Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

“Well—”

Curmudgeon stood up. “It’s good you don’t have any questions,” he said, “because I’ve got another appointment in two minutes. Watch your mail for tickets and travel information—and when you find out you’ve won the trip, be sure you act surprised. Meanwhile— What the hell?”

There was a muffled thunder-roll outside the windows, which rattled in a more somber rhythm than that of the buzzers at their bases. Curmudgeon sprang to look out, Hake right behind him. East and north, a dozen blocks away, tiny black things were sailing through the sky, followed by a ropy cloud of black smoke shot through with flame.

“Christ,” said Hake. Some of those black things looked like bodies!

Curmudgeon stared at him narrowly, then relaxed. He took his hand away from the .45 at his hip, where it had flown at once, and said, “See what we’re up against? That was the guy with the gas truck, I bet. He was one of the New Dorp Irredentists. And that was Madrid money that got them going, you know. We’ll fix the sons of bitches when that Dutch-elm beetle Haversford’s got gets into their— Well, never mind that. Just remember what you just saw. It’ll do more for your morale than fifty lectures Under the Wire.”

New Dorp Irredenists? Dutch-elm beetle in Spain? “Under the Wire”? But before Hake could ask about any of these confusing things he was out in the anteroom again, threading his way through the starlets and tap dancers, with all the questions unasked; especially including that central question that went, What made the gas-truck driver do it?

When Hake emerged from the slow-jet at Fort Stockton the heat wrapped itself around him at once. He was sweating before he got to the bottom of the ladder, panting as he walked the twenty yards from aircraft to the opening in the fence marked “Gate 1.” (There was no Gate 2.) He was met by a young black woman—black as to ethnicity, not skin color, which was a sort of sunny beige. There was no exchange of recognition signals. Clearly she had been briefed with description and photograph, perhaps also with fingerprints, genetic code and retina-prints, for all Hake knew. There was also the consideration that no one else got off the slow-jet. She came up to him unhesitatingly and said, “You’re Hornswell Hake and I’m Deena Fairless. Let’s go to the plane.” Also unhesitatingly, he went along. She didn’t ask if he had checked any baggage. She knew he had not. He had been instructed to take only toilet articles and personal items not to exceed four kilograms, and she assumed he had complied. Fairless pointed to the passenger side of what looked like an old electric golf cart, got in on the driver’s side and was in motion before Hake had fully settled himself in. There was no top. The drive to the end of an auxiliary runway, where a small plane was waiting for them, was only about two minutes, but it was long enough for Hake to think of sunstroke. He followed the woman up a retractable ladder into what he recognized as some sort of old military plane; he did not know enough to be sure of model or function, but it seemed to be one of the vertical-takeoff counter-insurgency gunships that had been popular in the old brushfire wars.

Hake’s guide turned out to be Hake’s pilot as well. She checked Hake’s seat belt, spoke briefly into the radio, went through a thirty-second checkoff against a printed list, and launched the plane in a climbing turn that made no use of the runway at all. It was a brute-force takeoff in a brute-force kind of airplane, and Hake knew that the fuel that got them into the air would have been enough to have kept his rectory warm all the last winter.

It stuck in his craw. He leaned over and yelled in the pilot’s ear, “Isn’t this a terrible waste of fuel?”

She looked at him with mild astonishment. “You mean this SHORTOL? Depends on how you look at it, Hake,” she yelled. “These are the planes we’ve got.”

“But a lighter plane—”

“Sit on it, Hake,” she yelled good-humoredly. “I knew you were a conscientious type the minute I saw you, but you haven’t worked out the figures. How much energy do you think it takes to build a plane? Don’t guess. I’ll tell you. Quarter-million kilowatt-hours or so, so if we junk this to get a little one it’s like peeing away ten thousand gallons of fuel. Anyway,” she finished obscurely, “every now and then you need what this plane can give you. Now shut up and let me fly.”

It was clear that Deena Fairless didn’t want conversation, so Hake forbore to ask her where they were flying. He knew that it was generally southwest, at least. Fairless hadn’t said, but Hake could estimate direction well enough from the position of the sun. They flew low, under ten thousand feet, and updrafts from the dry mesas kept them in bouts of turbulence. Fairless didn’t talk, or at least not to Hake. She kept moving her lips into the radio; he could not hear what was said, but granted it enough importance to refrain from offering conversation. Only as they began to climb over a ridge of hills she leaned toward him and said, “Have you got a lot of fillings in your teeth, Hake?”

“No. Not too many.”

“Lucky,” she said, looking over the hills. “There’s the Wire.”

There was something there to look at. He could not identify it, was not even sure he was seeing what he saw. It — looked like pencil-thin searchlight beams winking on and off, tinged with color, one red, two bluish-green. The beams were very faint except for high patches where they impinged upon wisps of cirrostratus, and even there they existed only as split-second impressions. As they topped the hill he saw what looked like a tilted plain of chicken wire sloping away on the far side. But he had only a glimpse, and then they were dropping to a short, black-topped landing strip next to a cluster of buildings. Painted on the roof of one low, long shed were the words HAS-TA-VA RANCH. He saw what looked like a row of small and unprosperous motel cabins, a corral with a clump of horses milling around one end, a few stables. The horses did not even look up as the plane screamed down to a rolling stop on the airstrip, which was the only indication in sight that the place was anything other than an attempt at a tourist attraction, rapidly going broke.

“Welcome to your new home,” said Deena Fairless, unstrapping herself and flipping switches off. “You’ll love it here.”

Hake didn’t love it there. He didn’t hate it, either; he didn’t have time. Or energy. Up at 4:45 a.m., and a quarter-mile run before breakfast, snaking among the supports for the wire-field overhead. Ten minutes to go to the toilet, and then out again. Sometimes for an hour’s hand-to-hand combat instruction, flinging each other into hillocks of sand or clumps of buffalo grass—the buffalo grass was softer, but once in a while there was a snake in it. Sometimes for calisthenics. Sometimes for scuba-training, practicing clearing the mask, practicing snatching the mask away from each other—those were good times, because with water-discipline enforced it was about the only time any of them got an all-over bath; but not so good, because with water-discipline a necessity the pool was never changed. Then something sedentary for half an hour’s rest: learning to use bugging equipment, learning to know when it was being used on themselves. Making repairs in equipment. Morale—over and over, morale. Then lunch, twenty minutes of it. Then more. And more and more. Hake had tucked a dozen microfiches into his “personal effects” bag, but he never learned if there was a viewer on the premises, because he never even found time to ask.

Hake ‘s fellows included three dozen persons, most of them new trainees like himself, a few old-timers being brought back on line for reassignment, a cross-section of humanity. Hispanic teenaged boys, a glowingly long-legged California blonde, one elderly black professor, a nun. They all shared the same bunkhouse, tucked in the lee of a dune Under the Wire. They all, somehow, kept up. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they had little in common—beyond, of course, the purpose of their presence here. If Hake had looked around his commuter bus one morning and seen all of them there he would have considered them a perfectly normal busload of average Americans. The group changed. Some came, some went. The San Diego blonde was the first to go, to Hake’s regret, but a day or two later a New Orleans brunette turned up, along with two middle-aged Japanese ladies from Hawaii. The only constants were the instructors: a one-legged youth for surveillance and debugging, a whipcord and vinegar senior citizen for hand-to-hand and physical training, Deena Fairless for scuba and instrument repair, all of them, taking turns, for the morale lectures. In the first ten days Under the Wire, Hake never did the same thing twice, and never came to the end of a day without falling instantly into exhausted sleep, regardless of hunger, pains, itches or the occasional mad singing of the wire overhead.