The Cool War

XV

Hake took the afternoon bus back along the coast, got out at the path to the guard shack, climbed the dune and presented himself to the guards. The noise from the solar tower was immense, even at this distance, rumble of pumps, roar of gas and steam, scream of tortured molecules ripped apart. The rifleman sitting on a canvas chair outside the shack took a plug out of his ear, yawning and scratching. He glanced uninterestedly at Hake’s forged identification badge and made a coarse remark about male scrubwomen. “Too bad you’re a man,” he said. “You can’t go down for an hour yet, and if you were a woman we could pass the time more interestingly.”

“Not very many trespassers to keep you busy?” Hake offered conversationally.

“Trespassers? Why would anyone trespass? All we do is keep silly people in boats from coming too near the tower. Go, sit in the shade. When the noise stops, you can go down to the control.”

So Hake sprawled out under a clump of sunflowers, fingering the badge that had once been Leota’s, his mind clear and almost blank. He could not plan very far. All he could do was go through with his orders until he saw a chance to do something else. When the sun set the guard waved him down. Actually the noise had not stopped. There was still plenty of heat in the receptor cavity at the top of the tower, and the turbines continued to roar.

Scrambling down the path in the dusk, Hake remembered the summer’s moonlighting—he had still been in the wheelchair—when he held a part-time job cleaning heliostats for Jersey Central Power & Light. The big, jointed mirrors were stowed shiny side down to keep dust from coating and salt spray from pitting their surfaces. Even so, Hake, or someone like him, had to get out and spray them clean once a month—a job that never ended, because by the time the last sector was detergented the first was beginning to cloud up again. But the sunplants cleaned themselves.

Going inside the control dugout was like entering the bridge of a ship. CRTs glowed in a rainbow of colors at half a dozen monitoring stations, displaying a hundred different kinds of data about temperature, pressure and every other transient state at every point in the process. One set monitored the air as it was forced through its tiny pipes across the heat receptor. Another tracked the expanded air as it turned gas turbines to generate electricity. Others reported on the sea-water as it was boiled into steam, the splitting of the steam into its elements, the exhaust of waste brine back into the ocean, the pumping of hydrogen and oxygen to the liquefaction plants beyond the end of the cove. Hake knew this was so, from knowing how the plant worked, but he could read none of the indicia. They were only glowing masses of colors and symbols to him.

A short, dark woman looked up from one of the screens to glance at his credentials. “You’re not our standard brand of cleaner,” she said.

“I needed the job. Later on I might get something better, they said.”

“Be nice having you around,” she said, looking with more interest at Hake himself than at his badge. “The rest of the crew’U be here by boat any minute. They’ll show you what to do.”

Between the dugout and the tower was a long, underwater tunnel. The night crew leader, an Egyptian engineer named Boutros, took his gang through it at a brisk walk. They had seen the tunnel a hundred times, and it was of no more interest to them than his driveway is to a suburbanite. But for Hake it was something to see. Half a mile of nothing but distance. It was like being in a long birth canal, a ten-minute half-trot with spaced red lights before and after, always seeming to stretch out to the same indefinite, maybe infinite, length.

The sunflowers had long since folded themselves into buds for the night. No more energy was coming to the receptor. It was safe for the maintenance crew to come in and start their work. But the generators were still turning, the pumps were thudding, the compressed air was screaming through the criss-cross of thin pipes. Boutros had a spare set of earplugs for Hake. Without them, he was deafened.

The tower was tightly sealed most of the time, but sealed or not, fine sand from the dunes and salt spray from the water found its way inside. That was Hake’s job. While the skilled mechanics split off to check and repair the brains and entrails of the system, Hake and a couple of others were set to sweeping’ and polishing. The first job was the brass railings that surrounded the open central shaft at every level. Hake, following the finger of the woman working with him, could see where to start. The rails on the three lowest levels, looking up from the base of the heat exchanger column, were bright and clean. What looked like a sudden change to green-black iron in the railings of the fourth was only the change to the dirt they had to clean. Far, far up—near the hundred-meter level at the top of the tower—he could see that the rails brightened and gleamed again. Cleaning corrosion inside the tower was another of those jobs without an end.

That part of the job was only make-work and fussiness. Hake and his co-workers scraped and polished to complete the fourth level, until Hake was actually sent to push a broom for a while until it was time to do the more important jobs. The solar collector retained enough heat to generate power for several hours after sunset. Then, with a suddenness like a crash, everything shut down—the pumps, the valve motors, the yell and whistle of fluids forced through tubes—and everyone took earpfugs out. There was total silence for a minute before the pumps started again, this time at low pressure, and Boutros appeared to wave his crews toward the stairs.

It was a long climb. A hundred meters of climbing.

When the generator was going and sunpower was pouring in, the pumped air swallowed energy to turn into electricity in the generators. At the same time the flowing air kept the pipes from burning through. The critical time was only a matter of seconds at full power. The cavity was hot—could, in theory, be as hot as the surface of the Sun, some 9000° Fahrenheit; was, in practice, only about half that. But hotter than anything Hake had ever encountered. If the pumps failed, the reflected heat from the sunplants would convert that delicate grid into slag unless the plants were deflected away at once. Now that was not the problem, because the sunplants slept. But the pumps were cooling the pipes for Hake’s crew, so that they could chip them free of the thin, tough corrosion of sea-scale that reduced the heat conductivity of the pipes and wasted energy.

To do that, they had to go up where the heat receptor was.

A hundred meters is not a great distance, when it is stretched out flat. An Olympic runner can cover it in a matter of seconds. But a hundred meters straight up from the nearest flat surface is something quite different. The physical exertion was the least of it, although Hake reached the top deck panting and shaking. Worse. The wind blew. Clinging to the safety rails, Hake thought his hair would fly off. The tower shook—not entirely in his imagination; there was a bass organ-pipe thrumming that he could feel through the hand-holds. And, although the pumps had swept most of the 4000° heat out of the piping, it blistered his fingers at a touch.

The Arab next to him laughed, spreading his own fingers and pointing to the gloves Hake carried on his belt. Hake set his jaw. They could have reminded him! But he conceded to himself that no reminder would have worked as well to impress the need on him as that one sizzling touch.

But out over the dunes Orion cartwheeled down toward the end of the night. Cool, dry air from the desert smelled of salt, camels and old petroleum. Once he learned to forget the great depth beneath him and get on with the job, it was far from unpleasant to be a hundred meters up in the Arabian night sky.

The job was not difficult. As it was done every night, the salt had little chance to build up. It took only a firm slow rub along each wire-thin pipe, front and back, with the chemically treated cleaning wads. The crew broke for mint tea and peppery coffee, hoisted up from the surface level in buckets, and by the time the sky began to turn cobalt in the east they were done.

Hake went down with the others, excused himself to go to the men’s room, and waited there until there were no more sounds from inside the tower. Then he peeped out.

Most of the crew had returned through the tunnel. Some had left by boats tied to the tower’s base. He did not think anyone would care much about not seeing him in one place or the other. He had marked the TV monitors that scanned the interior space of the tower and was careful to avoid their fields of view. And he sat down and waited, three levels up from the gentle waves, with a clear view of the shore through one spray-splashed window, and a panorama of the sea’s horizons through the others.

The fact that he could see nothing but water in that direction did not mean there was nothing there; the Team would be on its way by now. And on land as well. Peering cautiously over the squat dugout at water’s edge, he saw the pink roof of the guard shack. Tigrito and his goons would be there by now, checking their watches. It all looked peaceful, even the tangle of bright plumbing that projected above the eastern headland, the gas-cooling plant and the radar mast of an LH2 tanker waiting to be loaded.

It would be sinful to destroy this. So thought Hake, minister of a church that never used the word “sin,” veteran of a quarter century of New Jersey’s brownouts and freezeouts and sooty grime. Clean hydrogen was a good. What madness were Curmudgeon and the others engaged in? What madness the world?

The sky beyond the headlands was orange, ready for the sun’s entrance on the stage, the color picked up by the plumbing of the LH2 plant. So many megawatt-hours from this array; and this only one tiny cove, invisible on a map, that could be duplicated a hundred times along this coast alone. No wonder the fight was so intense. The stakes were fantastic.

The pumps throbbed suddenly, and the TV cameras began to swing back and forth in their scan.

Hake jumped. It was time. The sunflowers were beginning to open. The sun was not yet high enough to produce much energy, but he could see the violet ghost image spring into being, halfway up the sky. It laid a trail of oily glitter along the surface of the sea—

And in the middle of that shining trail was a sprinkle of pockmarks.

Bubbles. The invaders were approaching.

The first one up the ladder was Mario, wet suit gleaming in the long slants of sunrise, waterproof tote lashed to his back. He did not speak to Hake, just stripped off his suit and opened the bag to lay out the tools of his trade. Speaking would not have been easy. The pumps were roaring at full force now, and the whole tower thrummed with their noise and the scream of gas through piping. The underwater tug bobbed up to the lowest rung of the ladder, and one, two, three more persons pulled themselves up.

“Stay in this corner!” Hake shouted in Mario’s ear. “I rolled a screen over the doorway. You can get to the tunnel without the camera picking you up.”

Mario looked at him scornfully, then repeated the orders to the others. That wasn’t necessary, except to reinforce the fact that it was he, not Hake, who was running things. He spoke into a radio, listened and nodded. “The others are on their way,” he said. “Let’s move it!”

Yosper’s bully-boy quartet were reassembled here in A1 Halwani, rapidly getting out of their wet suits, spreading their treasures on the steel deck. Mario’s gear was nose-masks, sleep-gas canisters, slabs of gray-pink plastic explosive. Sven (or Carlos) had his own tools: the camera to photograph the machinery, the kit to take apart any equipment interesting enough to carry away, the detonators to explode Mario’s plastic and bring the tower down, when it had been looted of everything worth taking. Dieter (or Sven, or Carlos) carried the biocans of fungus spores. They were to go into the trickle-irrigation system, infecting the sunplants with the wilt. Carlos (or whoever) carried the guns. Bulgarian Brollies and Peruvian Pens, with green-tipped darts like hypodermic needles; one touch, and the victim was anesthetized, in case the sleep gas failed. And a clutch of machine-pistols. They were not nonlethal. Any person who took their thousand-round-a-minute blast would sleep forever, in blood.

The second crew arrived, three persons. Two turned out to be the sheik’s men and the third, a-hop with excitement, was Yosper himself. “Goin’ like shit through a tin funnel!” he cackled, skinning out of his suit. “We ready, Mario? Get on with it, Hake, lead the way!”

Hake climbed down the ladder and crouched at the door to the tunnel as the others came behind him. Yosper raised himself on tiptoes to peer through the little window, then turned, scowling. “You didn’t cover the TV cameras,” he accused.

“How could I? They just would have come out and fixed them.” It was a true reason, if not a real one, but it didn’t solve the problem for Hake. Dieter (or Sven) said cheerfully:

“Not to worry. Give me a minute with the wires.” He located and opened a junction-box, and in a moment all the dim red lights beyond the door winked out. “We better move it, Yosper,” he said. “They’ll be checking that in a minute.”

‘Then let’s go!” Yosper grabbed machine-pistol and sleep-dart projector from the pile and started off at a trot, the others following. Hake lagged, slipped on a nose-mask, and tossed two of the sleep-gas canisters into the darkness behind the Team.

They did not have time to turn around. He heard the clatter of the canisters, the puff of their explosion, a few grunts and gasps, and then the sound of bodies falling.

When he was sure they were all out cold for at least an hour, Hake reclimbed the ladder, picked up the rubbery wads of plastic and the fitted box of detonators and pushed them into the sea, along with as many machine-pistols as he could collect. Then he descended the ladder again, stepping on a thigh here, a spine there, and stumbled through the black tunnel to the control dugout. What he would do when he got to the dugout he was not sure, but at least he could dump the problem on whoever was there. He tripped over a body just before the end—how had anyone managed to get that far?—and reached for the door.

Just as Yosper’s voice said softly behind him, muffled through a mask, “You know, Hake, I thought you might try something. Now open the door real easy. What you feel in your back isn’t sleepy gas.”

Hake stopped still. “You can’t blame me for trying,” he said.

“Wrong, boy,” sighed Yosper. “I can kill you for trying.”

Even as Hake started to move, one part of his mind was assessing what Yosper had said: how true it was, but also how irrelevant. If he had a choice, he could not find it.

Three weeks Under the Wire are not much to change the pacific habits of a lifetime, but they had been hard weeks.

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.

And the yacht stopped and dropped its anchors. The woman at the hologram nodded to Hake.

“Go ahead, Horny,” said Leota. “You can be the one to tell them what’s happening.”

“My pleasure,” Hake grinned as he began to understand. Then, into the transmitter, “Curmudgeon! Put your sun glasses on!”

A startled grunt from the radio. Then silence. Then Curmudgeon’s voice, thick and nasty, “Hake, your last chance. What the hell’s going on?”

“We’re zeroing in on you, Curmudgeon. You have one minute to abandon ship.” The yacht was growing brighter every second, as if stagehands were switching kliegs on it from some invisible rafters. “Jump off on the far side,” Hake added. “Our aim might not be too good.”

The one-legged man scowled and motioned fiercely for Hake to turn off the transmitter. “Watch what you say to them!” he snapped. “They might still get away from the beam—” He stared anxiously out the darkened slit, then began to smile. “I think they missed their chance,” he said. “That ship’s as good as sunk.”

The receiver was rattling with Curmudgeon’s voice. “Hake, I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but if you think you’re going to—”

“Not going to, Curmudgeon. It’s already done. You have maybe thirty seconds, then I think your hydrogen tank may blow.” The sunbeam was contracting and brightening now. Individual shafts of merged beams dipped and wobbled across the surface of the sea, and a palest plume of steam shimmered off some wave-tops. “Fifteen seconds!”

From the corner where he was roped to a chair came Yosper’s voice, turgid with rage, “Hake, you little bastard, you’re going to wish you were never born.”

There was a confused babble of voices from the radio, and then it clicked off again. Even through the grayed glass it was becoming painful to look at the ship. Smoke rose from its side. The paint scorched away. Glass was shattering in the portholes, and the gay line of flags at its masts blew away as ash. The ninety-percent concentration disk shrank to a thousand milliradians, five hundred, three hundred—

The globe of liquid hydrogen on the afterdeck never did blow. It did not have time. Before the heat of its shell boiled off enough of the LH₂ within to shatter the valves, the ninety-percent disk had shrunk away from it, narrowing in on the center of the hull, just above the waterline. Hake could not see that the metal was glowing. The reflectance from the dot of light far overpowered the mere incandescence of steel. But suddenly a dollop of softened metal slid away and splashed into the sea, with an immense production of steam. The vessel rocked wildly and began to settle in the water.

Standing at the darkened window, Hake had a sudden stab of concern. “When it sinks, what’ll happen to the people in the water?”

Robling grinned and pointed to the hologram monitor. Already the purple crosshairs were climbing the sky, up and away from the ship itself, and the spot was defocusing again. “Anyway, they’re in the shadow. It won’t go down for half an hour,” he said.

The woman at the control board snapped, “And about time! Do you know what this little game is costing? We do fifteen million dollars a day, and we’ve already lost an hour’s production—”

“Cheap at the price,” said the one-legged man. “Let’s call the cavalry in.”

“I already have,” she said. The long-range screen picked them up first, but as soon as Hake’s eyes recovered from staring at the bright spot on the side of the dying ship he could see them. A destroyer and two gunboats of the A1 Halwani “navy”—probably they were the A1 Halwani navy —coming in over the horizon, with white bow-waves to show their racing speed.

Hake put his arm around Leota, beside him at the window, and said wonderingly, “We’ve done it.”

“Not quite,” said Rama Reddi, cradling a machine-pistol in his arm; and from the other side of the control room, his brother said: “That is so, Hake. You have still to settle with us.”

There was more happening than Hake understood. It was not a new situation; he had been living under those conditions for months, but familiarity did not make it easier. Leota rescued him. “Of course,” she said, pressing against his arm. “Horny knows. We promised to give you the codes and the keys, and we wilL”

Yosper yelped venomously, “Slut! You’re fooling around with the most muscle in the world!”

“We’ll just have to take that chance,” said Leota, “although your friends don’t really look that dangerous right now.” And they were not. They were doing the best they could, and even in rubber boats or struggling in the water itself they were far from toothless. There were half a dozen separate struggles going on in the tiny view of the CRT display. A1 Halwani’s naval might was up to the challenge. They lobbed vomit-gas grenades at the Team members in the water, and power launches fished them out, one by one, some still struggling, some without fight, scooped out of the water like guppies in a breeding tank.

“We are still waiting,” hissed Rama Reddi, meaning that they did not want to wait at all.

“As soon as we get this nailed down,” Leota promised. One of the launches was coming in to beach itself before them, and a group of sloppy-looking, but quite efficient, A1 Halwani sailors dragged two bound figures into the dugout.

“Now we’re getting somewhere,” said Leota with satisfaction. “This one I know—” she touched the contemptuously angry Sheik Hassabou with the toe of her shoe—“but who’s this other creep?”

“Why, that is one of our leading American sabotage specialists,” Hake said. “Good to see you again, Curmudgeon.”

The spy was in no position to act, lying on his belly, hands cuffed behind him, one side of his bristly beard slicked down with his own blood. But he could talk. “Every one of you,” he said, “is dead. You won’t see another sun rise.”

Estimating the odds, Hake was not very sure Curmudgeon was wrong. Tied and helpless as he was, there was behind him the immense mastodon strength of the Team, and if Curmudgeon thought it capable of squashing all these impromptu opponents Hake could see no good reason to disagree.

Robling and the hologram operator were trying to get everyone out of the way while they got to the serious business of getting the thermal tower back into production. The Reddis did not want to be out of the way. They had not relinquished their machine-pistols, and they were whispering to each other in their own language, eyes taking in everything that was going on. It would not be possible to stall them very long. But then what?

Hake’s head was beginning to clear. It didn’t help. He was playing in a game whose rules had never been explained; worse, he couldn’t tell which team the players were on. Once upon a time he had thought his life as a clergyman was unbearably complex. Here in this strange-looking room on the Persian Gulf complexity was cubed, muddle was confounded, a simple soul like himself could not tell friend from foe. Ranting Yosper, blustering Curmudgeon, silent and deadly Hassabou were easy to diagnose as enemies. But were the Reddis friends? Unthinkable! Robling, the hologram operator Omaya, the other strangers? Apparently they were. And Leota, encouraging him to fulfill his bargain with the Reddis, surely she was a friend? Of course she was, Hake assured himself firmly, at least a friend; but that was the only “of course” he could find.

Leota, at least, seemed to know exactly what to do. “Let’s get on with it,” she said, smiling cheerfully at the Hydro Fuels crew.

“About time,” grunted Robling, his eyes on the screen where the purple hologram was sliding back to where it belonged. “I think we’re okay now. As far as I’m concerned, you people can get on with your private business.”

“Here? At this place, with all these witnesses?” Subirama Reddi demanded. “Are you trying to cheat us?”

Leota said firmly, “The deal was that Hake would give you the information, that’s all. Said nothing about when or where.”

“But—these men are from the Team! In one minute they can change all the codes, and it will be worthless!”

Leota shook her head. “Tell you what. As soon as you’ve got what you want you can take off. Nobody else will leave here for an hour. Anyway, the prisoners aren’t going to be talking to anyone for a while—they’ll be in jail in A1 Halwani, and I don’t think they’ll have any visitors.”

“Not for twenty-four hours,” the one-legged man said, grinning. “I can promise that.”

The brothers looked at each other, then shrugged. ‘Twenty-four hours. No less. In that case he may proceed,” Rama Reddi said grudgingly.

“How come nobody asks me if I want to proceed?” Hake demanded, anger spilling out.

Leota put her hand on his arm. “Because we made a deal,” she said. “Go ahead, Horny. The whole thing. Even tell them about your thumbprint, I promise that part’s going to be all right.”

Hake took a deep breath. Everybody was looking at him. For the center of attention, he seemed to have very little free will about what he did, and very little time to decide what he wanted. Trading with the Reddis was not the kind of thing he could take pride in. Thwarting one little plan of the Team’s was too tiny a victory to last, and the future beyond this moment looked unpromising— “Do it, Hake!” snarled Leota, and her eyes were urgent.

“Oh, all right,” he said. “Well. We finance our operations by tapping into other people’s bank accounts—mostly cloak-and-dagger fronts for the other sides. To open a line, the first thing I do is present my thumbprint for ID. Then there are some code words.” He went on in detail, naming all the bank accounts they were looting, reciting the codes, omitting nothing, while Subirama Reddi took notes and his brother asked questions. Finally Subirama looked up.

“I think we have the procedure, yes. Remains the question of your thumb.”

“I’ll help out there,” Leota said quickly, producing a flat metal box. It contained plastic. “Press your thumb in this, will you, Horny?”

He shrugged and did as he was told. Leota offered the box to the Reddis. “You can make your own thumbprint from that,” she said.

Subirama Reddi took it, studied it carefully, and then nodded at his brother. “The payment is complete,” he said, “apart from our one-hour lead before anyone else leaves this place, and twenty-four hours incommunicado for the Team.”

‘Then you better get moving,” grumbled Robling. “I want to get all these people out of our plant. Take the gags off those three while we figure out what to do with them.”

As the Reddis disappeared, Yosper began to rage. “Traitor!” he yelled. “Boy, you’ve betrayed the Team, the U. S. of A. and the Lord God, and I pity you when we get through with you! Spreading a few disease germs in Europe, that was all you were good for.”

Leota put in, “You mean last spring, when he was a germ carrier for you?”

Yosper glared at her. “Shut up, slut. The sheik’ll take care of you, don’t worry about that.”

“Not unless he wants to kidnap me again. That’s a crime, and the Italian government won’t put up with it.”

The sheik, disdainfully allowing one of the A1 Halwani sailors to remove his gag, said in accented English, “My friend the Minister of Justice will not listen to your ravings.” He was almost a comic figure, the kohl around his eyes smeared from immersion in the water; but there was nothing comic in his expression.

“What about you, Curmudgeon?” Hake asked. “Have you got anything to contribute to this?”

The Team chief said with dignity, “It doesn’t matter, Hake. You’re finished. So is A1 Halwani.”

Robling cut in, “You don’t seem to realize that you’re facing a jail term, Curmudgeon. We’re on to you now.”

“And what good will that do you? We don’t need to blow up your tower to put you out of business. We’ve got the stuff to kill off your plants—and a new breed of sunplants of our own, resistant to the disease. You think you can stop one of our choppers from spraying your whole setup, some dark night? Forget it!”

Hake flared, “You can’t get away with it. I’ll—I’ll talk to the President!”

Curmudgeon laughed. “That pipsqueak! He doesn’t know about this, and he won’t believe you anyway. The Attorney General runs this show.”

Hake stared at them, helpless captives, still belligerent. “You know,” he said wonderingly, “you people are crazy.” And so they were, there could be no doubt, crazy people running a crazy game of sabotage and destruction. They were so secure\ Curmudgeon and Yosper even seemed to be enjoying it! He detached himself from the surroundings, trying to reason things all out. Was there any way, ever, to put a stop to this endless cycle of mad violence?

Vaguely he heard Leota say to the one-legged man, “I think we’ve got it all,” and saw the one-legged man nod and pick up a telephone. He waited, watching Yosper and Curmudgeon as though they were specimens in a cage, and then spoke into the phone.

Then—“Everybody shut up,” he called. “Hake, you might want to take this call.” He switched on a loudspeaker extension.

The voice on the other end, cackling with delight, was The Incredible Art.

“Horny? Oh, Horny!” he cried. “It came in just fine! Somebody started jamming about two minutes ago, but it was too late—What?”

The half-second delay made him miss Hake’s words. Hake repeated them, staring around at the others. “Art! What are you talking about?”

Half a second. Then—“You mean you don’t know? Why, Horny, that’s funny! You’ve been on the air! All of you! For the last half hour, by satellite, all over the world!”