Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

“At night?” She winked and returned to the menu.

She at least was having a good time, especially when she glanced up over the menu at Hassabou’s pink and blue palace, and seemed almost to stop breathing. It wasn’t fear. It was excitement. There was something about the idea of being held so closely that thrilled her. He almost thought she envied Leota; but, as she turned back to the menu, all she said was, “Do you suppose the trout is fresh?”

It was, and could not be from any place closer than the Pyrenees. And so was the Iranian caviar they began with; and the wines were chateau-bottled Graves.

Alys ordered with the precision and arrogance of a well-practiced tourist. Calculating the cost of the meal in his head. Hake thanked his one-God-at-the-most that he Was not going to have to pay for it.

He understood at least that reason why Yosper and the others so enjoyed their work. It was difficult to remember that thrift was a virtue when you didn’t have to pay the bills—when, in fact, with their complicated juggling of computer programs and credit cards, each charge was paid unwittingly by an enemy, so that each extravagance was a blow struck against the foe.

Living like a millionaire was a new experience for Hake, and quite an immorally pleasant one. But it shriveled in contrast with the lifestyle of Sheik Hassabou. Abu Magnah was not his personal possession, but it was, every inch of it, his family’s. Their palaces were the dozen others scattered around the irrigated areas, but his was the largest, the principal, the one from which the power flowed. And what power! He had created a world, where nothing had been before but a silty, salty camel-wallow and a few dwarf trees.

The irrigation circles that gave Abu Magnah life could have been created at any time. But no one before Hassabou had been willing to pay the price. Under the scrub and rock was an ocean of fossil water—faintly brackish, yes; but cool, ample for irrigation, even drinkable if one were not fastidious. But it was nearly half a mile down. Every pint delivered to the surface represented 2,000 foot-pounds of work. Power-piggery! And on a vaster scale than Hake had ever dreamed. The sheik had found the old oasis, and bought it, and tapped its underground sea to recreate in the Empty Quarter those A1 Halwani courts and palaces he had played among as a child. All it took was energy. Energy took only money. Money enough to buy his own plutonium generator—soon to be replaced, Dicran had said, by the new solar tower going up north of the city— and pump the water up from the sea beneath the sands. Money to distill the water to drink, and to spread it in the irrigation circles around the desert, so that the great rotating radii of pipe could make the desert bloom. Money to track-truck in the marble and steel to build his palaces; to subsidize and house the Palestinians and Saudis and Bedouins who farmed his circles and staffed his city; to buy his own muezzins to call out the hours for prayer, and to build the towers they called from. Money to buy a woman he fancied, and to bribe the police to look the other way when he abducted her here. One woman? Perhaps he had a hundred. Dicran’s winks and leers were ample for a thousand.

And the money was there. For more than a generation all the gold of the Western world had sluiced into the Near East to pay for oil. Oil became capital. Capital bought hotels and auto factories and publishing companies and thousands of square miles of land, some of it in building sites in New York and Chicago and Tokyo and London. Even when the oil was gone, the capital remained and ziz rreaeriK roni replenished itself, and kept pouring money into their treasuries.

That was what Hake was challenging.

Against that, what forces could he muster?

There were some. The pick-lock and martial-arts skills he had learned Under the Wire. The codes and cards that would let him draw on the secret funds of half a dozen major industrial powers. His own determination.

The forces were not even, but for this limited objective, the rescuing of a single prisoner—maybe they were even enough. If he was general enough to know how to deploy them.

With all that money, could he not buy himself an ally or two? A corruptible cop? A Palestinian with relatives still stuck on the West Bank? Maybe even one of Hassabou’s guards?

But how, exactly, did you go about that?

And there were only two days left.

They took their after-dinner coffee and brandy on the roof terrace, just outside the rotating turret. They were the only ones at the tables around the swimming pool, and the barman obviously thought they were crazy. The night wind was still hot. The sand made the surface of their table gritty however many times he wiped it away. But at least they could talk freely.

Alys was not in a mood to conspire- “You’ll work it out, dear,” she said, stretching languorously and gazing out toward the dark desert, “and, oh, Horny! Doesn’t this beat the hell out of Long Branch, New Jersey?”

Well, in a way it did. In some ways Hake was still very young, freshborn out of the wheelchair. But the darkness under the horizon’s stars struck him as less glamorous than threatening.

Alys lifted her snifter to her lips and then jerked it away. “What’s the matter?” Hake demanded.

She was laughing. “Parts of this place are a lot like Long Branch,” she announced. “There’s a bug in my brandy.”

Hake woke up with a flashlight shining in his eyes. A voice he had not expected to hear said, “Don’t move, don’t touch anything.” A rough hand patted his body and explored under his pillow. The light circled around the bed and did the same for Alys, who woke with a gasp. Then the light retreated. Hake could not see past it, but he remembered the voice.

“Hello, Reddi,” he said. “Which one are you?”

The wall-bracket lights came on, revealing the slim, dark man with the small, dull gun pointing at them. “I am the one who is quite ready to kill you, Hake. I do not like having to follow you all over the world.”

“Well,” Hake said, “I really didnt want to put you to the trouble.” He rubbed his eyes and sat up. Beside him Alys was awake but silent; she was watching the entertainment with great interest, waiting to see what would come of it.

The gun was in the Indian’s right hand, and there was a scar over his eye: this twin was Rama Reddi. “How did you find me, Rama?” Hake asked conversationally.

The Indian said, “It was not hard to guess you would be coming to see Leota. Especially as you took her old school chum with you. I caught up with you in Cairo, and beat you here in a private jet; I was in the airport when you arrived.”

“I didn’t see you.” Hake didn’t expect an answer to that, and got what he expected. He rolled his feet over the side of the bed and said, “Do you mind if I get up and make myself some coffee before we continue with this? I have instant in the bathroom.”

“Yes? And what else do you have there, Hake? I am more comfortable to keep you where you are.”

Alys stirred. “Suppose a person has to tinkle? As I happen to.”

Rama Reddi studied her for a moment, then went to the bath. He peered inside, entered, rummaged among the pile of towels, opened the medicine chest. He did not leave the door, and the gun remained fixed on them. “All right, Miz Alys Brant,” he said. “Keep in mind that this gun does not make any noise, and I have no special reason not to kill you both, since Hake has chosen to cheat my brother and me on our agreement.”

“Now, wait a minute,” Hake said. “I haven’t broken our agreement. If anybody has a right to be pissed off, it’s me—why did you blow up my car?”

“Then our agreement is in force? You will work with us?”