by The Cool War
“I think that’s it,” he said.
“This place? I don’t see any kind of generating plant.”
“It’s got to be on the far side of the dunes.” He hesitated. “We’re going to have to climb them. It’d be easier if we left the knapsacks here—”
“All right.”
“—but we might want to take pictures or something when we get to the top.”
Leota stopped, with the A-frame straps half off her shoulders. “Make up your mind, will you, Hake?”
“We’ll take them,” he decided. “But it’s going to be a tough climb.”
And it was, harder than any climb Hake had made in his post-invalid life. Even harder than the grueling exercises Under the Wire. The sand slipped away under their feet, so that they were constantly sliding back at almost every step, and where there was rock or concrete there were few footholds. To Hake’s surprise, however, the going became easier as they neared the top. The sand was firmer and more cohesive, and there was even a growing scatter of vines and stunted plants. There was a smell in the air that Hake could not identify. Partly it was the sea. But part of it was like the church lawn new-mown in the early spring: the smell of cut grass and stalks of wild scallions. And there was also a pungent, half-sweet floral odor that he had experienced somewhere before (but where?), which seemed to come from the scraggly volunteer growth. He did not understand these plant?. They were oddly succulent for this arid part of the world. Parched and half-dead, they still seemed improbably frequent on the dune; were they some sort of planting designed to keep the dune from moving in on the road?
And then they topped the ridge and looked out on the moonlit sea.
Panting from the climb, Leota found breath enough to whisper, “What’s that?” Hake did not have to ask what she meant. The same question was in his own mind. A quarter-mile out to sea, rising from the water and braced with three moon-glittered legs like one of H. G. Wells’s Martian fighting machines, a tall tower rose. Its head was a squashed sphere, and it shone with a sultry crimson, like the heart of a dying fire. It was not only light that came from it. Even at the top of the dune, they could feel its heat. Around its legs were a cluster of metal domes, awash in the sea, and what looked like barges moored to them.
Hake stood up for a better look around. Below him, the reverse slope of the dunes made an immense open bowl facing the sea. It could not have been all natural. Bulldozers and blasting had helped that shape along. It was more ovoid than spherical, and not entirely regular, but a mile-long bite had been taken out of dunes seventy feet high. And the seaward face of the dunes was no longer barren. It looked like an abandoned suburban yard, with the honeysuckle gone wild. Here and there along the slope shrubs and bushes were scattered. Hake was no gardener, but he could not have identified them anyway. They were choked under coils of ropy vine. The vines were everywhere, glossy leaves, gray-green in the moonlight, furled flowers, vines that were thinner than wire or thicker than Hake’s forearm. The mown-grass smell came from them. It was stronger now, and with a smoky aroma like marijuana burning, or candles that have just been blown out.
The logic of the design spoke for itself. As the Texas Wire sloped to face its geosynchronous satellite, this receptor cupped to confront the sea. “It has to be solar power,” said Leota, and Hake nodded slowly.
“Of course. But where are the mirrors?”
“Maybe they take them in at night? For cleaning?”
He shook his head. “Maybe,” he said. “But look at the way this whole area is overgrown—it’s almost as if they used to have something here, and then abandoned it.”
Leota said simply, “That thing out there doesn’t look abandoned.”
Hake shrugged, and then came to a decision. “The best way to look at a solar power plant is when it’s working. I’m going to stay here till sunrise and see what happens.”
Leota turned to look at him. “Wrong, Hake. We’re going to stay.”
“What’s the point? You’ll be more comfortable down by the road. And maybe safer. If this thing is operational, there are bound to be crews putting up the mirrors and so on—it’s easier for one person to stay out of sight than two.”
She did not answer, only began pulling the thermal sleeping bag out of her pack. “It’s too cold to argue,” she said. “And this thing is big enough for two. Are you going to join me or not?”
Hake gave in. Leota was right—right that it was too cold to argue, and right that the sleeping bag was big enough for two. Inside the bag it was no longer cold at all, as soon as their combined body heat began to accumulate. They wriggled out of their sweaters, then squirmed out of their pants and then, without transition, found that they were beginning to make love. In the absolute silence of the Arabian shore, with the bright moon peering through the vines over their heads and an occasional star, it seemed a very good place for it. They remembered to be hungry, afterwards, and divided a couple of chocolate bars, and then rested, sleeping and waking, with no clear distinction made between the states.
The only way Hake was certain he had been sleeping was that he woke up, with Leota tense in his arms. She had said something. He was no longer warm. The bag was wet and chill, soaked with cold water; and the silence was gone, replaced by a distant thumping sound of a pump and a slithering, creeping sound like a forest in a gentle wind. He blinked and beheld Leota’s face peering out toward the sea, lighted with a strange violet radiance. “It hurts,” she complained, squinting.
It was almost dawn. The moon and stars were gone, and the sky had turned blue, with a rosy aurora toward the east. The sullen red glow from the top of the tower was gone now; obviously it had cooled through the night, and was now only a black ellipsoid, no longer radiating. But something new was in the sky. A poorly defined, purplish splotch of light hung above the horizon. It was not bright, but as Hake looked at it his eyes began to ache. “Don’t look that way!” he ordered, clapping a hand to his eyes, then squinting between his fingers.
“What is it, Horny?”
“I don’t know! But I think it’s ultraviolet, and it’ll blind you if you let it. Look around you, Leota!”
The slithering noise came from the myriad tangled vines. Their furled flowers were opening and turning themselves toward the sea. Amid the glossy, green-black leaves, pearly white flower cups were swelling and moving, new ones smaller than his thumbnail and huge old ones the size of inverted beach umbrellas, and each pearl-white cup, tiny or immense, was pointing the same way.
Hake and Leota stared at each other, then quickly crawled out of the sodden sleeping bag and began to dress, careful not to look toward the spectral violet glow. The reason for the wetness revealed itself; under the vines there was a tracery of plastic tubing, squeezing out a trickle of water to irrigate the plants. None of this was accidental. A great deal of design and an immense effort of work had gone into it.
“Good God,” said Hake suddenly. “I know where I’ve smelled these flowers before! IPF had some of them in Eatontown.”
But Leota wasn’t listening. “Look,” she said, barreling her fingers to make a fist-telescope and peering out toward the sea. The sun had come up, as abruptly as it had set the night before, and it was blindingly bright. But it was not alone! It had two companions in the sky, the purplish glow, now comparatively fainter but no less painful to look at, and a tinier and fiercer sun atop the metal tower. Careful as he was, Hake could not avoid an occasional split-second glance at one or another of the three suns. Even with eyes closed the after-images were dazzling in green and purple.
“The flowers are the mirrors!” he cried. “Like morning glories! They ton toward the sun, and reflect it to the tower!”
“But what’s that purplish thing?” Leota demanded.
He shrugged. “Whatever it is, we’d better get away from it. But—but this is perfect! You hardly even need machines —just the tower, to generate electricity, or hydrogen, or whatever. Why is it secret?”
“Because we don�
�t have it ourselves,” Leota said bitterly. “Because your friends don’t want to give foreigners credit for it. Because they’re pathological liars. What difference does it make?” She squinted down toward the base of the tower. “Regardless,” she said, “there are people working down there now. I move we get out of here and see if we can catch the morning bus to the city.”
They made their way to the highway nearly blind, and even hours later, when they had succeeded in stopping a bus and were looking for the hotel called The Crash Pad in the city, Hake could still see the after-images, now blue and yellow, inside his eyes. They had come within measurable distance of blindness, he realized. If Reddi had known where the installation was, he had known enough to warn them of the danger, too. And he had not elected to do so. Which said something about their relationship with the Reddis.
The hotel was the only one available for transients in the city. It was set back from the roadway in a little park (now bare, because unwatered), and the entrance was behind a three-tiered fountain (now dry). The lobby was a ten-story-high atrium, with its space filled with dangling ropes of golden lights (now dark) and with a pillar of outside elevators at one side, only one of which seemed to be working. They used their faked passports to register for a room and were relieved to find that the desk clerk did not seem to care that they were in two different names. There was no bellboy to help them with their baggage, but as their baggage amounted only to the two knapsacks the problem was not severe.
Hake’s notions of luxury had been formed in Germany and on Capri, and they added up to a really large room with an auto-bar. This Was a suite. There was no soap in the bathroom, and the ring around the bidet suggested that someone, sometime, had mistaken its purpose. To offset that, it had its own kitchen (not working) and dressing room; and if the bed was bare, it was also oval and a good ten feet across. Its sheets and covers were stacked on top of it, along with half a dozen huge towels, and when Hake knelt on it to reach them he was surprised to find that it gave gently under his weight in a fashion quite unlike anything he had ever experienced before. “Silicone foam,” Leota explained. “Like Silly Putty. I’ve seen them, but I’ve never actually slept on one.”
It was clear that the hotel was willing to allow them whatever luxury they liked, as long as they didn’t expect any of the hotel staff to provide it. Hake carried towels to the bathroom and checked out the kitchen. A strange fermenting odor led him to the refrigerator which turned out to hold two half-gallon jugs of fresh orange juice, fresh no longer; he dumped them down the sink and discovered it was plugged up. The twin TV sets on either side of the immense bed didn’t work, either, until he crawled behind the head of the bed to plug them in. The room had been neither dusted nor swept in recent times, but there was a vacuum cleaner with attachments at the bottom of one of the immense closets. There Leota drew the line. When she had finished making up the bed she said, “That’s good enough. We’re not going to be living here forever, after all. I saw some shops in the lobby; are any of those credit cards good enough to get me some clothes of my own?”
“Let’s hope so,” Hake said grimly; and while Leota was re-outfitting herself he prowled the top three floors of the hotel, looking for the room with the bent Do Not Disturb sign on the door.
There wasn’t any. The Reddis either had not yet arrived or did not choose to be contacted.
When Leota returned Hake was sitting on the edge of the bed, watching an old American private-eye movie on the television. “Are you having a good time?” she asked.
He looked up and switched the set off. It was no loss; he had not seen any of the last twenty minutes of it. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to contact the Reddis. They’re pure poison.”
“And your friends on the Team are better?”
“No, they’re not. I should be applying for a job at Hydro Fuels right about now, and I’m not sure I want to do that either. Do you want to know what I am sure of?”
She sat down and waited for him to answer his own question. “I’m sure I like this. Being here. With you. And I’d like it to go on.”
He stood up and paced to the window. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’m willing to do what’s right, Leota—my God, I want to. But I don’t know where right is, any more, and I guess I understand how people give up. Take what they can get for themselves, and the hell with everybody. And we could do that, you know. We’ve got unlimited credit. Anywhere in the world. We can do anything we like, as long as the credit cards last. We could catch a plane to Paris tonight. Or Rio de Janeiro. Anywhere. We can milk the cards for a million dollars in cash and put it in a Swiss bank, so if they ever catch up with us we can go right on with real money.”
She said thoughtfully, “The Reddis wouldn’t let us. We owe them. They’d find us, even if your friends didn’t.”
“So we give the Reddis what they want. The Team—” Hake shrugged. “I guess they would catch us, sooner or later,” he admitted. “But what a great time we could have until they did!”
“Is that what you want to do?”
Hake said slowly, “Leota, I don’t know what I want to do. I know what would be nice. That would be to marry you and take you back to Long Branch, and get busy being minister of my church again. I don’t see any way to do that.”
She looked at him appraisingly, but did not speak.
“Even better. We could change the world. Get rid of all this crumminess. Expose the Team, and put the Reddis out of business, and make everything clean and decent again. I don’t see any way to do that, either. I know how all that is supposed to go, I’ve seen it in the movies. We defeat the Bad Guys, and the town sees the error of its ways, and I become the new marshal and we live happily ever after. Only it doesn’t work that way. The Bad Guys don’t think they’re bad, and I don’t know how to defeat them. Mess them up a little bit, sure. But sooner or later they’ll just wipe us out, and everything will be the same as before.”
“So what you’re saying is we should have a good time and forget about principle?”
“Yes,” he said, nodding, “that seems to be what it comes down to. Have you got any better ideas?”
Leota sat up straight in the middle of the bed, legs curled under her in the half-lotus position, looking at him in silence. After a long time, she said, “I wish I did.”
Hake waited, but she didn’t add anything to what she had said. He felt cheated, and realized that he had expected more from her. He said belligerently, “So you’re giving up too!”
“Shouldn’t I?” She was beginning to cry. Hake moved toward her but she shook him away. “Give me a minute,” she said, drying her eyes. She gazed out at the bright harbor, marshalling her thoughts. “When I was in school,” she began, “and I first got an idea of what was going on, it all looked simple. We got our little group going, the Nader’s Raiders of international skullduggery, and it was really exciting. But the whole group’s gone now. I’m the only survivor. Some got scared off, two wound up in jail, and it isn’t fun any more. Sometimes I get help from volunteers. Sometimes I work with people like the Reddis. Usually I’m all by myself.”
“Sounds like a lonely life.”
“It’s a discouraging life. The world isn’t getting any better from anything I do. Mostly it seems to be getting worse. And every time I think I get a handle on the roots and causes of it all, it turns out wrong. Like hypnotism. I thought that might account for it and, do you see, if it did, then there might be something I could do. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t even account for the way I acted in Hassabou’s harem.”
Hake got up awkwardly to stare out the window with her. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear any details of how Leota had acted in Hassabou’s harem. He said, “Why didn’t you go public?”
“Aw, Horny. First thing I thought of.”
“So did you try it?”
“Ha! Did we not! My PoliSci professor had a friend on a TV station in Minneapolis, and she got us a five-minute spot on the
news. We taped it. Everything we knew, or deduced—but it never got on the air. And the Team got on us. The professor lost tenure—for ‘corrupting a student’— me! And I took off. The trouble was the station wouldn’t believe us, and the people who did believe us called Washington to check.” She moved restlessly around the room; then, facing him, “For that matter, why didn’t you?”
He said, “Well, I thought of it. As a matter of fact, I left some stuff in New Jersey—a complete tape of everything I knew up to the time I got back from Rome.” He told her about International Pets and Flowers and his visits to Lo-Wate Bottling Co., and about The Incredible Art. She listened with some hope.
“Well, it’s a try at least,” she conceded. “Is there anything in the tape that you could call objective proof? No. Well, there’s the rub, Horny. Of course,” she said thoughtfully, “this fellow’s in entertainment, so he’s got more media access than you or I. Maybe somebody might listen —especially if it comes out the way you told him, and you get killed or something.”
“Now, that’s a cheerful thought.” They were both silent for a moment, thinking about that cheerful thought. “I told him about you,” he mentioned.
“Oh? Saying what?”
“Well, not about you personally, so much, but I asked him about hypnotism. He knows a lot about it. In fact, he gave me some tapes. Do you want to look at them?”
“What good would they do?”
“Maybe none, how do I know? But we don’t have an awful lot else to do, do we?”
She sighed, and smiled, and came over to kiss him. “Sorry, Horny. I guess I’m still up tight. Let’s see if that TV set has a viewer.”