Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

The three-eighths buffalo-five-eighths cattle hybrid herd was resting peacefully at the bottom of the slope, uninterested in the human beings creeping toward them. The three-fives were bred for stupidity as well as for meat and milk, and the breeding had been successful all around. What they liked to eat was the blossom from yucca—which is why, Hake learned, the yucca’s other name was “buffalo grass”—and on that diet they fattened to slaughter size in three years.

Deena gathered the troops around her and, one by one, squeezed a sticky, oily substance into each palm, and waved them toward the herd. They picked their way down the sliding, uneasy surface. Hake slipped and fell, and as he recovered himself he heard Tigrito whine, “Hey, man! You wasn’t here before!”

A bright light overwhelmed the IR lenses—Deena’s; it showed a man in a stetson and levis, pointing a gun at Tigrito. “Got ya,” the man crowed. “Y’under arrest, ever’ one of you, get your hands up!”

Mean rage filled Hake’s skull. The bastard had a gun! If Hake had had one of his own— He didn’t finish the thought, but his fingers were curling around a trigger that wasn’t there. And he wasn’t alone. Tigrito, still whining and complaining, was moving slowly toward the man; and behind the cowboy, Sister Florian reached out for his throat. Not quietly enough; the man half heard her and started to turn, and Tigrito launched himself on him, bowled him to the ground. The gun went flying, Tigrito’s hand rose and fell.

And it was all over. Tigrito rose to his knees, still holding the rock he had caught up to bash the man’s skull with. “Did I kill the fucker?” he demanded.

Deena was bending over him with the light. “Not yet, anyway. Hellfire. All right, let’s get on with it. Sister, you stay here and keep an eye on him. The rest of you, go get those cows!”

What Hake retained longest of the incident was a startling fact. He had been willing to kill the cowboy. If he had been asked the question as a theoretical matter, before the fact, he would have denied the possibility emphatically. Ridiculous! He had no reason. He had nothing against the man. There was no real stake riding on the incident. He was certainly not a killer! But when the moment came, he knew that if he had had a gun he would have pulled the trigger.

Actually, the man had not died. They had gone about their farcical task of slapping goo under the cattle’s tails, and then taken turns to carry the still unconscious man all the long way Under the Wire to the barracks. As far as Hake knew, he was alive still; at least he had been when the truck from Has-Ta-Va carried him away with a concussion and possible skull fracture, but breathing. The six of them looked at each other in the barracks, hands, faces and clothes smeared with green paint—it was not until they reached the lighted dugout that they knew what Deena had spread in their palms. As Hake fell into bed, for the forty-five minutes before reveille, he thought there might be repercussions. He also thought he knew what had been so strange about the expressions on the faces of all his comrades. They had all been very close to grinning.

But in the morning, when Fortnum fell them out in the pre-dawn light, no word was said about the incident. They ran their mile, swilled down their breakfast, spent their hour on the obstacle course and showed up for Deena’s class in computer-bugging. After ten minutes of drill on the nomenclature of the machine Hake could not stand it any more. “Deena,” he said, “how is the guy?”

She paused between “bit” and “byte” and looked at him thoughtfully. “He’ll be all right,” she said at last.

“Are we in trouble?”

“You’re always in trouble until you get out of this place,” she said. “No special trouble that the Team can’t handle. It’s happened before.”

The whole group knew about what had happened, and one of the ones who had stayed behind put his hand up. “Deena, what the hell were you-all doing out there, anyway?”

Deena glanced at her watch. “Well— Tell you what Pegleg’s off with the plane, Fortnum’s gone to pick up supplies and I have to make a report. I’m going to leave you on your own for, let’s see, ninety minutes. Only, so you shouldn’t waste your time, you’ve got two assignments, with prizes for the winners. First, see if you can figure out what the exercise was last night. Second, I want each one of you to think up an Agency project. You’ll be judged on originality, practicality and effectiveness, and so you’ll know it’s fair I’m going to let Fortnum do the judging.”

“How do we find out about the exercise?” asked Beth Hwa.

“That’s your problem,” Deena said agreeably.

“What are the prizes?” Hake asked.

“That’s easy. Everybody but the first prize-winner in each category gets punishment duty. So long; you’ve got eighty-eight minutes left.”

They had never been on their own before in the middle of the day, were not sure how to handle it. A dozen of the group drifted toward the scuba pool, Hake included; included also, most of the six who had gone on the exercise. The reasons had nothing to do with the problems. It was a way of getting some of the paint residue off, and a way, too, of waking up that underslept part of their brains that wanted more than anything else to crawl back into the bunkhouse. They stripped down to the all-purpose underwear and quenched themselves in the tepid and stagnant water.

Then the guessing began.

“Maybe we were practicing how to immobilize, I don’t know, cavalry or something. With like sleeping drugs.”

“Shee-it, man! What cavalry?”

“Well—race horses, maybe. Sometimes they give you anesthetics through an enema, don’t they?”

“Or maybe it was going to be some kind of poison, to kill off somebody’s beef supplies.”

“Come on, Beth! You think the Team’d send people around to massage ten or twenty million cows’ asses? Wait a minute. Maybe in a real job it wouldn’t be paint but—I don’t know. Honey? And it would attract flies, and they’d spread disease—?”

Fanciful ideas. The group seemed to generate a lot of them. Sprawled in the sun, under the shadeless wire, Hake’s tired brain was not up to the task of trying to guess whether any of those ideas were more fanciful than what he already knew the Team had done. Sitting near him, Mary Jean leaned over and whispered in his ear. “You got any better ideas?” He shook his head. “Then maybe we should start on the other project, I mean thinking up a real job. Wait a minute, I’ve got some paper.”

While she was rummaging in her shoulder bag Hake leaned back and closed his eyes, letting the talk drift over him. Some of the things they had guessed as explanations for the mission last night might work as project proposals, he thought. They were still going at it avidly—as though each and every one of them had taken it as a personal challenge. How had they all become so bloodthirsty?

“—some kind of irritating acid, make them stampede—” “—constipate them till they bloat up and die—” “—smells bad to the bulls, or, heyl Maybe bulls get turned off by green paint!”

“No, wait a minute, Tigrito. Look at it the other way. Suppose it was some kind of chemical that interfered with intercourse. Maybe made the bull lose its, uh, erection.”

The Hawaiian woman sat up straight. “Better idea!” she cried. “Why waste it on bulls? I’m going to try that out for the other assignment: some kind of chemical that you give women, I don’t know, put it in their food maybe, that sterilizes them. Or makes them unattractive to men.”

“Or it wouldn’t have to be a chemical, Beth,” said the black professor. “Subsidize the fashion industry, get them to go back to the bustle or the maxiskirt or something like that.”