Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

And that was how Hake found out that agent training was only one of the functions of the installation. There was a research-and-development underground—literally underground, dug into the side of the slope itself—a few miles away, and that was where things like the IR spectacles and the foamboats came from. There was a place euphemistically called “debriefing.” None of them were ever to go near it. Nor likely to, since it was constantly patrolled with attack dogs. Deena Fairless didn’t say who was “debriefed,” but the trainees formed their opinions; and if any of them happened to be taken out by the Other Side, decided they could expect to wind up in some other “debriefing” place at some other point on the surface of the Earth. There was even a small writers’-colony place—that was the one that was actually housed at the Has-Ta-Va Ranch itself—where psychological warfare texts were prepared.

And then, when God was kind, they were permitted to watch films. They saw notable agency triumphs of the past, the counterfeiting operations that broke the Bank of England and the price-rigging that bankrupted ten thousand Indian, Filipino and Indochinese rice growers. Those, they were given to understand, were only a tiny fraction of the successful ventures of the agency. Those were the blown ones, where the Other Side, or more often the Other Sides, knew what had happened. There were still huger projects that had never been detected. And that, they understood, because they were told so day after day, with relentless insistence, was the Optimal Project: to do something that weakened some part of the rest of the world relative to the United States without ever being found out.

And, of course, at the same time the Other Sides were doing all they possibly could to the United States. The water lilies that were choking out every slow-moving stream in the Northeast, the “Hell, No, I Won’t Mow!” revolt of condominium owners in Florida, the California stoop-labor strikes and the truckers’ go-slow that jointly had kept fresh vegetables rotting in the fields and warehouses while consumers paid triple prices for canned goods •—all had been traced to foreign intervention, playing the Team’s game from the other side of the board. They were doing it now. Even under the microwave antenna, even fresh and new to the Southwest as he was, Hake could see that the sparse grass was browning and dying. The Other Side, they said, was cloudnapping again, projecting bromide smoke into the big cumulus over the Pacific and stealing their rain before it ever reached America.

Perhaps Hake’s microfiches could have told him when the game had begun, if he had had time to read them. Peer as hard as he could into the future, he could not see where it all would end.

Even Southwest Texas got cold at two in the morning. Surprising cold, mean cold. Overhead the ten thousand Texas stars winked through the moaning wire, and the north wind that strummed the rectenna froze Hake at the same time. And froze Tigrito and Mary Jean and Sister Florian and the two Hawaiian ladies; they were worse off than Hake, not being New Jersey-bred. Deena Fairless seemed comfortable enough, but then she was the one who had rousted them all out of bed at midnight for this training exercise. She had had time to prepare for the night march—including, Hake was pretty sure, wool socks and thermal underwear.

Mary Jean, propped against the same three-cornered pillar as Hake, wriggled closer to him. He did not suppose that it was affection. She was a long way from Louisiana. What she was after was warmth. Nevertheless he glanced at Deena, who said, “Stay awake, that’s all.” But Hake’s problem was not sleepiness. Hake’s problem was that Deena had shattered one of the truly fine erotic dreams of his recent memory when she came in with her flashlight and twisted him awake by the toe. He still wasn’t quite out of it. Mary Jean certainly did not smell like a dream girl— more like a real one who had been worked hard and bathed insufficiently—but some synapse, cell or process in his brain unerringly identified a yin for his yang, and the real person drowsing against his shoulder merged with the dream one he had abandoned so reluctantly.

“Stay awake, I said!”

“Sorry, Deena,” Mary Jean apologized, shifting to a more alert posture. “When are we going to get moving?”

“When it’s clear.”

“When will it be clear?”

“When Tiger comes back and tells us so.” Deena hesitated, then said, “Move around if you want to. Keep your voices down.” They were in an arroyo that bent sharply just ahead of them; good cover from sight, as the sighing wire overhead was good cover for sound. At this point the antenna was at least seventy feet above them, but Hake could see it as a winking tracery of scarlet spiderwebs, faint but clear, as it reflected the pulse of the radar corner beacons. In fact, it was astonishing how much he could see by starlight, now that his eyes had had two hours to adapt. Deena Fairless was unscrewing what looked like a huge tube of toothpaste, head cocked in concentration, squeezing out a dab of what it contained onto her finger.

“What’s that?” asked Beth Hwa, sitting cross-legged, spine straight and alert.

“That’s what we’re going to stick up a cow’s ass,” said Deena. There was the sort of silence that follows a wholly unsuccessful joke, until Deena said, “No kidding. That’s the job for tonight. We’re going to move in on the three-five herd, locate the heifers and smear some of this on their, excuse the medical terms, their private parts. I don’t mean rectums, I mean vaginas. But if you can’t figure out which is which you have to do both.”

The silence protracted itself, but changed in kind; now it was the silence that surrounds a group of persons wondering if somebody was playing a very bad joke of which they were the butt. Deena chuckled. “It’s a simulation,” she explained. “Represents an actual operation, of which you may, or may not, hear more before you leave here.”

“Some operation,” snarled Sister Florian.

“Well, you’re excused from that part,” said Deena. “You’re going to be our lookout.”

“I don’t need to be excused from anything,” the nun said angrily. “I’m only saying I hate it.”

“Sure you do. But you’ll thank me for it some day. Why, the time will come when you’ll all look back on these good times Under the Wire and say— Hold it!”

A loose stone slid down the arroyo slope, followed by Tigrito, sulking back from his patrol. “No cowboys anywhere I could see,” he reported. “Hey, man. Let me get some of that heat.” He sat down next to Mary Jean on the other side, and put his arm around her.

“What about the herd? Did you find them?”

“Oh, sure, man. Nice and sleepy, ‘bout half a mile away.”

“Then we go. You too, Tiger. On your feet, Mary Jean, and from now on no talking. Tiger leads, I go last. When he has the herd in sight he stops and you all take a handful of this gunk and start smearing.”

“How do we tell which is a heifer? In fact, what’s a heifer?”

“If you can’t tell you just do them all. Move out, Tiger. Glasses on, everybody.”

Through the IR spectacles Hake saw the scene transformed. There was residual heat in the slope of the hill, so that they were moving over dully glowing rocks; Tigrito, ahead of him, was bright hands and head moving around a much darker torso, and the wire overhead was a dazzle of bright spots, obscuring the stars. He could not even see the red and blue-green laser beacons through it, and when he took his eyes away it took some time to adjust to the relative darkness. It was a long, hard downhill crawl, then a harder uphill scramble. There the top of a ridge had been shaved away to accommodate the rectenna and the wire was no more than ten feet above the ground. They all walked stooped and half-crouched across the ridge and didn’t straighten out until they were sliding down the loose fill the bulldozers had pushed onto the other side. It was said that touching the rectenna might not kill. None of them wanted to find out.