Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

“Oh, Horny!” she gasped, obviously delighted.

“Damn it! I’m serious.”

“I promise!”

“You used to teach the sports-and-art classes in Sunday school, didn’t you? So you can help me. First off, that wasn’t one man you saw, it was two. They’re twins, and they’re the ones who blew up my car. They don’t fool around. They gave me most of these bruises, and if they know what I’m doing they’ll probably give me worse.”

“Horny!”

“Second,” he said, “your friend Leota. She’s not as free and easy as you might remember her. In fact, she’s a slave.”

“A slave!”

“In the harem of an Arab sheik.”

“In a harem?” Alys’s eyes were bright as stars.

“Now, that might sound romantic to you—”

“Oh, boy, does it!”

“—but it’s no joke. I’m going to rescue her. You know I’m mixed up in some secret stuff. You’re better off if you don’t know any more than that. But I’m going to take a chance and go from Cairo to A1 Halwani by way of the sheik’s palace, and on the way I’m going to get Leota out of there.”

“Horny! You’re such a nerd. How are you going to do a thing like that?”

“I don’t know. But I’ll do it. Maybe I can even do it legally. Hassabou had no right to take her out of Italy, that was part of the contract, so he’s violating the law. Anyway —I’ll do it. But I need to doctor up some documents before I do, and that’s where you come in. I don’t have much artistic talent. So please, come in the office with me.”

As he was opening the church safe, he called over his shoulder, “You don’t have to do any of this. Outside of the Reddis, there are other risks. You might get in trouble with—the people I work for.”

“You mean the government,” she said, nodding. “Tell me something. Why won’t you get in trouble yourself?”

“Maybe I will. But I’m going to call up on my toilet— oh, never mind that part, Alys. I’m going to put in a message saying that I left early because the Reddis were threatening my life. I think that might cover me—anyway, it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot.” He had laid out the little forger’s kit. He said, “Let’s see. I need to change the date on the Egyptian visa. Call up Trans-Pam and get the first flight to Cairo. Should I change the passport to a different name? Maybe I should. Or—”

Alys took his hand. “Horny?”

He looked around, irritated. “What?”

“Take me along.”

He was so startled that he forgot about being irritated. •That’s ridiculous, Alys!”

“No, it isn’t ridiculous.”

“It’s impossible.”

“It isn’t impossible, either. If you can cook up documents for yourself, you can cook them up for me, too. And Leota was my friend longer than she was yours.”

“Just forget it, Alys. It’s dangerous.”

She leaned forward shyly and rested her cheek against his. “It’s also thrilling, Horny. Do you know what you’re talking about? Just my lifelong secret dream, that’s all. Sheiks that carry their women off on white steeds. Real men!”

“More likely to carry somebody off on a hydrogen buggy,” he snarled. “And those real men do funny things to their real women.”

“Oh, Horny.” She moved back and looked at him fondly. “Dear Horny, is it possible that you don’t think I can handle a man? Trust me in that, if in nothing else. So I regard the matter as settled. I’ll give you a hand with the documents… only, Horny? There’s one thing about the class I taught in Sunday school. Jim Tally taught the art. I was their judo coach. But if Jessie Tunman can forge a passport, I can too.”

The elderly Egyptian pilot twisted in his seat, bawling something. He was pointing down at the desert, and, although Hake’s rusty Arabic had been coming back to him, most of what the man said was lost. “Drive the airplane,” Hake ordered. From the way the Egyptian handled the little prop-jet Hake suspected he had got his first flight training in MIGs, from Soviet advisors before the Yom Kippur war.

“What’s he trying to tell us?” Alys asked in Hake’s ear.

Hake shrugged. “Something about the wind being bad. I think it’s about that stuff down there.” They both craned to look down. The Empty Quarter was empty, all right: rocky desert, not even a herd of goats or the black tents of a Bedouin camp. But parts of the ground were queerly colored, brownish green and strangely out of focus, as if an oily fog lay over the scraggly bushes.

“I wish this plane had a bathroom,” Alys said irritably. She was playing the part of a bored American tourist extremely well: pretty; well dressed, in her three-piece gray shorts-suit with a puff of scarlet silk at her throat. It was a wholly unsuitable costume for the Empty Quarter, but for that reason all the more suitable for someone who wanted to look like a tourist.

Her fidgety boredom probably was not altogether an act, Hake thought. Likely enough, she was having second thoughts about this adventure. The night before in the Cairo hotel, both of them out of it with jet-lag and fatigue, she had lain rigid beside him in the immense king-sized bed. When he had moved to touch her, more out of compassion than lust, she had jerked angrily away. He could understand her qualms. The closer they got to Abu Magnah, the more his own qualms surfaced. What had looked easy from half a world away looked more and more daunting at first hand.

“What’s that idiot doing now?” she demanded.

The pilot had unstrapped himself, leaving the controls untended, and was staggering back toward them. In Egyptian Arabic he shouted, “The oasis is coming up in just a minute. Did you see the locusts?” Hake turned to peer back along their course, but the sweep of the wing blocked his view. “Too bad you missed it,” grinned the pilot. “Now fasten your seat belts. If God wills it, we are about to begin our descent into the landing pattern.” He returned to his seat and a moment later, as he took over from the autopilot, the plane dipped one wing and began to circle to the left.

As the undercarriage rumbled and locked in the landing position, Hake got his first glimpse of Abu Magnah. It was much more than he expected. It looked like the interlocking-circles symbol for the Olympic games, but on a huge scale—immense disks as much as a mile across. They were ‘irrigation circles, and where they interlocked was no cluster of tents and palms but a city. Wide roads threaded. in between the farm plots, almost bare of traffic.

It had been Hake’s notion that Abu Magnah was a private pleasure dome of Sheik Hassabou’s. It was bigger than that. At least fifty snow-white, dome-shaped buildings were laid out in city blocks; minarets and mosques in white and gold and darker colors; a sprawling building like two dominoes joined together with a hotel sign on top of it, and, out in the farm circles, surrounded by walls, two or three story-book palaces, with pools and gardens. All in all, it was daunting. And quite new. There were few trees, because Abu Magnah was not yet old enough for trees, though a bright green pattern of seedlings showed where pine groves would be one day, and a scattering of gray-green promised olives. At the edge of one huge circle north of the city, dark brown and damp earth only lightly flecked with the beginnings of a crop of some kind, there was a rectangular tower taller than any of the minarets. Scaffolding showed that it was still under construction. Then the airplane dipped and twisted, and a runway was rushing up to meet them.

They went through the haphazard customs formalities, and the pilot was waiting for them at the hotel van. “Pay me now, please,” he said.