Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

He looked up and switched the set off. It was no loss; he had not seen any of the last twenty minutes of it. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I’m not sure I want to contact the Reddis. They’re pure poison.”

“And your friends on the Team are better?”

“No, they’re not. I should be applying for a job at Hydro Fuels right about now, and I’m not sure I want to do that either. Do you want to know what I am sure of?”

She sat down and waited for him to answer his own question. “I’m sure I like this. Being here. With you. And I’d like it to go on.”

He stood up and paced to the window. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’m willing to do what’s right, Leota—my God, I want to. But I don’t know where right is, any more, and I guess I understand how people give up. Take what they can get for themselves, and the hell with everybody. And we could do that, you know. We’ve got unlimited credit. Anywhere in the world. We can do anything we like, as long as the credit cards last. We could catch a plane to Paris tonight. Or Rio de Janeiro. Anywhere. We can milk the cards for a million dollars in cash and put it in a Swiss bank, so if they ever catch up with us we can go right on with real money.”

She said thoughtfully, “The Reddis wouldn’t let us. We owe them. They’d find us, even if your friends didn’t.”

“So we give the Reddis what they want. The Team—” Hake shrugged. “I guess they would catch us, sooner or later,” he admitted. “But what a great time we could have until they did!”

“Is that what you want to do?”

Hake said slowly, “Leota, I don’t know what I want to do. I know what would be nice. That would be to marry you and take you back to Long Branch, and get busy being minister of my church again. I don’t see any way to do that.”

She looked at him appraisingly, but did not speak.

“Even better. We could change the world. Get rid of all this crumminess. Expose the Team, and put the Reddis out of business, and make everything clean and decent again. I don’t see any way to do that, either. I know how all that is supposed to go, I’ve seen it in the movies. We defeat the Bad Guys, and the town sees the error of its ways, and I become the new marshal and we live happily ever after. Only it doesn’t work that way. The Bad Guys don’t think they’re bad, and I don’t know how to defeat them. Mess them up a little bit, sure. But sooner or later they’ll just wipe us out, and everything will be the same as before.”

“So what you’re saying is we should have a good time and forget about principle?”

“Yes,” he said, nodding, “that seems to be what it comes down to. Have you got any better ideas?”

Leota sat up straight in the middle of the bed, legs curled under her in the half-lotus position, looking at him in silence. After a long time, she said, “I wish I did.”

Hake waited, but she didn’t add anything to what she had said. He felt cheated, and realized that he had expected more from her. He said belligerently, “So you’re giving up too!”

“Shouldn’t I?” She was beginning to cry. Hake moved toward her but she shook him away. “Give me a minute,” she said, drying her eyes. She gazed out at the bright harbor, marshalling her thoughts. “When I was in school,” she began, “and I first got an idea of what was going on, it all looked simple. We got our little group going, the Nader’s Raiders of international skullduggery, and it was really exciting. But the whole group’s gone now. I’m the only survivor. Some got scared off, two wound up in jail, and it isn’t fun any more. Sometimes I get help from volunteers. Sometimes I work with people like the Reddis. Usually I’m all by myself.”

“Sounds like a lonely life.”

“It’s a discouraging life. The world isn’t getting any better from anything I do. Mostly it seems to be getting worse. And every time I think I get a handle on the roots and causes of it all, it turns out wrong. Like hypnotism. I thought that might account for it and, do you see, if it did, then there might be something I could do. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t even account for the way I acted in Hassabou’s harem.”

Hake got up awkwardly to stare out the window with her. He was pretty sure he didn’t want to hear any details of how Leota had acted in Hassabou’s harem. He said, “Why didn’t you go public?”

“Aw, Horny. First thing I thought of.”

“So did you try it?”

“Ha! Did we not! My PoliSci professor had a friend on a TV station in Minneapolis, and she got us a five-minute spot on the news. We taped it. Everything we knew, or deduced—but it never got on the air. And the Team got on us. The professor lost tenure—for ‘corrupting a student’— me! And I took off. The trouble was the station wouldn’t believe us, and the people who did believe us called Washington to check.” She moved restlessly around the room; then, facing him, “For that matter, why didn’t you?”

He said, “Well, I thought of it. As a matter of fact, I left some stuff in New Jersey—a complete tape of everything I knew up to the time I got back from Rome.” He told her about International Pets and Flowers and his visits to Lo-Wate Bottling Co., and about The Incredible Art. She listened with some hope.

“Well, it’s a try at least,” she conceded. “Is there anything in the tape that you could call objective proof? No. Well, there’s the rub, Horny. Of course,” she said thoughtfully, “this fellow’s in entertainment, so he’s got more media access than you or I. Maybe somebody might listen —especially if it comes out the way you told him, and you get killed or something.”

“Now, that’s a cheerful thought.” They were both silent for a moment, thinking about that cheerful thought. “I told him about you,” he mentioned.

“Oh? Saying what?”

“Well, not about you personally, so much, but I asked him about hypnotism. He knows a lot about it. In fact, he gave me some tapes. Do you want to look at them?”

“What good would they do?”

“Maybe none, how do I know? But we don’t have an awful lot else to do, do we?”

She sighed, and smiled, and came over to kiss him. “Sorry, Horny. I guess I’m still up tight. Let’s see if that TV set has a viewer.”

It did—for, Hake thought, the primary purpose of displaying the equivalent of filthy postcards. But it would work as well for Art’s tapes and fiches. He pulled them out of the bottom of his knapsack and stuck one at random into the scanner.

The first panel was a page of a technical journal, with a paper by two people on the resemblance between sleep and hypnotism. It seemed that people who napped easily were, by and large, also easily hypnotizable.

Hake looked at Leota. Leota shrugged. “I don’t take naps very often,” she said. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything, anyway.”

“Let’s try another,” Hake said, and dumped the rest of the microfiches on the floor. Among them was a cassette, home-made by The Incredible Art. Hake clicked it into the player and turned it on, and Art’s voice came to them.

“I don’t know how much of this stuff is going to be useful to you, Horny,” it said, “but here’s the whole thing. What I started with was my own magic act. You remember how I did it. I get maybe thirty people to come up on the stage and I give them the usual ‘you are getting sleepy-sleepy -sleepy’ stuff. Most of them will act as if they’re really going to sleep. The ones that don’t I scoot right off stage, so I have maybe twenty left. Then I command them to try to raise their arms, but I tell them they can’t. The ones that don’t respond, off. So I have about a dozen. I keep going until I have maybe half a dozen that will do any damn thing I tell them to.