Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

He would have resisted more, he told himself, if he had had anything to resist for. But the talk with Leota had shaken him again: what was he doing working for the Team in the first place? Why had he left a perfectly comfortable, personally rewarding and socially useful life as a minister in New Jersey to involve himself in these desperate adolescent games? He climbed into one of the bunks, hungry, exhausted, feeling sick and in pain. He could not believe sleep would be possible, his head pounded so. Then he woke up with Leota sitting on the bunk beside him and realized he had been asleep after all.

“These are aspirins, take them,” she said.

He pushed her away and himself up, his head thundering lethally. “Get lost,” he snarled. “This is the bad-cop and good-cop routine, right? I saw it on television.”

“Oh, Hake! You are so terribly ignorant. The boys are bad, bad enough to kill you, more likely than not. And I’m good. Mostly good,” she corrected herself, holding out the pills. She put an arm behind his head while he drank the water to swallow them, and said, “You look like hell.”

He didn’t answer. He sat on the edge of the bunk for a moment, then tottered to the tiny toilet and closed the door behind him. In the mirror he looked even worse than he felt. His face was puffed out from chin to hairline; his eyes were swollen half shut, and his ears rang. He splashed cold water on it, but when he tried drying his face with a scrap of towel it hurt. He moved his lips and cheek muscles experimentally. He could talk, and maybe even chew; but it was going to be some time before he could enjoy it.

When he came out Leota was gone, but reappeared in a moment with a tray. She closed the door behind her, and Hake heard someone outside lock it. “Your friends are taking good care of me,” he said bitterly.

“They aren’t friends of mine, only allies. I told you I didn’t mean for this to happen.” She put the tray down and sat next to him. “I brought you some soup. After you eat I’ve got an ice bag for your face.”

He could not bring himself to say thank-you. He grunted instead, and allowed her to feed him a couple of spoonfuls of the thick soup. The rocking of the boat dumped half of each on his lap, and he took the spoon and bowl away from her. The soup was a minestrone, no more than lukewarm but not bad; and he was famished. He emptied the bowl while she talked. “I’m not responsible for the Reddis! Sometimes we work together, sure. But they’re mercenaries.

They’ll kill. They’ll do anything they’re paid to do. And they scare me.”

“What have you paid them to do to me?”

“Not me, Hake! We don’t pay them. They’re working for—” she hesitated, glancing at the door. “Never mind who they’re working for,” she said, but on her bare thigh, below the short terrycloth beach robe, her finger traced out the word Argentina. “Your own boys have hired them from time to time, I would guess. Right now, somebody else. What does it matter? But when my group needs help, sometimes they give it. If they hadn’t taken out your friend Dieter’s bodyguard, he never would have been arrested. So with their help we stopped your people from killing kids.”

“And how did they take out the bodyguard?”

She flinched. “He was a mercenary, too. What does it matter?”

“You say that a lot,” he commented. “It matters to - me.”

“Well, it matters to me, too,” she said sadly. “But what’s worse, Horny? What kind of people pass out poison dope?”

He took the ice bag from her and gingerly applied it to his jaw. His head was still hammering, but it was a slower, less shattering beat. “Well,” he said, “I’ll grant you there are faults on both sides. Just for curiosity, what did you think was going to happen in the Grotto?”

“I thought I’d try to recruit you to our side,” she said simply. “Don’t laugh.”

“My God, woman! What do you think I’ve got to laugh at?”

“Well, that’s it. I wanted to talk to you. The Reddis were • just supposed to stay outside and warn me if your boys came along, or if—excuse me, Horny—if you tried to bring me in, or anything like that.”

“Um.” Hake transferred the ice bag from right cheek to left thoughtfully. What she said made sense, but did not change the fact that he had spent three hours being beaten and was now held captive, with a future outlook that at best was not to be called promising. “I guess I know what an innocent bystander feels like,” he said resentfully.

“Innocent?” Leota closed her mouth to cut off the next words, and then, carefully, said, “I wouldn’t exactly call you innocent, Horny.”

“Well, all right! I made some mistakes.”

She shook her head sorrowfully. “You don’t really know what’s happening, do you? You think all this has happened at random.”

“Hasn’t it?”

“Random as a guided missile! Your boys go straight for the jugular every time.”

“No, that’s ridiculous, Leota. I’ve been with them often enough to know! They’re the most bumbling, incompetent—”

“I wish you were right!”

“Really! They picked me out just by chance in the first place. No reason.”

“You mean you don’t know the reason. There was one, believe me. They probably had you under surveillance for months before they pulled you in. Somebody spotted you as a likely prospect—”

“Impossible! Who?”

“I don’t know who. But somebody. I know how they work. First they pulled your records, then they did a full field check. You must have looked okay, but they had to be sure. So they called you in. You could have told them to get lost—”

“No, I couldn’t! I was in the Reserves. They just reactivated me.”

“Oh, yes, you could, Horny. You could always have just said no. What would they have done, taken you to court? But you didn’t. So you passed the first test, and then they slipped you a few bucks and gave you a dumdum assignment to try you out. Don’t look at me like that, Horny, that’s what it was. A two-year-old child could have done it, and probably better than you. But you did it, so you passed that test too, and when you found out what it was all about you passed another. You didn’t blow the whistle on them.”

“I couldn’t!”

The girl looked away. “Well, no, you couldn’t, Horny, because you probably wouldn’t have lived to get to a reporter. Somebody would have seen to that. Whoever fingered you in the first place probably had an eye on you. But, Horny, you didn’t know that. You didn’t even try; so you passed. Next stage: they send you to training camp. You pass with flying colors. They send you here to fink on me— Don’t tell me again you didn’t know you were doing it. If you’d thought at all you could have figured it out. Some kinds of coincidences can’t be coincidences. When you saw me you should’ve got suspicious.”

“By then it was too late.”

Long pause. “Yeah,” she said, and began to cry. “It’s a lot too late,” she managed to say.

It took some time for her meaning to penetrate.

When Leota had left him alone again Hake sat on the edge of the bunk, staring at the red denim coverlet of the upper bunk across the stateroom. He did not see it. His mind and his whole body were in standby mode. It was almost a kind of paralysis. In all the long years in the wheelchair he had never been so little in control of his own fate as he was now.

If indeed he had ever been in command of his fate. Everything Leota had said rang true. He had followed along a course that he could not believe had been of his own choosing. Passive. Obedient. Even cooperative. A willing accomplice of people he despised, doing things he loathed. Hake was not sure who he was. The brawler who had exulted in the fight with Tigrito was a person he could not recognize as himself.