Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

The lessons stuck. Fall forward, kick back; twist around, grab for a leg. Hake executed the maneuver flawlessly. His heel caught Yosper just where it was supposed to, lifting the old man off the ground. Yosper brayed sharply, and something rattled away down the corridor as Hake jerked at the leg nearest his flailing arms. The training paid off. The gun was gone, they were hand to hand and Hake had every advantage of youth and size and strength.

But Yosper had been through the same course, more than once, over years. Yosper’s skinny knee caught Hake on the side of the jaw, wrenching his head around on his neck and knocking the nose-mask free.

There was a maneuver for that, too. Stop breathing. Find the enemy’s nearest vital point, any of the dozen quick and dirty vital points, put him out, get the mask—it was all very clear in Hake’s mind, and his body did its best to carry it out. Yosper was before him. The frail old man was incredibly resilient. He could not win against Hake in a one-on-one, but he didn’t have to. He only had to delay a decision until Hake was forced to breathe. Hake was straining with every muscle to claw at Yosper’s throat, and then, without transition, he was dazedly aware that he was being dragged by the collar into the control room. I did my best, he thought clearly. But what was the good of that, when his best had failed?

Yosper dropped him, and there was silence.

Why silence?

Hake tried to slow the spinning of his head to see what was going on, but nothing was going on. No one was in the room. The monitors were untended, the seats empty. He heard the distant whir of ventilators and the dusty faint crackle of electronics and nothing else, and over him Yosper was standing in a gunfighter crouch.

But there seemed to be no target for his gun; and then a voice, a familiar voice, the voice of one of the Reddis, said, “Put your gun down, Medina,” and all around the room men and women were standing up from behind the monitors and desks, and each one held a gun and every gun was pointed precisely at Yosper’s head.

It seemed to Hake that he had been hurting, one way or another, for half his life—had in fact been, most of the time, all the days and weeks since March. The tussle with Yosper had reawakened all of the left-over aches and bruises from Rome and Capri, and his nose was bleeding again. But someone gentle and sweet-smelling was cradling his head and soothing away his pains.

He made the effort to get his head together. “Hello, Leota,” he managed.

“Oh, Horny,” she crooned, rocking him. It was a pleasant place to be and gave him little incentive to want to move, but he struggled up anyway, breathing deeply to try to get the last of the sleep gas out of his blood. The room was full of people, not only Leota and both the Reddis, but the man from the employment office, Robling, and eight or ten others. Not counting Yosper, who was sullenly spread-eagled against a wall while one of the women pulled articles of armament out of every pocket and crevice.

“You mean we made it?” he demanded fuzzily.

“Well, so far,” said Leota, dabbing at the blood on his lip. “Somebody’s collecting all the casualties in the corridor; if we can take care of the yacht… and then clear up some of the other loose ends…” But all the ends were loose in Hake’s gassy brain. He concentrated on trying to follow what she was telling him. The Reddis had set most of it up, somehow assisted by the personnel man, Robling; they had faked a fire at the hotel and got everyone evacuated, and in the confusion Leota and Alys had been liberated. They were all very pleased with Hake, who had apparently done his part superbly, even if he hadn’t quite known what it was.

But Subirama Reddi snarled shrilly, “We waste time! The yacht is still out there. It must be decoyed in just now.”

Across the room the mask of fury on Yosper’s face cleared. He nodded agreeably to the woman guarding him and stepped forward to the radio. Hake managed to get there before him. “Not you, Yosper,” he said. “You’re a staunch old spook and I don’t trust what you’d say. I’ll do it.”

“Then do it!” snapped Rama Reddi. “Let us complete this and get to the matter of payment!”

Leota cut in. “Absolutely. Go ahead, Horny. Tell them the control room’s secure.” She squeezed his shoulder warningly.

Someone handed him a microphone. He cleared his throat, looked around and then shrugged. “Curmudgeon?” he called. “Sheik Hassabou? Somebody! Come on in, Curmudgeon. We’re all buttoned up and waiting for you.”

The radio op clicked off the microphone. “Don’t answer anything they say,” she warned. “Tell them your receiver’s bad. Tell them—”

She was interrupted by Curmudgeon’s voice from the speaker overhead. “Is that you, Hake?” he demanded. “What’s going on? Where’s Jasper Medina?”

“Don’t answer,” snapped the radio op, but Hake had no intention of answering. They waited, while Curmudgeon vainly tried to raise them and Yosper snarled and fumed from the wall. With Leota’s hand clutching his, Hake could believe that all this was real. Reasonable, no. What strange charades they were playing! But all his life had become such a series of charades since the Team had drafted him into their world of outrageous fantasy. It was no more incredible that this patchwork operation should succeed than that spooks and spies should be playing such wretched pranks to begin with.

“Now do it again,” Leota ordered. “Talk him in!”

The operator thumbed the switch and Hake took a deep breath. “This is Hake,” he said steadily, over the shrill complaints from the radio. “I can’t get an answer out of you, but Yosper ordered me to tell you we’re all ready. The control dugout is secure, so is the thermal tower. We’re waiting.”

For a minute or more there was no sound at all. Then Leota sighed, her breath tickling Hake’s ear as they both bent over the radar tube. “I think the silly fool is going to do it,” she whispered.

On the display they could see the green shadow of the tower, the headlands, the barges waiting with their globular tanks for their cargoes of LHa… and, yes, cautiously nosing around the headland, the sharp, slim shape of Hassabou’s yacht.

“He’s coming in!” Robling exulted. “Okay now, you tower operators, do your stuff!”

The dark woman at the hologram monitor reached for her controls. Out of the heavily screened slit at the front of the dugout Hake could see the violet target hologram skid across the sky. Behind, through the clear-glass clerestory panes on the dune side, the sunplants began to nod toward a new focus. Their response time was slow. It would take several minutes, at least, for perfect collimation. But they were moving.

It all happened very slowly. The sunplants could throw ninety-nine percent of the solar flux onto a target—but not all at once. For the next little while they would be tracking in. First they would create a wide patch of warmth, then a swath hundreds of yards wide of discomfort, then a spot smaller than the side of the yacht in which no unprotected thing could survive.

The brilliant star of white at the top of the tower began to blur and darken.

The one-legged man and the controller whispered anxiously to each other. This was a critical time. The cavity receptor was designed to handle intense heat. The structure around it was not. As the spot defocused, thousands, then millions, of watts of heat struck at the polished Fresnel shapes of reflecting steel. The energy of ten thousand horses assaulted each metal vane. But the defocusing was fast enough, barely. By the time the temperature monitor began to redline, the spot had spread. The warning trace wobbled, held steady, then began to decline.