The Cool War

XVI

For the first time Hake could remember, it felt safe to relax. He lay bare in the healing sun. His eyes were closed and the pebbly beach stabbed not unpleasantly at his back. Cold drops on his body made him look up. Leota was kneeling beside him as she squeezed water out of her hair. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said.

She shook her hair onto his face, laughing. “You sure looked like you were having one sweet, self-satisfied dream.” He could not look at her directly; the bright sun in the chrome-blue sky was dazzling. He propped himself on one elbow to see her better. Were the intricate tracings on her body really beginning to fade, or was he just getting used to them? He was certainly getting quite chronically used to Leota, to having her nearby, to thinking about her when she was not. To sharing the important parts of a life with her. “Actually,” he said, completing a half-dozing thought, “what I was doing was playing chess.”

She pulled a shirt around her shoulders and regarded him critically. “You’re a weird one, Hornswell Hake,” she said, “and you’re about to have the damnedest sunburn a human being ever had.”

Obediently he turned over to toast his other side. The sensible thing to do, of course, was to get dressed and go on in to A1 Halwani, and take up their lives. He wasn’t ready to do that. Neither was Leota; it was her suggestion that made them stop the borrowed hydrogen buggy and run down to the beach for a swim. The notion was ludicrously inappropriate to the high-stakes international gangster games they had just been playing; that was what had made it seem just right. “What did you mean, you were playing chess?” she demanded.

“Maybe it was more like doing a jigsaw puzzle,” he said thoughtfully. “I was fitting pieces together.”

“What kind of pieces?”

“Well—” He craned his neck, to squint up at the burning sky. “Like up there there’s the satellite.”

“So? There are satellites everywhere.”

“But this one was the one we needed.” Twenty-two thousand miles straight up; it had taken the pictures from the monitoring cameras and sprayed them all over the world, along with the incriminating words of Yosper and Curmudgeon and the sheik. A chunk of metal no bigger than a piano, but it was there and it had worked.

“I don’t quite see how that’s part of a jigsaw puzzle—”

“And there’s the ‘thinking with’,” he said, rolling over again to face her in spite of the sun. “I was thinking, it’s part of a sort of series: Thinking with. Hypnotism. The ecstatic mystical state. Schizophrenia. The hallucinogenic-drug high—they’re all so much like each other.”

Leota sighed. “Horny,” she said earnestly, “if we’re ever going to get married, or anything, you’re going to have to learn to get the marbles out of your mouth. What are you talking about?”

“I’m sorry. I guess I don’t exactly know, except that what they all have in common is a sort of detachment from reality, and when I get back to Long Branch I want to talk about that. To the church, for starters. Then to anybody who’ll listen. Now that we’re all big TV stars, maybe I can get on the air to talk about it.”

She nodded seriously. After a moment, she pointed out, “You said T.”

“We. Us—if you’ll come along?”

“I might give it a try,” she said cautiously. “Are you sure it’s, well, healthy?”

He sat up and rubbed his chin. “I could be surer,” he admitted. Then he said, “That was the chess-playing part, trying to figure out what moves come next. For instance. What’s the Reddis’ move when they find out we gave the whole world the information we sold them? What’s the Team’s next move in A1 Halwani—do they come back some night and defoliate all the sun plants just to get even? What’s their next move with me—do they frame me on a drug bust or get me dumped in the Hackensack River?”

“A bunch of real good questions, Horny,” she applauded.

“I even have some answers. As for the Reddis, our only move is to keep our eyes open. We’ve given everything away, so there’s no profit for them in us any more; I think we call that game a draw and forget it. I hope,” he said. “For the Team, that’s harder. I think I know the right move if they just kill off the sun plants, out of meanness, with those spray-cans of bacteria and fungus. There’s a resistant strain at IPF, and I think I have a flower from it tucked away. If not, at least I know where to find them. And the move to counter any personal trouble is just what we’re going to do anyway. Go public. Raise so much noise they won’t dare touch us.”

Leota touched his shoulder and frowned. “You’re hot. You’re going to be really burned if we stay here any longer.”

“So let’s go,” he said, standing up and beginning to put his clothes on. The sun was well up in the sky—it was not even afternoon yet, he realized with astonishment—and it was, when you considered everything, he thought, a really beautiful day. They picked their way barefoot over the sharp pebbles toward the road, Hake relaxed, Leota thoughtful. As they were getting into the hydrogen buggy she said:

“Those sound like pretty good moves. Especially since we don’t have much choice. But did you figure out how the game comes out?”

“That’s easy,” he said, climbing in after her as she slid behind the wheel. “We win.” He leaned back and closed his eyes. “Or else we don’t,” he added. “But either way we play it out, the best we can.”