The Cool War

II

He barely made it to the bus station on the boardwalk by 8:15, but then the bus was late. By the time it limped along he had had ten unprotected minutes in the unending bitter wind. The first section of the tandem was full already. He found a seat in the second bus, but that meant sitting next to the charcoal generator, which was old and leaky and backed smoke into the bus every time the driver throttled down. He might have slept, but for the matter of his sermon for the next morning. No sense putting it off. He took the lid off his battered portable typewriter, balanced it on his knee and began to type:

Finding Something to Love in Everyone.

Well, that was a start. When you came right down to it, there was something lovable in every human being. Jessie Tunman? She was a hard worker. The world would fall apart without Jessie Tunmans. The coal man? Out day after day in every kind of weather, keeping everyone’s home warm. Sergeant Moncozzi— He drew a blank on Sergeant Moncozzi, disrupted his chain of thought, sat with his mind skittering in a hundred directions for a minute and then t crossed out what he had written and typed in a new title:

If You Can’t Love, Then Tolerate.

“Excuse me,” said the lady next to him, “are you a writer?”

He looked up at her. She had got on in Matawan, a tall, skinny woman with an old-fashioned wedding ring belligerently displayed on her finger, hair an unlikely yellow, face made up so heavily it had to be concealing wrinkles. “Not exactly,” he said.

“I didn’t think so,” she said. “If you were a real writer you’d be writing instead of just staring at the paper like that.”

He nodded and went back to looking out the window. The tandem bus was creaking up the long slope of the Edison Bridge, the motor groaning and faltering to make forty kilometers an hour. It was all right on the straightaway, but on anything more than a three percent grade it could not even reach the legal limit of eighty. Down below the river was choked with breaking-up ice laced together with a tangle of northern water hyacinth. A tug was doggedly trying to clear a path for a string of coal barges running upstream.

“When I was a girl,” the woman said, leaning across him to peer out the window, “this was all oil tanks.” She rubbed a clear spot on the window and scowled at the housing developments. “Dozens of tanks. Big ones. And all full. And refineries, with the flames coming out of the top of them where they were burning the waste gas. Waste gas, young man! They didn’t even try to save it. Oh, I tell you, we had some good times in 1970.”

If You Can’t Love, Then Tolerate.

Exercising his tolerance to the full, Horny said, “I guess there have to be places for the people to live.”

“People? Who’s talking about people? I mean, where’s the oil now, young man? The Communists have it all, what the Jews left us. Wasn’t for them, we’d have good times again.”

“Well, madam—”

“You know I’m right, don’t you? And all this crime and pollution!” She sank back into her seat, neck craned to stare at him triumphantly.

“Crime? I’m not sure I see how crime comes into it.”

“Plain as the nose on your face! All these young people with nothing to do! If they had their cars they could ride around with a six-pack and a couple of girls, and who could be happier? Oh, I remember those times, until the Jews spoiled it for all of us.”

Horny Hake fought back his temper. She was, of course, referring to the Israeli reprisals against the Arab League, the commando and air attacks that had blasted open every major oilfield in the Near East, causing the Abu Dabu firestorm and a thousand lesser, but immense, blazes. “I don’t agree, madam! Israel was fighting for its life.”

“And ruining mine! Talk about pollution. Do you know they increased the particulate matter in the air by seven point two percent? And it was just to be mean.”

“It was to save their lives, madam! It wasn’t the Arab armies that put Israel in danger. They proved that six times. It was the Arab oil, and the Arab money!”

She looked at him with dawning comprehension, then sniffed. “You Jewish?” she asked. “I thought so!”

Hake swallowed the answer and turned back to the window, steaming. After a moment he put the lid back on the typewriter, slid it under the seat, closed his eyes, folded his hands and began practicing his isometric exercises to relax.

The trouble with the question was that it had a complicated answer, and he didn’t like her well enough to give it. Hake didn’t think of himself as Jewish—well, he wasn’t; but it was more complex than that. He didn’t think of himself as a minister, either, or at least not the kind of person he had always thought of as a minister, back when he was a kid. Considering how his life had changed in the past two years, he wasn’t altogether sure who he was. Except that he was himself. Physically he might be somebody new, but inside he was old Horny Hake, whose choices were limited, not too lucky with women, not too financially successful. Maybe not even too smart, at least compared to the bright new kids out of the seminaries. But the center of his own personal universe, all the same.

The first memory Horny Hake had of his early life was being carried, hastily and not very carefully, through the wheat fields of his parents’ kibbutz. The sprinklers were going, and the sour smell of the grain was heavy in the sodden, sultry air. He was maybe three years old at the time, and it was way past his bedtime.

He woke up with a yell. Something had scared him. It was going right on scaring him: crunching, roaring blasts of sound, people shouting and screaming. He didn’t know what it was. Little Horny knew what rocket fire sounded like well enough, because he had heard the kibbutz militia practicing in the fallow fields every week. This was different. He could not identify these terrifying eruptions with the orderly slow fire of the drill. Neither had he heard people shriek in agony and fear when rockets exploded. He began to cry. “Sssh, bilmouachira,” said whoever was carrying him, gruff, scared, a man’s voice. Not his father’s. When he realized that neither his mother nor his father was with them, that he and the unknown man were all alone, he stopped crying. It was too frightening for tears.

At three he was still young enough to be treated as a baby, too old to like it. He also disliked the physical sensations of where they were; it was unpleasantly hot, but the mist from the sprayers was clammy cold. “Put down, magboret” he yelled, but the man who was carrying him didn’t put him down, he clamped a dirty, calloused hand that tasted of grease and salt over Horny’s mouth. Then Horny recognized the hand. It was old Ahmet, the Palestinian electrician who ran the milking machines at the kibbutz, and babysat for Horny when his parents flew into Haifa or Tel Aviv for a weekend.

By all rights Horny’s life should have ended right there, because the PLO commandos had them dead to rights. What saved them was a diversion. Horny remembered it all his life, a tower of flame that seemed to reach the sky. He got it confused in his mind, as he grew up, with the Abu Dabu firestorm, when the Israelis dumped their shaped nuclear charge into the oilfields that gave the Arabs their muscle. It was impossible, of course. Probably what had actually exploded on the edge of the kibbutz was no more than the tractor gas pumps. But it kept the commandos busy enough for long enough to save his life.

Horny never saw his father again. None of the male militia at Kibbutz Meir survived the first strike. Horny’s mother lived, but she was too seriously wounded to go back to farm life. She took the baby and returned to America, lived long enough to marry a widower with five children and bear him Horny’s half-sister. It was the best she could do for her son, and it wasn’t bad. He grew up in that family in Fair Haven, New Jersey, well cared for and well educated.

That was in the last Arab-Israeli war, the fourth after Yom Kippur, the second after the Bay of Sharks, the one that settled things forever. Growing up after it, Horny had been alternately full of resolve to return and build up Israel again (but Israel did fine without him) and determination to help his new country as a thermodynamic engineer, able to solve the problems of wiped-out oil reserves. It didn’t work out that way. It might have, if he hadn’t spent so much of his childhood in a wheelchair. But after two years of MIT he began to perceive that technology didn’t seem to deal with the kind of problems people came to him with: the invalid young man was a repository for all confidences, and he found he liked it He switched schools and objectives. The next step was the seminary, and he wound up a Unitarian minister.

He had not married. Not because he was in a wheelchair; oh, no, any number of young women had made it perfectly clear that that wouldn’t stop them. At the seminary he had paid a shrink for a dozen fifty-minute hours to find out, among other things, why that was. He was not sure he had had his money’s worth. It seemed to have something to do with pride. But why that much pride? He had learned that he was full of unresolved conflicts. He hated Arabs, who had killed his father, and ultimately his mother too. But the man who hid him out in the wheat and saved his life was also an Arab, whom he loved. He had been brought up as a Jew, a non-religious Jew, to be sure, but in an atmosphere saturated with dreidels and Chanukah candles. But both his parents had been born Protestants, one side Lutheran and the other Methodist, who had happened to admire the kibbutz lifestyle and been accepted as volunteers in the exciting years when all the second-generation kibbutzim were flocking to the cities and the agro-industrial settlements were desperate for warm bodies.

So he wound up a minister in a Unitarian church in Long Branch, New Jersey, between a pizzeria and a parking lot, and all in all he liked it well enough. At least until the last cardiac operation, two years before, that had changed things around.

Now he was not really sure what he liked. What he disliked was clear enough. He disliked crime, and filth, and poverty, and meanness; and most of all he disliked bigots like the woman beside him. He maintained silence all the way to Newark, where he got out while the bus driver stood in the doorway with his shotgun until all the passengers were safely inside the terminal, just in time to catch the Metroliner to Washington.

The Metroliner was a four-bus string, with a pilot, copilot, stewardess and conductor. From the outside it looked glittering and new. Inside, not quite so new. For one thing, in his coach section three of the windows were stuck open. For another the woman from the Long Branch bus followed him aboard, evidently anxious to renew the conversation.

For the first twenty miles Hake tried to feign sleep, but it was hard going. Not only was the window behind him open, but for some reason the air-conditioning was full on and icy drafts caught him in the temple every time he leaned back and closed his eyes.

At the rest stop at the Howard Johnson’s outside Philadelphia, he got out, went to the men’s room, came out and stood gloomily surveying the Philadelphia Slag Bank until the pilot tapped his horn impatiently. He leaped in at the last minute, followed closely by a girl in a denim zipper-suit, who gave him a surprisingly inviting smile. The smile collapsed when he sat down in the front seat, next to a large black woman counting rosary beads. The girl hesitated, then went back to the next vacant seat, and gratefully Hake fell asleep.

He woke up quite a long time later realizing that someone was talking to him in a penetrating whisper. “—to bother you, but it’s important. Would you please come back to the toilet with me?”

He sat up suddenly and looked around, feeling frowsty with sleep and somewhat irritable. His black neighbor was gone, replaced by a Puerto Rican woman holding a baby with one hand and a copy of El Diario in the other.

The voice came from behind him; he turned and met the eye of the girl in the zip-suit.

“Turn back!” she whispered tensely. “Don’t look at me!”

Confused, he followed orders. Her whisper reached him. “I think you’re being watched, and I don’t want any trouble. So what I’ll do is I’ll go back in the toilet. Nobody pays much attention to that. The one on the left; it’s got a broken seat so nobody uses it much. Will you?”

Hake started to ask what for, but swallowed it. He said instead, “Where are we?”

“About half an hour out of Washington. Come on, tiger, I won’t hurt you.”

“I have to get out pretty soon,” Hake said. “I mean, I’m not going all the way into Washington—”

“Will you please come back and quit arguing? Look, I’m going back to the toilet now. Wait one minute. Then you just get up and stroll back and come right in. I’ll leave the door unlatched. There’s plenty of room, I already checked it.”

“Lady,” said Hake, “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but please leave me alone.”

“Oaf!”

“I’m sorry.”

She whispered angrily, “You don’t even know why I want you to come back there, do you?”

He paused, surprised. “I don’t? Well, then, I guess I don’t.”

“So come. It’s important.” And she got up, turned around in the aisle to scowl at him, and headed toward the back. None of the other passengers were watching, having reached the terminal phase of mass transit where they were asleep or engrossed in whatever they were doing or cataleptic.

For a moment Horny Hake seriously thought of following her, just on the chance that it would be interesting. She really was rather a nice-looking woman, years younger than he was but not so young as to be embarrassing. There was very little chance that she intended to cut his throat or infect him with a communicable disease. He didn’t have a lot to lose, he was sure; but just at that moment the bus slowed and the driver leaned over, eyes still on the road. “Here’s your stop,” he called.

Would have been interesting; should have taken a chance, thought Hake, but that’s the story of my life. As he got out of the Metroliner, at a private driveway marked Lo-Wate Bottling Co., Inc., he looked back and saw the girl emerging hurriedly from the toilet, staring at him with resentment and rage.

Hake opened his sealed instructions and read them again to make sure:

Debus at Lo-Wate Bottling Co. entrance. Proceed on foot V4 mi. to entrance marked Visitors. State name to receptionist and follow her instructions.

Clear enough. The building marked Visitors—Market Analysis—Sales & Promotion was two-story, ivy-covered, a veteran of the decentralization years of the ’60s and ’70s, but well maintained. The receptionist was a young man who listened as Hake gave his name, then asked, “May I see your travel orders?” He did not trouble to read them, but put them, backside up, under a hooded bulb that emitted a faint bluish glow. What the receptionist saw Horny could not see, but evidently it was satisfactory. “The gentleman with whom you have an appointment will see you in about ten minutes,” he said. “Please be seated.”

It was almost exactly ten minutes, by Hake’s watch. The receptionist had been nice enough to let him use the waiting-room john—he hadn’t dared, in the bus, although the girl’s talk had put the idea strongly in his mind. Then the receptionist beckoned to him. “The gentleman with whom you have an appointment will see you now. This lady will escort you there. Please follow the following instructions. Walk ten paces behind your escort Do not look into any offices. Check any camera, film, microphones or recording devices here. If you have any undeveloped film or magnetic tape on your person it will be damaged.”

“I don’t have anything like that,” said Hake.

The young man nodded, unsurprised. Thinking it over, Hake remembered the thirty-second pause in the vestibule on the way in, waiting for the automatic door to open; no doubt at the same time capacitators probed for metal on his person.

His escort was a little old lady, motherly and smiling, who tottered along at slow-march, crying in a thin, piercing voice: “Uncleared personnel coming through! Uncleared personnel coming through!” Hake didn’t look into the offices because he was getting the uneasy feeling that something was going on that had high stakes involved and orders had better be followed; but he was aware of a rustling of papers being covered and charts being turned to the wall from every doorway they passed.

It did not surprise him that “Lo-Wate Bottling Co.” was some sort of government installation. Even if he had not expected it, “follow the following instructions” would have been a dead giveaway.

All the walls were bare, except for what looked like ventilators but might have concealed surveillance equipment; government-issue cream-colored paint; no windows visible anywhere. Hake wondered about the outside of the building. Surely there had been windows in it? But maybe they were dummies.

The motherly woman reached her destination—a closed door that bore a frame for a nameplate, but instead of a name it had a number: T-34. The guide carefully checked it against a card in her hand, knocked twice and waited. When the door opened she averted her eyes and stared at the ceiling. “The gentleman with whom the gentleman had an appointment is here,” she said.

Hake walked in and shook the hand of the gentleman, accepted a seat and a cigarette and waited.

The gentleman slung himself into a fat leather chair behind a steel drawerless desk, and lit a cigarette of his own. He was short, slim and hairy: not only a Waspro that fluffed out in all directions, but a sloppy beard and sideburns. His general appearance was not of a man who had decided to grow long hair and facial hair, but of someone who simply stopped doing anything about it at some remote point in time. He wore chinos and an Army jacket, without insignia, over a blue work shirt open at the throat; and around his waist he had a gunbelt with a holstered .45.

“I imagine,” he said, “you’re wondering what you’re doing here, Horny.”

Horny let out a long breath. “You are very right about that, Mr.—”

The man waved a hand. “My name doesn’t matter. I suppose you’ve already figured out that this is some kind of cockamamie cloak-and-dagger operation. If you haven’t, you’re pretty dumb. So we don’t give real names to people like you, but you can call me—” he paused to lift a corner of one of the papers on his desk—“ah, yes. You can call me Curmudgeon.”

“Curmudgeon?”

“Don’t ask me why, I don’t decide these things. Now, the first thing we have to do is recall you to active service. Please stand up and repeat the oath.”

“Hey! Hey, wait a minute. I’m thirty-nine years old and draft-proof, and besides I’m a minister.”

“Oh, yes, you certainly are. You’re also a fellow who took ROTC in college, right?”

“Now, that’s ridiculous! I wasn’t really in Rotsy. I was in a wheelchair. It was just some kind of public relations thing, for extra credit—”

“But you took the oath, and when you signed up you signed for twenty years in the Reserve. And that hasn’t changed, has it? So stand up.”

“No,” said Horny, for whom things were going much too fast. “I mean, can’t you let me know what this is all about first? I guess it’s some kind of CIA thing, but—”

“Oh, Horny, you’re tiresome. Look. The CIA was disbanded years ago, after the scandals. Didn’t you know that? There’s no such thing any more. What we have here is just a team. With a job to do.”

“Then what kind of job—”

The man stood up, and suddenly looked a lot taller. He said in a flat voice, “You have two choices, Hake. Take the oath. Or go to jail for evasion of service. That’s only a five-year sentence, but they’ll be hard years, Hake, they’ll be very hard years. And then we’ll think of something else.”

It took about three seconds for Horny Hake to catalogue his alternate choices and realize that he didn’t have any; reluctantly and sullenly he stood up and repeated the oath.

“Now, that’s much better,” the man said warmly. “The first thing I have to do is give you three orders. Remember them, Horny. You can’t write them down, but I’m recording the orders and your responses—which, in each case, are to be, ‘I understand and will comply.’ Got it? All right, first order: This project and your participation in it are top secret and are not to be discussed with anyone at any time without the specific authorization of me or whoever replaces me in the event I die or am removed. Got that?”

“I guess so—”

“No, that’s not it ‘I understand and will comply.’ “

“I understand and will comply,” said Hake thoughtfully.

“Second order: The declassification of any material relating to this project can be only at my explicit order in writing, or that of my successor. It is without time limit You are bound to it for the rest of your life. Okay?”

“Right,” said Hake dismally.

“Wrong. ‘I understand—’ “

“All right. I understand and will comply.”

“Third: This security classification also applies to the fact that you are recalled to active duty. You may not inform anyone of this.”

“What am I supposed to tell my church?” Hake demanded. The man wagged his head. “Oh, all right: I understand and will comply. But what am I supposed to tell them?”

“You’re very sick, Horny,” Curmudgeon said sympathetically. “You have to take time off.”

“But I can’t just leave—”

“Certainly not. We’ll supply you with a replacement And,” he went on, “there are certain advantages to this from your point of view. For payroll procedures, you will be placed on retainer by Lo-Wate as a consultant at an annual salary equal to a GS-16—which, if you don’t know, is currently about $83,000 a year, counting bonuses and cost-of-living. That’s, let’s see—” he took a notebook out of his inside shirt pocket—“looks like better than thirty thousand more than you’re making now from your church. And we’ll take good care of you in other ways. The Team takes care of its people.”

“But I like being a minister!” Even as he was saying the words, he felt their total irrelevance. “Why me?” he burst out.

“Ah,” said the man, all sympathy, “how many people have asked that question? Men dying on a battlefield. Girls being raped. Children with leukemia. Of course,” he said, “in your case it’s a little easier to explain. We put through a sort for persons on active service or capable of being activated for our team. Age at least twenty but no more than forty-five, of Middle Eastern but non-Jewish and non-Moslem extraction. I guess there weren’t all that many, Horny. Then we evaluated in point scores. Point scores,” he said confidentially, “usually means that we don’t really know who we want. We figure out a couple of things— Eastern-Mediterranean languages, knowing the customs of the area, free of obligations that would interfere with leaving for parts unknown for prolonged periods. That sort of thing. And you won, Horny, fair and square.”

“You want me to go be a spy in the Middle East?”

He coughed. “Well, that’s the funny part. It says here your first mission will be in France, Norway and Denmark. It’s a strange thing,” he said philosophically, “but every once in a while the system screws up. Well. It’s nice talking to you, but you’ve got two other people to see before you leave. Let me have you taken to your next appointment.”

The next person was a plump and rather pretty woman, who said at once, “How much history do you know?”

“Well—”

“I don’t mean Romans and the Dukes of Burgundy, I mean over the last couple of decades. For instance. Why hasn’t there been a shooting war in the last twenty years?”

Well, he knew the answer to that. No one had the heart for a shooting war any more, not since the brief violent bloodbaths that had splashed up and smeared twenty small countries in a couple of decades. For one thing, they were bad for business. Oil roared with pain when the Israelis demolished the Arab fields. Steel screamed under the squeeze of price-fixing. Banking wept under currency controls.

“I would say,” he began judiciously, “that it’s because—”

“It’s because it’s too dangerous,” she said. “Nobody wins a war any more—if the enemy knows a war is going on.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“There are two ways to win a race, Hake. One is to beat your opponent by sheer force. The other is to trip him up. They’re playing trip-him-up with us. Why do you think we’re so short of energy in this country?”

“Well, because the world is running out of—”

“Because they manipulate our balance of payments, Hake. The mark is up to three dollars, did you know that? And what about crime?”

“Crime?”

“You’ve heard of crime, haven’t you? It’s not safe to walk the streets of any city in America today. Even our highways aren’t safe, there are bus robbers in every state. Do you know why you can’t get an avocado for love or money? Because somebody—some body!—deliberately brought in insect pests that wiped out the crop.”

Horny said, “I think you jumped over something about crime. I didn’t quite get that part.”

“It’s plain, Hake! Somebody’s encouraging this lawlessness. Cheap Spanish and Algerian porno flicks that show muggers and highwaymen doing it to all the girls. They look crude. But, oh, how carefully engineered! War is not all bombs and missiles, my boy. It’s hurting the other fellow any way you can. And if you can hurt him so he can’t prove it’s happening, why, that’s one for your side. And that’s what they’re doing to us, Hake. Here, have a look at this tape.” And she threaded a cassette into a viewer.

Horny stared at it, bemused. It started way back, back before the Big Wars entirely. The peace-loving British had pioneered in this immoral equivalent for war as far back as the nineteenth century: they found a good way to discourage resistance in subject populations by encouraging them to trip out on opium. America itself had exported cigarettes and Coca-Cola around the world. Now, according to the tape, it was becoming state policy, and William James was turning in his grave. China flooded the Soviet Union with Comecon vodka at half the market price. It was not a weapon. No one died. But twenty percent of the steel-workers in Magnitogorsk were absent with hangovers on an average working day. Tokyo flooded the Marianas with cheap, high-quality sukiyaki noodles, reminding the voters of their ancestry just before the referendum that rejoined the islands to Japan. During the London water shortage just before the completion of the Rape of Scotland waterworks, Irish nationalists went around turning on hydrants and covert sympathizers left their taps running. It worked so well that Palestinian refugees, circumcized and trained for the occasion, repeated the process in Haifa to such an extent that two hundred thousand acres of orange groves died for lack of irrigation.

By now such tactics had become well institutionalized, and wholly secret. Everybody did it. Nobody talked about it.

Horny Hake was horrified. As soon as he began to understand the thrust of what he was being shown he burst out, “But that’s animal. Wars are supposed to be all over!”

The woman replaced the cover over her projector and sighed, “Go through that door, there’s somebody who wants to study you.”

The somebody turned out to be a sandy-haired young man with spectacles, who looked a little like Hake. “Jim Jackson,” he said, standing up. “I’m your replacement.”

“Replacement for what?” Hake demanded.

“You’re going on a sabbatical,” said Jackson, watching Hake’s expression thoughtfully. “Right word?”

“Sabbatical? It’s a minister’s vacation. I thought I was supposed to be sick.”

“Oh, shit,” said Jackson crossly, “have they changed the plans again? Well, anyway, I’m going to take over for you while you’re on active duty.”

Hake looked at him jealously. “Are you a minister?”

“I’m whatever they tell me to be,” Jackson shrugged. “They say ‘You’re an account executive’ or ‘You’re a TV producer,’ and I do it. You’d be surprised how easy it is when you’re a boss. When somebody else is the boss it’s harder, but I manage. Sometimes I screw up but usually nobody notices.”

Hake was horrified. “A minister has a tough job! How can you possibly take over a congregation?”

“Oh, I think it’ll work out,” said Jackson. “They told me this assignment might be coming up so I went to a church last Sunday. Doesn’t look so hard. I picked up a batch of mimeographed sermons on my way out that ought to keep me going for the first few weeks anyway. Of course,” he said, “that was a Baptist church and I understand you’re Congregational. Or something like that. I suppose there are doctrinal differences, but I’ll manage. I already checked out some books from the library: oldies but goodies like On Being a Woman and stuff by Janov and Perls. What else do you do?”

“Counseling,” said Hake immediately. “The sermon’s nothing by comparison. All the people in the church can come to me with their problems, any time.”

“And you solve them?”

“Well,” said Hake, “no, I don’t always solve them. That’s a sort of structured old-fashioned kind of way to look at it. You can’t force solutions on people. They have to generate their own solutions.”

“How do you get them to do that?”

“I listen,” Hake said promptly. “I let them talk, and when they come to the place where the pain is I ask them what they think they could do about it. Of course there are some failures, but mostly they perceive what they have to do.”

Jackson nodded, unsurprised. “That’s how I handled it when I was a judge, too,” he remarked. “Get the two lawyers into chambers and ask them not to waste my time, tell me what they really think I should do. They’d almost always tell me. I hated to give that job up, to tell you the truth.”

By the time the little old lady returned to conduct Hake out into the real world he was reconciled to the fact that this fantasy had forced itself into reality. Incredibly, he was about to become a spy in a war that he had not even known was going on. Mad\ he thought, following the lady’s leper cry down the hall, while the offices around him slammed doors and bustled with the hiding of secrets from his eyes-front gaze. Mad\

He waited by the side of the road for his bus to pick him up. It was wholly mad, but interesting; Hake found himself accepting it as a sort of lunacy high. At least for some time he would not have to worry about blowing his overload fuse or dealing with Jessie Tunman’s temper. And the extra money would be welcome enough. Hake was not overpaid. Like most preachers, he had moonlighted at a number of occupations over the years—hustling magazine subscriptions and ghosting masters’ theses in school, when he was still chair-ridden; later, when he became a jock, he was counselor at a camp for delinquent boys one summer, and the year following had even driven the little hydrogen-propelled truck that squirted detergent on the heliostats for the local solar power facility. There were important requirements for a minister’s sideline job. It should be either dignified or inconspicuous. No parishioner wanted to see the shepherd of his soul checking out soup cans at the supermarket.

Being a spook might not qualify as dignified, but it was guaranteed to be inconspicuous. There was, of course, the question of right and wrong. That was hard to handle. Hake dealt with it by postponing it. He saw no way out of doing what he was told, so he would do it—trusting that anyone who charged him with evil-doing later, even his own conscience, would forgive it as a temporary aberration in a life otherwise not too bad.

And viewed as madness—i.e., as a sort of penalty-free vacation from the irritating world of objective reality—it was certainly exciting enough! Almost pleasurable, in fact. Anything might happen. He told himself, with a little thrill of excitement, that he had to expect the unexpected… and so he was not even surprised when, instead of the bus, a three-wheeled telephone company repair truck whined to a halt in front of him. Not even when the double doors opened to reveal four people in masks, two of whom pointed guns at him while the others jumped out, grabbed him and threw him inside.

There were no windows in the van, but Hake couldn’t have seen out of them anyway. He was made to lie down on a collection of only approximately level toolboxes and cases of repair parts. He was not allowed to get up until the truck stopped and, now polite and unviolent, the men led him into a normal-looking split-level ranch home in the timeworn style of sixty years earlier. It did not astonish him that he recognized the girl in the doorway. She was tall, slim and really quite pretty, if you didn’t mind some strange behavioral quirks; she was, in fact, the one who had tried to pick him up in the bus.

They moved him like a puppet, talked about him as if he weren’t there. “Search him,” said the girl, and one man held him while another expertly turned out his pockets. The holding wasn’t necessary. Horny had no intention of resisting while the two other men still had their guns pointed in his direction. “Give me his stuff,” she said.

“Bunch of junk, Lee.”

“Give it to me anyway.” She filled her cupped hands with the litter from his pockets. It was not very impressive. Wallet, return ticket on the Metroliner, keys with a rabbit’s-foot chain, summons for power-piggery, the folded sheets that were supposed to be his sermon—

“Hey,” he said. “Where’s my typewriter?”

The girl looked furiously at one of the men, who ventured, “I guess we left it in the truck.”

“Get it! Bring it in the kitchen. You keep an eye on him, Richy.” And the man with the bigger gun pushed him face down on a lumpy couch, while the girl and the other two retired from the room. The couch smelled of generations of use, and when Hake tried to move his face away from it the man called Richy warned, “Don’t try it, pal.”

“I’m not trying anything.” Stubbornly Hake kept his face averted. Now he could study the room, though there was not much to study. It was dark because the picture window had been covered long since with translucent, then opaque, plastic to conserve heat Which he could have wished they had conserved better because, now that he was not moving, he was cold. In the feeble light from two candles Hake worked at trying to memorize Richy’s face. A perfectly ordinary face, youngish, with a red-brown beard. He wondered if he would be able to identify it in a police lineup, and then wondered if he would live to try. Although he was past being surprised he was not past being scared, and this was beginning to scare him.

“Bring him in,” called the girl.

“Right, Lee. Get up, you.” Horny let himself be shoved into the kitchen. It was brighter than the other room, but smelled, if anything, even worse, as though the ghost of long-dead garbage-disposal units had left their greasy deposits to sour in the drain.

The girl was sitting on the edge of a chrome and plastic kitchen table, older than she was. “Well, Reverend H. Hornswell Hake,” she said, “do you want to tell us who you really are?”

It caught him by surprise. “That’s who I am,” he protested.

She shook her head reproachfully. “You a minister? Cripes. Worst cover I ever saw.” She poked through the litter on the table: his papers and his typewriter, opened, with the roller lifted out and inches of the ribbon unrolled—to look for microfilms, maybe? “Look at this driver’s license! It’s dated three days ago. Real amateurish. Anybody would have known to backdate it a year or two, so it wouldn’t look so phony.”

“But that’s when it had to be renewed. Honest, that’s me.

Horny Hake. I’m minister of the Unitarian Church in Long Branch, New Jersey. Have been for years.”

Richy nudged him with the gun, into an aluminum-tube chair. “I suppose you’ve never heard of yo-yos,” he sneered.

“Yo-yos?”

“Or hula hoops. Don’t even know what they are, do you?”

“Well, sure I do. Everybody does.”

“And you know about them better than other people because you’re a toy designer, right? Don’t crap us, Hake, or whatever your name is. What we want to know is, what kind of toys are you exporting these days?”

Hake sat and blinked up at them, silent because he could not think of any answer that he was sure he should make. Except, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lee sighed and took over. “Just start out by admitting you’re a toy designer, why don’t you? In fact,” she said helpfully, “that would be smart, don’t you see? If you don’t admit that much you’ll cause curiosity, which would lead people to suspect that some security matter is involved.”

“But I’m not! I’m a minister!”

“Oh, God, Hake, you’re such a pain.” She glanced morosely toward the bigger of the armed men, who was standing by the door with a .32 automatic hanging loosely from his hand in an ostentatious kind of way. It had a long tube attached to it that Hake supposed to be a silencer. That was also ostentatious, as well as highly unpleasant.

“Want me to try with him?” the.32-automatic man rumbled.

“Not yet. Not unless he keeps this up. Listen, Hake,” she said, “I can see you’re new at this game. Damn Team, they don’t give you proper briefing. Let me tell you the rules, all right?”

“Would you tell me the name of the game, too?”

“Don’t be a wise-ass. Here’s how it’s supposed to go. We’ve kidnapped you, so obviously we’re breaking the law. You’re okay as far as the law goes, but you don’t want to stay kidnapped. Got it so far? That’s the first level of meaning to what’s happening here. Now, on the second level, let’s say you’re really just an ordinary toy designer—”

“I’m not!”

“Oh, shut up, will you? Let me finish. Say you’re a toy designer, and you never heard of the Lo-Wate Bottling Company, alias the Team. Why do you think we kidnapped you? You might suspect we’re from Mattel, or say Sears Roebuck or somebody, maybe. Just plain old industrial espionage, you know, trying to get your new designs. A little rougher than most. But still just commercial, right? Well, in that case there’s a special way you should act. You should cooperate with us. Why? Because your boss wouldn’t expect you to for God’s sake risk your life just to protect a new yo-yo design, even if you were expecting to ship a hundred million of them to the Soviet Union. Got it so far? There’s a limit to what you should put up with just to keep the new fall line from a competitor.”

“Well, that’s probably true, but—”

“No, Hake, no ‘but’ yet. That’s if you’re just a toy designer, really. But now let’s go to the third level. Let’s suppose you’re a toy designer who is actually working for the cloak-and-dagger boys. Let’s say you know these yo-yos carry a subsonic whistle that drives people crazy when their kids play with them. Not fatal. Just enough to make them tense and irritable. Let’s say you’ve figured out that the adult hula hoops are going to cause more slipped disks and sacroiliac disorders than the Soviet economy can put up with—just for instance, right? So what do you do in that case? Why, you act just the way you would on the second level, because you wouldn’t want us to know you weren’t just an ordinary toy designer. What you don’t do, on either level, is lie to us about what you do for a living, because, you see, we already know that; that’s why we brought you here,” she explained.

“But I’m still on the first level! I’m a minister!”

“What rot,” she said scornfully. “And next you’re going to tell me you went to the Team headquarters just to get a diet cola?”

“Well,” he said uncomfortably, and stopped.

“You see? No answer! You can’t even make up a decent lie! Very bad briefing they gave you!”

Hake had to agree that he couldn’t give her an answer— not any answer at all, not after Curmudgeon’s very explicit orders. But he agreed silently. It was a pity no one had explained to him what to do in a case like this. Where were the poison capsules in the false teeth, or the secret radio that would alert Headquarters and bring a hundred agents slinking in to save him?

The girl was waiting for a response. He said desperately, “All I can tell you is the truth. The papers you have tell it the way it is. I’m a Unitarian minister. Period.”

“No, Hake,” she said angrily, “not period. What would a minister be doing where we picked you up?”

“Ah, well,” he said guardedly, “yes, I was asked to come there.”

“To talk about toys for Russia!”

“No! Nobody said a word about toys!”

“Then why were you there?”

“My God, don’t you think I wish I knew? All they said was they wanted somebody with a Near East background who wouldn’t be missed if anything went—” Belatedly he clamped his lips together.

His captors were looking at each other. “Near East?”

“It isn’t the first time that source got it wrong.”

“You think—?”

“So maybe this one isn’t the toy man,” said the man with the .32.

The girl nodded slowly. “So maybe we’re into something entirely different.”

“So maybe it’s time for Phase Two,” said the gunman.

“Yeah. Tell you what, Hake,” she said, turning back to him. “That sort of changes things, doesn’t it? I guess we’ve made some kind of mistake. Here, have some coffee while we figure out what to do next.”

He accepted the cup morosely. The four of them withdrew to the other room and whispered together, glancing through the doorway at him from time to time. He could not hear what they were saying. It did not seem to matter. Let them conspire; there was nothing he could do about it, except to let it happen. Even the coffee was not very good, though not as bad as his precarious situation. These people did not seem like very expert kidnappers or spies or whatever they were; but how much expertise did you need to pull the trigger on a gun? He took another sip of the coffee—

As he was lifting the cup for a third sip, it belatedly occurred to him that it might not be wise to drink something just because it said “Drink Me.” Poison, truth serum, knockout drops— But that was two sips too late. The cup dropped out of his hand, and his head dropped to meet the typewriter case on the table.

When he woke up the typewriter was in his lap, and none of them were anywhere in sight.

He was back on the Metroliner, heading back to Newark. Across the aisle two tiny, elderly ladies were staring at him. “He’s sobering up,” said one loudly.

Equally loudly the other one replied, “Disgusting! If I were his wife I wouldn’t have helped him on the bus, I’d’ve just let him rot there. And serve him right”