by The Cool War
A crewman with an actual scimitar pulled back a gold cloth curtain, and they were in the sheik’s private salon.
If opulence had been missing below decks, it was all concentrated here. Iced fruits in crystal bowls, tiny coffee cups and squares of sweetmeats on hammered silver trays; chests of glazed tile, covered with rugs that had not been woven to rest on any floor. Even the gold cloth drapes were not cloth at all; as the yacht moved, the way they swung showed that they were actual gold.
The sheik was already present, sitting above the others in a cushioned chair. He was older than Hake had remembered, and better looking: olive skin and nose like a bird of prey, the eyes brilliant within their circle of black kohl. Next to him, half a foot lower down, Curmudgeon was sitting erect and impatient. The meeting was short. There was little discussion and, to Hake’s surprise, not even any recrimination. Even Jessie Tunman confined herself to glaring poisonously at him from time to time. Curmudgeon spelled out the plan, pausing to defer to the sheik every time Hassabou stirred or cleared his throat, and it was all over in fifteen minutes.
Hake’s part was simple. He was to report to the control shack with his fake ID and the story that he had been assigned as a sweeper. It would be too late for them to bother checking up at night, even if they became suspicious, and by the time the personnel office opened in the morning it would be all over. Hake would remain in the tower at sunrise—there was some danger there, Curmudgeon noted grudgingly, but he would simply have to take his chances. Yosper, his boys and others would come to the tower in scuba gear, and he would let them in. They would be armed with sleep gas, missile weapons and canisters of fungus spores. The sleep gas was to knock out the people in the control shack when they came to it through the tunnel under the bay. The guns were in case the sleep gas didn’t work. The fungus was to destroy the sunflowers. Another party was to take out the guard shack on the dunes, and when all was secure they would blow up control shack and tower—having first photographed everything and taken off any interesting-looking equipment. The yacht would pick them all up, and then—
No one said anything about “then” as far as Hake was concerned. It was as if his life had been programmed to stop when the tower was destroyed.
Ten minutes after he was back in his cabin the twelve-year-old, trembling, brought him an unordered bottle of mineral water. “I will be back in half an hour,” he whispered, and disappeared; and when Hake picked up the napkin, he found a tiny cassette recorder, with a tape in place.
Leota!
But it was Alys’s voice that came to him from the tape. “Keep the volume down!” it ordered at once. Then, “Horny, Leota came aboard wired. God knows how long it will be before they find the radio, so don’t waste time. Tape all the information you can, put the recorder under your pillow and go for a walk. Jumblatt will get it when he cleans up your room. Don’t talk to him. Don’t try to see either one of us.” Then, incredibly, a giggle. “Isn’t this fun!”
An hour later Hake was back in the lounge, looking as much like a loyal member of the Team as he could. That involved some sacrifice. Yosper was holding court, explaining to Jessie Tunman that men were better than angels (“The Lord never picked no angel for our Redeemer, did he?”), offering to bet Mario and Carlos that they could not find any reference to the Trinity anywhere in the Bible, informing Dieter that, whatever he’d seen in medieval religious paintings to the contrary notwithstanding, neither he nor Albrecht Diirer nor anybody else knew what the face of Jesus looked like: “It’s right in the Bible, boy! His face was like unto the face of the Sun! You see any blue eyes and scraggly blond beard on the face of the SunV’ Having settled that, he looked around for someone else to instruct, but Hake had had enough. He got up and joined Tigrito at the pool table. They were all up, all their glands flowing, ready for adventure, like kids on the way to Disneyland; even Jessie Tunman was flushing and giggling like a teenager. Hake was up in a different way. He knew, without question, that the next few hours were going to make a change in his life, and part of him was terrified. When at last he became aware of stirrings outside he dropped his cue and ran to peer over the railing.
The landing stage was packed with penguins. It was the women of the harem, all in long black gowns and headdresses, stepping clumsily into the launch. One looked up toward him, but he had no way of telling who it was.
From behind him Tigrito said irritably, “Come on, man, take your shot!”
“Sure. What’s happening?”
Tigrito glanced casually over the side, then grinned. “Going into battle, you know? They send the women and children to the hotel, get them out of the way. Don’t worry, old Hassabou will bring them back tomorrow morning.”
“I wasn’t worried,” said Hake, coming back into the lounge to take his shot, but it was a lie. He was worried about a great many things, not the least of them whether the tape he had just made had had time to reach Leota.
XV
Hake took the afternoon bus back along the coast, got out at the path to the guard shack, climbed the dune and presented himself to the guards. The noise from the solar tower was immense, even at this distance, rumble of pumps, roar of gas and steam, scream of tortured molecules ripped apart. The rifleman sitting on a canvas chair outside the shack took a plug out of his ear, yawning and scratching. He glanced uninterestedly at Hake’s forged identification badge and made a coarse remark about male scrubwomen. “Too bad you’re a man,” he said. “You can’t go down for an hour yet, and if you were a woman we could pass the time more interestingly.”
“Not very many trespassers to keep you busy?” Hake offered conversationally.
“Trespassers? Why would anyone trespass? All we do is keep silly people in boats from coming too near the tower. Go, sit in the shade. When the noise stops, you can go down to the control.”
So Hake sprawled out under a clump of sunflowers, fingering the badge that had once been Leota’s, his mind clear and almost blank. He could not plan very far. All he could do was go through with his orders until he saw a chance to do something else. When the sun set the guard waved him down. Actually the noise had not stopped. There was still plenty of heat in the receptor cavity at the top of the tower, and the turbines continued to roar.
Scrambling down the path in the dusk, Hake remembered the summer’s moonlighting—he had still been in the wheelchair—when he held a part-time job cleaning heliostats for Jersey Central Power & Light. The big, jointed mirrors were stowed shiny side down to keep dust from coating and salt spray from pitting their surfaces. Even so, Hake, or someone like him, had to get out and spray them clean once a month—a job that never ended, because by the time the last sector was detergented the first was beginning to cloud up again. But the sunplants cleaned themselves.
Going inside the control dugout was like entering the bridge of a ship. CRTs glowed in a rainbow of colors at half a dozen monitoring stations, displaying a hundred different kinds of data about temperature, pressure and every other transient state at every point in the process. One set monitored the air as it was forced through its tiny pipes across the heat receptor. Another tracked the expanded air as it turned gas turbines to generate electricity. Others reported on the sea-water as it was boiled into steam, the splitting of the steam into its elements, the exhaust of waste brine back into the ocean, the pumping of hydrogen and oxygen to the liquefaction plants beyond the end of the cove. Hake knew this was so, from knowing how the plant worked, but he could read none of the indicia. They were only glowing masses of colors and symbols to him.
A short, dark woman looked up from one of the screens to glance at his credentials. “You’re not our standard brand of cleaner,” she said.
“I needed the job. Later on I might get something better, they said.”
“Be nice having you around,” she said, looking with more interest at Hake himself than at his badge. “The rest of the crew’U be here by boat any minute. They’ll show you what to do.”
Between the dugo
ut and the tower was a long, underwater tunnel. The night crew leader, an Egyptian engineer named Boutros, took his gang through it at a brisk walk. They had seen the tunnel a hundred times, and it was of no more interest to them than his driveway is to a suburbanite. But for Hake it was something to see. Half a mile of nothing but distance. It was like being in a long birth canal, a ten-minute half-trot with spaced red lights before and after, always seeming to stretch out to the same indefinite, maybe infinite, length.
The sunflowers had long since folded themselves into buds for the night. No more energy was coming to the receptor. It was safe for the maintenance crew to come in and start their work. But the generators were still turning, the pumps were thudding, the compressed air was screaming through the criss-cross of thin pipes. Boutros had a spare set of earplugs for Hake. Without them, he was deafened.
The tower was tightly sealed most of the time, but sealed or not, fine sand from the dunes and salt spray from the water found its way inside. That was Hake’s job. While the skilled mechanics split off to check and repair the brains and entrails of the system, Hake and a couple of others were set to sweeping’ and polishing. The first job was the brass railings that surrounded the open central shaft at every level. Hake, following the finger of the woman working with him, could see where to start. The rails on the three lowest levels, looking up from the base of the heat exchanger column, were bright and clean. What looked like a sudden change to green-black iron in the railings of the fourth was only the change to the dirt they had to clean. Far, far up—near the hundred-meter level at the top of the tower—he could see that the rails brightened and gleamed again. Cleaning corrosion inside the tower was another of those jobs without an end.
That part of the job was only make-work and fussiness. Hake and his co-workers scraped and polished to complete the fourth level, until Hake was actually sent to push a broom for a while until it was time to do the more important jobs. The solar collector retained enough heat to generate power for several hours after sunset. Then, with a suddenness like a crash, everything shut down—the pumps, the valve motors, the yell and whistle of fluids forced through tubes—and everyone took earpfugs out. There was total silence for a minute before the pumps started again, this time at low pressure, and Boutros appeared to wave his crews toward the stairs.
It was a long climb. A hundred meters of climbing.
When the generator was going and sunpower was pouring in, the pumped air swallowed energy to turn into electricity in the generators. At the same time the flowing air kept the pipes from burning through. The critical time was only a matter of seconds at full power. The cavity was hot—could, in theory, be as hot as the surface of the Sun, some 9000° Fahrenheit; was, in practice, only about half that. But hotter than anything Hake had ever encountered. If the pumps failed, the reflected heat from the sunplants would convert that delicate grid into slag unless the plants were deflected away at once. Now that was not the problem, because the sunplants slept. But the pumps were cooling the pipes for Hake’s crew, so that they could chip them free of the thin, tough corrosion of sea-scale that reduced the heat conductivity of the pipes and wasted energy.
To do that, they had to go up where the heat receptor was.
A hundred meters is not a great distance, when it is stretched out flat. An Olympic runner can cover it in a matter of seconds. But a hundred meters straight up from the nearest flat surface is something quite different. The physical exertion was the least of it, although Hake reached the top deck panting and shaking. Worse. The wind blew. Clinging to the safety rails, Hake thought his hair would fly off. The tower shook—not entirely in his imagination; there was a bass organ-pipe thrumming that he could feel through the hand-holds. And, although the pumps had swept most of the 4000° heat out of the piping, it blistered his fingers at a touch.
The Arab next to him laughed, spreading his own fingers and pointing to the gloves Hake carried on his belt. Hake set his jaw. They could have reminded him! But he conceded to himself that no reminder would have worked as well to impress the need on him as that one sizzling touch.
But out over the dunes Orion cartwheeled down toward the end of the night. Cool, dry air from the desert smelled of salt, camels and old petroleum. Once he learned to forget the great depth beneath him and get on with the job, it was far from unpleasant to be a hundred meters up in the Arabian night sky.
The job was not difficult. As it was done every night, the salt had little chance to build up. It took only a firm slow rub along each wire-thin pipe, front and back, with the chemically treated cleaning wads. The crew broke for mint tea and peppery coffee, hoisted up from the surface level in buckets, and by the time the sky began to turn cobalt in the east they were done.
Hake went down with the others, excused himself to go to the men’s room, and waited there until there were no more sounds from inside the tower. Then he peeped out.
Most of the crew had returned through the tunnel. Some had left by boats tied to the tower’s base. He did not think anyone would care much about not seeing him in one place or the other. He had marked the TV monitors that scanned the interior space of the tower and was careful to avoid their fields of view. And he sat down and waited, three levels up from the gentle waves, with a clear view of the shore through one spray-splashed window, and a panorama of the sea’s horizons through the others.
The fact that he could see nothing but water in that direction did not mean there was nothing there; the Team would be on its way by now. And on land as well. Peering cautiously over the squat dugout at water’s edge, he saw the pink roof of the guard shack. Tigrito and his goons would be there by now, checking their watches. It all looked peaceful, even the tangle of bright plumbing that projected above the eastern headland, the gas-cooling plant and the radar mast of an LH2 tanker waiting to be loaded.
It would be sinful to destroy this. So thought Hake, minister of a church that never used the word “sin,” veteran of a quarter century of New Jersey’s brownouts and freezeouts and sooty grime. Clean hydrogen was a good. What madness were Curmudgeon and the others engaged in? What madness the world?
The sky beyond the headlands was orange, ready for the sun’s entrance on the stage, the color picked up by the plumbing of the LH2 plant. So many megawatt-hours from this array; and this only one tiny cove, invisible on a map, that could be duplicated a hundred times along this coast alone. No wonder the fight was so intense. The stakes were fantastic.
The pumps throbbed suddenly, and the TV cameras began to swing back and forth in their scan.
Hake jumped. It was time. The sunflowers were beginning to open. The sun was not yet high enough to produce much energy, but he could see the violet ghost image spring into being, halfway up the sky. It laid a trail of oily glitter along the surface of the sea—
And in the middle of that shining trail was a sprinkle of pockmarks.
Bubbles. The invaders were approaching.
The first one up the ladder was Mario, wet suit gleaming in the long slants of sunrise, waterproof tote lashed to his back. He did not speak to Hake, just stripped off his suit and opened the bag to lay out the tools of his trade. Speaking would not have been easy. The pumps were roaring at full force now, and the whole tower thrummed with their noise and the scream of gas through piping. The underwater tug bobbed up to the lowest rung of the ladder, and one, two, three more persons pulled themselves up.
“Stay in this corner!” Hake shouted in Mario’s ear. “I rolled a screen over the doorway. You can get to the tunnel without the camera picking you up.”
Mario looked at him scornfully, then repeated the orders to the others. That wasn’t necessary, except to reinforce the fact that it was he, not Hake, who was running things. He spoke into a radio, listened and nodded. “The others are on their way,” he said. “Let’s move it!”
Yosper’s bully-boy quartet were reassembled here in A1 Halwani, rapidly getting out of their wet suits, spreading their treasures on the steel deck. Mario
’s gear was nose-masks, sleep-gas canisters, slabs of gray-pink plastic explosive. Sven (or Carlos) had his own tools: the camera to photograph the machinery, the kit to take apart any equipment interesting enough to carry away, the detonators to explode Mario’s plastic and bring the tower down, when it had been looted of everything worth taking. Dieter (or Sven, or Carlos) carried the biocans of fungus spores. They were to go into the trickle-irrigation system, infecting the sunplants with the wilt. Carlos (or whoever) carried the guns. Bulgarian Brollies and Peruvian Pens, with green-tipped darts like hypodermic needles; one touch, and the victim was anesthetized, in case the sleep gas failed. And a clutch of machine-pistols. They were not nonlethal. Any person who took their thousand-round-a-minute blast would sleep forever, in blood.
The second crew arrived, three persons. Two turned out to be the sheik’s men and the third, a-hop with excitement, was Yosper himself. “Goin’ like shit through a tin funnel!” he cackled, skinning out of his suit. “We ready, Mario? Get on with it, Hake, lead the way!”
Hake climbed down the ladder and crouched at the door to the tunnel as the others came behind him. Yosper raised himself on tiptoes to peer through the little window, then turned, scowling. “You didn’t cover the TV cameras,” he accused.
“How could I? They just would have come out and fixed them.” It was a true reason, if not a real one, but it didn’t solve the problem for Hake. Dieter (or Sven) said cheerfully:
“Not to worry. Give me a minute with the wires.” He located and opened a junction-box, and in a moment all the dim red lights beyond the door winked out. “We better move it, Yosper,” he said. “They’ll be checking that in a minute.”
‘Then let’s go!” Yosper grabbed machine-pistol and sleep-dart projector from the pile and started off at a trot, the others following. Hake lagged, slipped on a nose-mask, and tossed two of the sleep-gas canisters into the darkness behind the Team.