Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

He rose painfully to his feet and limped over to the blackboard. “That’s for your what you call your aqueous dispersants,” he said, beginning to draw what looked like a bowling ball, pierced on either side with fingerholes. “Now this here,” he said, “is your schematic of these here little things in the dish. Come up one at a time and take a look.” When it was Hake’s turn, he saw half a dozen tiny pellets in a glass petri dish. He had to squint to see them; they were no more than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. He could not see the holes at all. “These here,” droned Pegleg, “are your pellets for your spring-loaded or your carbon-dioxide-propelled devices, like your Bulgarian Brolly and your Peruvian Pen. Your pellets are platinum. Each of your little holes—” he pointed to the diagram on the blackboard—“will take two-tenths of a microliter of ChemAgent, whatever you put in them. Anybody want to guess what that is?”

Tigrito waved a hand. “Arsenic?” he ventured.

Pegleg gave him a glare of contempt. “Arsenic! You got to have a hundred milligrams anyway to do any good with arsenic; you got two hours’ latrine duty for dumbness. No. There’s three things could go in there. You can use your biologicals, like germs. Or you can use your plutonium-239, only then they can find your pellet easy with a radiation detector. Best thing is one of your neurotoxins in your phosphate-buffered gelatin, any questions?”

“How do you get anyone to swallow it,” Beth Hwa asked uncertainly.

“You got two hours too, who said anything about swallowing it?” Pegleg reached under the table and brought out what looked like an ordinary brightly colored woman’s umbrella. “This is your Bulgarian Brolly. There’s a spring-loaded gun in the shaft. You put your pellet in, load the spring, point it at the, uh, the subject and push the button. If you poke the, uh, animal with the Brolly while you push the button all he feels is the poke from the umbrella.

“Or,” he went on, stooping to pick up a large ballpoint pen, “this here is your Peruvian Pen. It’s gas loaded. You charge it with your ordinary COz soda-water capsule. It hasn’t got the range of a Brolly. And it won’t go through, like, clothes, unless you give it a double charge, and then it makes more noise. It takes your average, uh, subject about four or five days to die, because the stuff has to get out of the pellet and into his bloodstream. So you can be long gone. Other side of it is, it’s no good to stop.anybody fast, any questions?”

Hake raised his hand. “I thought the charter of the Team didn’t allow killing human beings?”

“You got two hours too. Who said anything about human beings?”

“You said it would go through clothes.” “I meant like a horse blanket,” the instructor explained. “Or like fur. But that’s not to say,” he went on darkly, “that the Other Side wouldn’t use these same things on you. It was the Bulgarians invented the Brolly in the first place, and they didn’t use it on no Airedales. You stick around, Hake. I got some little jobs for you besides the latrines. Any questions?”

But even the little extra jobs passed, and on the sixteenth day the whole crew was assigned to spraying defoliant on the three-five pasture—the animals cropped the yucca so heavily that every once in a while the inedible plants had to be killed off, to give the “buffalo grass” a chance to come back. By the time they came back Hake had solved his sexual problem, and so had Mary Jean. Wolfing down their food that night they sat touching on the wooden bench. Deena was amused. Sister Florian was tolerant. Tigrito was sulky. And Beth Hwa, that quiet, middle-aged wife of an avocado shipper from Hilo, intercepted Mary Jean on the way out of the mess hall and handed her something. Mary Jean showed it to Hake, grinning; it was a pillbox. “In case we got caught short,” she explained.

The remainder of the three weeks began to look more attractive. But on the seventeenth day Fortnum told them the Congressional Oversight Committee was coming around for its annual inspection, and they all better look sharp, and that night everything was changed. Pegleg tucked them in with the news that there was going to be a special assignment for the morrow, and in the morning he told them what it was:

“This is not, repeat not, a training mission,” he singsonged. “This is the real thing. You will be given full gear for an extended stay in the open, and the whole class is going to participate. Five of you will go by plane to Del Rio. The rest will be trucked to Big Bend National Park. We gonna have ourselves a wetback huntl” “Wetbacks?”

“Hell, yes, Tigrito! You ought to know what a wetback is. Got too many Mexes coming in and taking our jobs, you know? And it’s up to us to stop them.”

Hate said, “Wait a minute. I thought the presidential directive limited us to actions outside the United States.”

“Shit, man. They come from outside the United States, don’t they? You’re never gonna get anyplace on the Team, you keep coming up with stuff like that. Now, you listen to me. We’re going to go down to the border and we’re going to make friends with the wetbacks. Then we’re going to track back to find out where they’re coming in, and track forward to where they’re going. Any of you do good, you’ll likely get yourselves sent to St. Louis and Chicago and maybe even New York to find where they’re going there. There’s not going to be no direct action against them, that’s for the Immigration. We’re just going to locate them and get the evidence. That’s good duty. So don’t fuck it up.”

Ten minutes to pack. They looked at each other, and Tigrito announced that he was going to get to Chi if he had to kill for it, and Sister Florian suspected that it was all just a scheme to get them out of the way while the Oversight Committee inspected the installation, and Hake and Mary Jean tried to estimate their chances of being on the same truck. Or plane. But, in the event, Hake never saw the wonders of wetback life in the big cities. Just as the trucks were about to leave he was pulled off the detachment and ordered to the office of the training director and there, sitting on a wicker chair on the second-floor porch of the main building of Has-Ta-Va Ranch, talking on a hush-phone, was hairy, fidgety Curmudgeon, his gun strapped to his side.

“I didn’t expect to see you here,” said Hake.

“Course you didn’t,” said Curmudgeon, putting down the phone. “You’re going back to Europe.”

“I am? Why am I? What have you got for me to spread this time, leprosy?”

Curmudgeon looked at him thoughtfully. “Leprosy? Oh, no, Hake, that wouldn’t be any good. Hard to infect anybody. And the incubation period’s much too long. That job you did last month, that was the kind of thing. Did you know German absenteeism’s up eighty percent for the month? And, naturally,” he said, “our laboratories have just announced a real breakthrough in immunization. We’ve got enough material for sixty million shots right now. We’re selling it all over the world, and making a nice few bucks for the balance of payments. But anyway, that kind of thing was only your first mission, Hake. You couldn’t really be expected to do anything independently. No. But now we think you’re ready for the big time, and I really liked your religion proposal.”

It took Hake a second to remember the project he had been outlining next to the scuba pool, just before his fight with Tigrito. He had turned it in and heard no more about it. “I—I didn’t think anyone paid any attention to it.”

“Hell, yes, Hake! It’s a fascinating idea. If we could find a European Sun Myung Moon, or even some good messianic leader, why, we’d back him to the hilt. There are new sects springing up in Europe all the time. The important thing is somebody who has enough personal charisma to make a good pitch. Any thoughts on what sort of thing we should look for?”