here.

  No one challenged them. No one seemed to care. But Hake was glad when the sun was up, at least, even though the heat began at once.

  They walked on in silence through the morning, the heat building up with every hour. When the sun was directly overhead they paused in the ruin of an old bus stop and drowsed for an hour or two, drinking sparingly from their canteens, and then moved on. A few minutes later Leota broke the silence. “Have you been thinking about my question?”

  Hake had been thinking about everything but—more than anything else, about the implications of Leota’s body paint. It took him a moment to remember what question she had asked him. “You mean about why I do all this? God,” he said fervently, “have I not!”

  “And?”

  He thought for a moment. “If you mean am I aware of ever being hypnotized into being a spook, no. I did some reading up on hypnotism, and none of it seems to fit. In fact, I’ve still got some stuff in my bag.”

  “But you aren’t convinced. You don’t believe anybody did this to you. You’d rather think you were a villain than a dupe.”

  He looked at her sharply, but her tone was not contentious, only thoughtful.

  “I’d rather,” he said, “know exactly what is going on. In my head, and in my life. Whichever way it came out. But I don’t.”

  She nodded and was silent, eyes fixed on the empty road ahead. The highway was bending away from the coast now, and the dunes between them and the sea were higher.

  Leota said something, so faintly he could not hear it against the hot on-shore wind and had to ask her to repeat it. “I said, do you know, I almost didn’t go with you when you turned up?”

  “For God’s sake, why? Did you like it in the harem?”

  She looked at him quickly—not with anger, he saw. She said placatingly, “I don’t know why. But when you and Reddi and Alys turned up, you looked like—invaders. You didn’t belong there. I did, and it felt wrong for me to let you capture me.”

  “Capture you!”

  “I know, Horny. I’m telling you the way it was in my head. You were on the other team. And I don’t think I was hypnotized, either—just kidnapped at a knife-point,” she said bitterly. “I don’t know how I could have escaped from the harem. But I didn’t even try.”

  They drew off the road to let one of the tandem buses whine past, the passengers half asleep in the heat, paying no attention to them. Hake studied the map thoughtfully for a moment. “We’ve only got a couple of miles to go, near as I can figure it,” he said.

  “Shall we get on with it?”

  “I’ve got a better idea. If we’re going to snoop, I’d rather do it at night, and it’ll be sundown in a couple of hours. Let’s go for a swim.�
�

  “Swim?”

  “Up there.” He pointed to the now distant dunes, a few hundred yards ahead. There was a sand-covered side road leading between two of the larger ones. “Let’s take a look.”

  The quarter-mile of coast behind the dunes had once been developed as a beach; there were abandoned cabanas and dressing rooms and the wrecks of refreshment pavilions. And no human beings in sight. They dropped their packs and their clothes in the shade of what had once been a lifeguard tower and ran down to the bright blue water. There was no surf to speak of, only gentle foot-high waves moving diagonally in from the sea, but the two of them splashed the water into foam. Leota’s painted skin made her look like a naiad in the crystal sea, and Hake could feel his parched tissues soaking up moisture as they floated and dove in the shallow water. They did not go out far, or stay in long. But when they returned to the lengthening shade and sprawled out, their bodies drying almost at once in the hot breeze, Hake felt a hundred times better, and Leota dropped off to sleep. —

  He let her rest for an hour, and then they dressed, resumed their packs and started off again, with the sun now low behind them. Before they had gone a mile it set, quickly and definitively. There was a minute when their shadows were long and clear before them, and another minute when the shadows had gone entirely. The darkness did not hinder their walking. There was a more than half-moon already in the sky, ample to see where they were going. As the dry earth gave up its heat the night wind began to blow toward the sea and the temperature dropped. They stopped to add sweaters to their covering, and pressed on, with the moon bright before them and the dunes interrupting the spread of stars to their right. There was no one else on the road now, not even the occasional bus or truck.

  But when Leota spoke it was almost in a whisper. She tugged Hake’s arm. “What’s that up ahead?”

  Hake had been more intent on her than on the road, but he saw at once what she was pointing to. The old road ended only a few hundred yards ahead. It seemed to be swallowed up in an immense dune; and before the dune there was a wall of waist-high concrete set with reflectors, leading to a newer, far less elaborate detour that struck off at an angle into the desert. The dunes that covered the old road did not seem to be there by accident. They were buttressed by cement and faced with stone. They had not blown there at the whim of the winds. Someone had put them there.