Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

He had not, as it turned out, stayed at Has-Ta-Va Ranch any longer than it took to get into a truck and bounce half a mile under the power rectenna that he had glimpsed from the air. By the time he had been dropped off and set about drawing two sets of underwear, ten pairs of socks and the stoutest hiking boots he had ever had on his feet, he had figured out both what he had seen and why he was there.

The training base was hidden under the microwave receiver that supplied most of three states with electricity. The power came from space. Twenty-two thousand miles straight up from the equator a magnetohydrodynamic generator hung in geosynchronous orbit, sucking electrical energy out of plasma, transmuting it into microwaves, pumping five gigawatts of it down to the Ok-Tex-Mex grid. The trouble with a “stationary” orbit is that it can only be stationary directly over some point on the equator, so the rectenna had to be tilted toward the south: thus the slope of the hill. At 30° North Latitude the tilt did not have to be extreme. And, as a valuable byproduct, there was all that land under the wire that was, if not immune, at least resistant to airborne or satellite inspection. Some was used for grazing forty-acre cattle, or the three-five buffalo hybrids that survived better and gained faster, if you could get used to the gamey, sweetish taste of the meat. Some was used, or was sometimes used, for irrigated crops—soy, sorghum or alfalfa. (But not this year, with the water tables sinking.) And some was used by Curmudgeon’s people, for the purposes that brought Hake there. Ok-Tex- Mex was not the only huge rectenna bringing down MHD power to pop American toasters and light American homes. SCALAZ, on the Gila River, handled more energy. Three or four others were the same size, and the new one in the Gulf of Mexico off Cape Sable was much larger (when it wasn’t being ripped up by tropical storms). But Ok-Tex-Mex had a special advantage. It was a long way from anything more populous than a dude ranch. There were reasons for that. That part of Texas, south of the Permian Basin, had never had much to make anyone want to be there, at least above ground; and the stuff that had been below ground had long since been pumped into the tanks of American cars and burned away.

Being Under the Wire was not so bad, once you got used to a couple of things. The Wire itself was not your average snow fence. It was three hundred square kilometers of dipole elements, each with its own filter, gallium-arsenide Schottky barrier diode rectifier and bypass capacitor. Put them all together and they were supposed to be something over eighty percent efficient at sucking in low-density microwaves and spitting out 10,000-volt DC into the Ok-Tex-Mex power grid. It was eight percent transparent to sunlight, and a hundred percent leaky to rain—when there was any rain. It was also hot and noisy. Most of the eighteen percent loss came off as heat, and convected harmlessly away into the Texas air. Most of what was left appeared as a dull, faint hum, like a toy-train transformer spread out over the sky. Living Under the Wire meant that where the Wire came down low to the ground you felt its radiance like a toaster element overhead; where it was high, the convection sucked in surface winds; and always it droned at you. It did other things. The support columns got in the way of moving around. And there was the little problem with the microwave energy itself. There was a good chance it damaged DNA. The cattle grazing under it were raised for slaughter, not breeding; there was some question about what sort of descendants they would have. (And the people in the camp underneath? No one seemed to want to discuss it.)

The satellite transmitter was constantly locked onto a comer-reflector at the center of the rectenna’s spread. Ninety-nine-plus percent of the time it stayed centered there, or no farther from it than the wire could accommodate. The average power density of the beam was comfortably low. Unfortunately, it didn’t always stay average. Atmospherics intervened. The interface between air layers became lenses. Focusing one way, the beam spread over more area than the rectenna accepted, and some of the power was lost. Focusing another, the power density climbed. That was when dental fillings became significant. In a dense beam, the result was the damnedest toothache anyone could have. For this the management of the training camp offered aspirin, or even rough-and-ready extraction if desired, and nothing else. (The good part was that the worst lumps in the beam seldom lasted more than an hour or two. Only enough to drive a sufferer out of his mind for a while. Not enough to interfere with his training.)

What was left of Hake’s convalescent frailty was sweated out of him in running, knee-bends and hand-to-hand combat, an eclectic discipline that seemed to include judo, la savate, sapping-and-stabbing and the dirtier kinds of Saturday-night punchups. That wasn’t bad. Hake hadn’t had his strong male body long enough’to take it for granted, and when he sent the Louisiana charmer flying and dropped one of the professors to the ground, his knee on the man’s throat, two seconds after they had jumped him from behind, he heard himself growling with pleasure. There was a session on how to make plastic explosives on a base of Vaseline, with ingredients purchasable in any drugstore, and one on the use of Blue Box and Black Box penetration of telecommunication networks. They weren’t bad, either. The technology was fascinating to the MIT dropout who had not thought of any of those things for years. They trained with a large selection of electronic cameras and microphones, and each of the trainees in turn took the equipment to spy on the others. The prize was when the nun came up with a two-minute sniperscope tape of one of the teenagers masturbating behind a cluster of yucca. Hake was impressed. Not so much by the nun’s technical skill as by Tigrito’s energy. Hake did not seem to have the energy left after a day to think of sex. (Or not in the first week; but then, Tigrito had been there for four.) When Hake thought of sex, or indeed when he let his mind drift in any direction at all away from remembering to spit into his facemask and rehearsing the nomenclature of the parts of the rifle-microphone, was only during the indoctrination lectures. Sprawled out on the sparse grass, the sun beating through the wire overhead, they listened to Deena or Fortnum or Captain Pegleg going on and on about their purpose in being there:

“The United States is threatened as never before in its history—” Pegleg drumming on his outstretched artificial limb with the fingers of one hand, while the words droned out of him as if he were himself a tape—“by a world in which our rightful defense forces are stymied by red tape and international agreements, any questions? Right.” There weren’t any questions. There was a difference of viewpoint, to be sure, but Hake did not feel a necessity to air it, and besides Mary Jean was stretched out before him with her hands folded behind her head and he was enjoying what he saw.

Or, “Under the constitution and laws of our land—” this was old Fortnum, who stood up when he talked to them and insisted on alert posture from his audience— “we are charged with securing the blessings of democracy to ourselves and our posterity, which we got to do by keeping our nation strong and secure, any questions?” There weren’t any questions for Fortnum, either. He was the only one of the instructors who had the habit of imposing extra duty for misdemeanors. Attracting his attention was usually a misdemeanor.

Deena Fairless was the only one who held Hake’s attention as a speaker. For one thing, she didn’t sit or stand but moved around among them, sometimes rousting them awake with a toe when the after-lunch heat began to put one or another of them away. For another, she talked about more interesting things. “By presidential directive, we are limited to covert, nonlethal operations on foreign soil only. All three things, remember. Covert. Nonlethal. Foreign. Now, if there are no questions—” she barely paused, but there weren’t any questions then, either—“let me explain some of the things you’ve been seeing around here.”