Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

And Leota was still in the shower, the water gurgling intermittently. What was taking her so long? Didn’t she know the concierge would be raging at the waste of water —if, that is, the concierge was bothering to listen?

He rubbed the cards between his palms to age them, bent a few corners artistically and studied the result. They looked good to him, for a first effort; he hoped they would look as good to any inquiring official.

He had stowed away the blank cards and kit, undressed and lay back on one of the bunks, almost falling asleep, before Leota returned. Her hair was wrapped in a towel. She wore Alys’s familiar long print housecoat and, queerly, heavy knee-length socks; as she moved, he caught a glimpse of thigh and discovered that she still seemed to be wearing the embroidered stockings beneath them. He said, “Welcome back, Millicent.”

“Millicent?” Her expression was calm and detached as she put the traveling bag down and began to towel her hair.

“That’s your new ID,” he said, getting up to show her the documents. She inspected them carefully, and then said:

“You do good work, Horny. Horny? Alys must have a blow-dryer somewhere in those bags. See if you can find it. And tell me what we’re doing now.”

Hake did his best to fill her in, aware that he knew less than he needed to know. Leota listened abstractedly, her expression remote, as she dried her hair, and brushed it, and began to sort out the contents of Alys’s baggage. She asked a few questions, but did not press when Hake’s answers were unsatisfactory.

She seemed, in fact, to be moving in a dream. When she had all Alys’s possessions laid out on the cots—two long dresses, five pounds of cosmetics, even a titanium-rutile tiara among them—Hake saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

He said awkwardly, “You’ve had a pretty hectic time. Maybe I should just think about getting you back to America, or wherever. I can deal with this alone.”

She looked up at him. “Hell you can, Hake.”

“Well… I guess you’re worried about Alys. But I think she’ll be all right. She was looking for an adventure.”

“Adventure!” she exploded. “What do you know about adventures?” Then she calmed, and the glacial, detached expression returned. “Well, actually,” she said, “I suppose Alys is better suited to that life than I was. He’s an interesting old bastard, the sheik. Very artistic. And very technological. And if it gets too bad, she can always get out of it, sooner or later—she’s in a better position to yell for help than I was. But still—”

Hake was finding the conversation uncomfortable. He wanted to know. He did not want to ask. He could feel a queasy pelvic sensation that he did not like, and did not even want to allow himself—after all, he pointed out to himself, Leota’s sexual activities were not any of his concern. As she herself had told him. He was, however, entitled to feel compassion, surely. He said, stumbling over the words, “Was it, ah, really bad?”

She looked at him in silence for a moment, and then said only, “Yes.”

He could not think of a response, and after a moment she said, “Or, actually, no. I haven’t got things sorted out yet, Horny.”

He nodded without saying anything—it did not signify understanding, only acceptance. He stood up, helped her repack Alys’s bags, and began to get ready for bed, all in silence. And then, as he was taking off his shirt, Leota touched the great broad welts on his chest.

“Horny? Those are your scars, from something that almost killed you.”

“Yes?”

She dropped her robe. What he had thought to be embroidered stockings were tracings in blue, green and yellow on her legs, and they covered her entire body, a tattooed explosion of surreal color. She said, “These are mine.”

Before dawn they were on the road, the rented A-frame awkward on Hake’s shoulders. The “objective” was four miles down the road, and it would be hot, broad daylight before they reached it; now there was a faint slipperiness of dew on the paved road and the occasional greenery. For most of these plants, most of the year, that would be the only water they saw. Or needed.

Neither Hake nor Leota spoke much. For Hake, he had too much on his mind—or none of it really on his mind, because he could not keep his attention on any one question. There were a dozen trains of thought slithering inconclusively around his head: the Team; what the Reddis were up to; the broad sand hillocks to one side of them and, now and then, a look at the sea to the other. And, over and over again, Leota. None of them came to a climax, and perhaps he did not want them to; they were less uncomfortable where they were.

When the oil sheiks owned this part of the world, they had climbed to the top of their mountain of petrodollars and looked toward the west. What they saw, they copied. Hospitals and libraries. Museums and shiny convention hotels. Beaches, with marinas that now rotted empty. Roads that would have done credit to Los Angeles, divided by parkway strips that would have graced Paris. The plantings along the parkway strips were dead now, because no one had chosen to spend the money to bring them water. But the long, wide, silent highway itself stretched endlessly along the sea.

It was not quite deserted. As it came near to daylight occasional traffic shared it with them. A bus like the Metroliner, whispering past a train of camels—not like the Metroliner, because its exhaust was only a thin plume of steam, that disappeared almost at once in the morning light. Hydrogen-powered. Reasonable enough, here where it came from. Hake felt a moment’s envy. And some worry, too, because there were signs along the road with troublesome implications. Bleached old metal ones in Arabic, with messages like:

Military Reservation Keep to Road Passage Prohibited After Dark

And one in English, carelessly lettered on a painted-out road-traffic sign, but quite new:

HAUL ASS If you can read this, you don’t belong here.

No one challenged them. No one seemed to care. But Hake was glad when the sun was up, at least, even though the heat began at once.

They walked on in silence through the morning, the heat building up with every hour. When the sun was directly overhead they paused in the ruin of an old bus stop and drowsed for an hour or two, drinking sparingly from their canteens, and then moved on. A few minutes later Leota broke the silence. “Have you been thinking about my question?”

Hake had been thinking about everything but—more than anything else, about the implications of Leota’s body paint. It took him a moment to remember what question she had asked him. “You mean about why I do all this? God,” he said fervently, “have I not!”

“And?”

He thought for a moment. “If you mean am I aware of ever being hypnotized into being a spook, no. I did some reading up on hypnotism, and none of it seems to fit. In fact, I’ve still got some stuff in my bag.”

“But you aren’t convinced. You don’t believe anybody did this to you. You’d rather think you were a villain than a dupe.”

He looked at her sharply, but her tone was not contentious, only thoughtful.

“I’d rather ,” he said, “know exactly what is going on. In my head, and in my life. Whichever way it came out. But I don’t.”

She nodded and was silent, eyes fixed on the empty road ahead. The highway was bending away from the coast now, and the dunes between them and the sea were higher.

Leota said something, so faintly he could not hear it against the hot on-shore wind and had to ask her to repeat it. “I said, do you know, I almost didn’t go with you when you turned up?”

“For God’s sake, why? Did you like it in the harem?”