The Cool War

IV

There were thirty-one of the kids, and they filled the whole Yellow-Left section of the aircraft, two and four abreast. The Lufthansa stewardesses moved up and down the aisles, checking seat belts and making sure that air-sick bags were in every pouch, and Horny Hake and Alys Brant, his co-leader, followed.

“You’re really good with children,” Alys said admiringly, as he patted two or three of the unfamiliar heads at random. “I wish I could relate to them the way you do.” Then she retreated to her seat at the front of the compartment, leaving Hake to wonder why a woman who didn’t think she could relate to children had maneuvered herself into being his co-leader. By the time he was in his own seat and the jet was airborne he had confronted the fact that this was going to be one sticky trip.

He fell back on a resource of his childhood: counting off the hours till it was over. Nineteen days. That came to 456 hours. Including ground travel time from and to Long Branch, call it 470. He had left the rectory—he checked his watch—nearly five hours before, so now he was a little better than one one-hundredth of the way through the ordeal. In about half an hour it would be one ninetieth. By the time they reached their hotel in Frankfurt as much as a fortieth, maybe more, and by bedtime—

“Father Hake?”

He blinked and turned away from the window. “Mrs. Brant is waving to you, Father,” whispered the stew, her flaxen hair brushing his cheek. “It’s all right, you can get out of your seat for this.”

At the head of the aisle Alys was already standing with one hand on the shoulder of a twelve-year-old, smiling sympathetically toward him. “It’s Jimmy Kenkel,” she said confidentially. “He reached back and punched Martin here in the nose. Probably if you ask the stew she’ll get you some ice.”

Martin’s nose was streaming blood. The regular passengers who had been unlucky enough to be seated in Yellow-Left, dapper tall German businessmen and alert Japanese tourists, were whispering among themselves. Hake whipped out his handkerchief and held it to the boy’s face, bracing himself against the thirty-degree climb of the plane and trying to catch the stew’s eye. By the time he looked around Alys was gone. By the time the stewardess brought ice the bleeding had stopped, and by the time the seat belt sign was off Martin had already revenged himself by pouring the cup of melting ice over Jimmy’s head.

Enough was enough. Hake turned his back on his charges and marched to the midships bar for a drink.

“Two minds with but a single thought, Horny?” asked Alys cheerfully, turning from a conversation with a slim, uniformed man wearing waxed blonde mustaches.

Hake looked at her with displeasure^ “The boy is all right, if you care. God knows what they’ll be doing now they can get up and move around, though.”

“You see, our minds do work alike. I was just asking Heinrich here if they could keep the seat belt sign turned on in just our compartment.”

“Ja, that would be good. But not possible.” The man stuck out his hand. “Heinrich Scholl, Father,” he said. “I am your purser.”

“I’m not a priest, just a Unitarian minister,” Hake said testily, but he accepted a whiskey and water, compliments of the purser. The children had not yet realized they were free, and the stews were moving among them, passing out Cokes and orange juice and packets of in-flight games and puzzles. Hake began to relax. He had flown tens of thousands of miles before he was ten years old, and hardly at all since. It was all new to him, from the back-tapered wing outside the window with its peculiarly feathered tip to the topless bar-stew serving their drinks. The immensity of the aircraft astonished him. He had never fully comprehended the size of the big intercontinental jets, more than a thousand people inside one great steel sausage zapping across the sea. “But I don’t see why we have to have them,” he said. “These jets, I mean. What a waste of energy!”

“Waste?” repeated the purser politely. “But that is not so, Mr. Hake. For the mails alone we must have them, so why not fill them up with passengers?”

“But with energy so short—” he began, thinking of heat-less days in Long Branch and the tons of fossil fuel each of those huge engines on the wing was pouring out.

The purser said kindly, “It is all carefully planned, I assure you, Mr. Hake. Air transport is a vital service. We carry valuable medical supplies, diplomatic pouches, all kinds of strategically vital materials. Why, this very aircraft carried measles vaccine from Koln to New Guinea just, let me see, just last year. Or possibly the year before.”

And since then? Hake asked himself. But all he said was, “Granting that, but why so many of them? I mean, does every pipsqueak little company in the world have to have its own flag line?”

“Pip? Squeak?” repeated the purser, mustache quivering.

“Oh, I don’t mean Lufthansa, of course. I mean all of them. Little countries you never even heard of. I see them coming in to the traffic patterns off Long Branch, African airlines and Latin American airlines and God knows what airlines. Couldn’t America, for instance, use Air France or Aeroflot or whatever, instead of flying its own planes all the time?”

Alys laughed and pushed her glass forward for a refill. “Oh, Horny! And let them do God knows what with our mail all the way across the Atlantic? You are so naive!”

The purser nodded stiffly and said, “It has been most interesting speaking with you, Mr. Hake, but now I must attend to my duties. The flight attendants must now start serving dinner.”

“And maybe you should too, Horny,” said Alys, looking past his shoulder. Ten of the kids were lined up for the toilets, and some of the boys were fighting again. “It’s hard on you,” she commiserated, “but boy-boy fights are a man’s job, aren’t they?”

Boy-girl fights also turned out to be a man’s job, and so, Hake found out, were some of the seamier kinds of what he had always considered pure girl questions. Tiny Brenda came to him and whispered, “Reverend Hake, I’m having my personal hygiene.”

He leaned closer to her, juggling the half-eaten dinner tray. “What?”

“My friend is here,” she said, blushing.

“What friend are you talking about?” he demanded, and then Alys drifted by to whisper in his ear.

“The poor little thing wants a sanitary napkin,” she said. “Tell her they’re in the washrooms.”

“They’re in the washrooms, Brenda,” he said.

The girl nodded. “Some of the girls call it ‘my friend.’ I call it ‘my personal hygiene’ because that’s what it says on the bag in the bathroom in school.”

“So go to the washroom,” said Hake, patting her cautiously on_%the shoulder; and then to Alys, “Why me?”

“Because you’re the father-surrogate, of course. I’m only a kind of elderly girl,” she said sympathetically. “Well. It’s going to be a long flight. I think I’ll see if I can catch some sleep.”

“Me too,” said Hake hopefully, surrendering his tray to a no longer smiling stew.

The hope never materialized. All through the five-hour flight Hake and the stews quelled insurrection. At least, Hake thought, toward the end of it, he was beginning to know some of them as individuals: Jimmy and Martin and Brenda; black Heidi and little blonde Tiffany; Michael, Mickey and Mike; the big, gentle, Buddha-like twelve-year- old, Sam-Wang; the three oldest girls, all from the little religious backwater of Ocean Grove. They all looked astonishingly alike, wedge-cut hairdos and disapproved lipstick and eye-shadow, but they were not related. One was named Grace, and one was named Pru, and the shortest and strongest and meanest of the three was named Demeter. Demeter was the one who swatted the youngest boys on the rear as they stretched across adult passengers to get at each other. Demeter and Grace finked to the Lufthansa stews when three of the junior-highs were smoking in the toilet. Demeter and Pru bribed the smaller ones to be quiet with the in-flight game kits. How splendid it all would have been, if only the Ocean Grovers had been doing it all to help Hake, instead of trying to soften him up for their own misdeeds: sharing drinks with the salesmen in the first-class lounge, making illicit dates with the male flight attendants. Through it all Alys slept like a baby, head on the shoulder of the Turkish Army officer in the seat next to her. But Hake didn’t sleep, and neither did the stews.

Eleven hours down, four hundred and fifty-nine to go. It was going to be a long trip.

They arrived at the immense, echoing Frankfurt-am-Main airport at two a.m., local time. Worst of all possible times: because of the time difference, the kids were not really quite ready for sleep; but they would have to be up and presenting marmosets to a Kinderhalle at nine that very morning. Hake kept the children whipped into line in the transit lounge while Alys, yawning prettily, sorted through the room assignments.

Somehow Hake got them all through Customs and into the main departure hall. There were no chairs, of course; but somehow he kept them from killing each other through the hour-long wait for their chartered bus; until the driver arrived, furiously complaining in German, finally managing to explain that he had been waiting outside in the parking lot for the past two hours. Somehow he got them into their rooms at the shiny big hotel, with the baggage approximately in the right rooms, or close enough. “I’ve put you in with Mickey and Sam-Wang,” Alys said, handing him keys. “Sam snores. And Mickey’s mother says he wets the bed if he isn’t got up at least twice during the night, so— Anyway, I’ve finished your room assignments for you, Horny,” she said virtuously. “Now I think I’d better tuck in myself. It’s been a long day. Oh, I’ve had to take an extra room. It wouldn’t be fair to the children to put any of them in with me, I’m so restless. I’d keep them up all night.”

He watched her sway gracefully into one of the exposed teardrop elevators, then sighed, finished signing the registration cards and counting the passports and followed to his own room.

He found the bed so delightful that he allowed himself to lie with his arms crossed behind his head for a while, enjoying the prospect of sleep before letting himself experience it. Sam-Wang’s snoring blended with the mutter of the air-conditioner and the distant yammer of someone’s TV set across the hall. At least his virtue was spared—no, not his virtue so much as his sense of professional morality; bird-dogging around European hotels with Alys would have seemed pretty attractive if he hadn’t been her marriage counselor. But if she wasn’t after his body, why was she here? For that matter, why was he here? He had no doubt in the world that Lo-Wate Bottling Company, or whatever the spook factory chose to call itself, was behind it all.

That was clear enough. But what was it, exactly, that they were behind? If they were sending a new agent on a mission to Western Europe, shouldn’t they tell him what the mission was? Were the marmosets secret intelligence couriers? Was Curmudgeon going to turn up in trenchcoat and fedora, out of some rain-shadowed doorway, to hand him The Papers? And if so, what would the papers say? It seemed a lousy way to run an intelligence agency.

No doubt it would all be revealed to him in time. He uncrossed his arms, rolled over, buried his head in the pillow, closed his eyes—

And opened them again.

He had forgotten to put Mickey on the pot.

It would have been easy enough to go on forgetting it, but a trust was a trust. Hake pushed himself out of bed, thrust his arms into his robe and coaxed the half-sleeping ten-year-old into the bathroom. With difficulty he steered him away from the bidet to the proper appliance, but then was rewarded for his efforts and got the still unawake boy back into bed… just as the phone rang stridently.

Hake swore and grabbed it. A voice screeched in his ear, “Where the hell are my marmosets?”

“Marmosets? Who is this?” Hake demanded in a hoarse whisper; Sam-Wang’s snoring had stopped and Mickey was rocking resentfully in his bed.

“Jasper Medina. You better get down here, Hake, and start explaining where the monkeys are. I’ll be at the elevators.” And he hung up.

Resentfully Hake carried his discarded clothes into the bathroom and put them back on. As he combed his hair he glowered at his reflection: that healthy outdoors face now had circles under its eyes, and this trip was just beginning! He let himself out as quietly as he could and waited for the glass elevator bubble to come for him.

Waiting for him in the main lobby was a tall, lean man with bald head and white beard, chewing on a corncob pipe. “Hake? What’s your excuse for this foul-up? What do you mean, you don’t know what I’m talking about? There’s twenty-two pair of Golden Lion marmoset fancies coming in with you, and where are they? My boys’ve been all over Frankfurt tonight, trying to locate them!”

“Who are you?”

“Don’t you listen, sonny? I’m Medina, from the Paris office. IPF. These are my assistants—” he pointed to four men clustered around the wall telephones, two of them talking into instruments, the other two standing by. “Sven. Dieter. Carlos. Mario. We’re supposed to help out with your project.”

“I sure can use a little of that,” said Hake feelingly, beginning to feel more friendly. “Those kids—”

“Kids? Oh, no, Hake, we’ve got nothing to do with the kids. We’ll take care of the marmosets for you, if you’ll just tell us where they are. But not the kids. Now if you’ll just—wait a minute. What is it, Dieter?”

One of the men was coming toward them, beaming. “Jasper,” he said—he pronounced it “Yosper”—“these monkeys, we have found them. At the Zookontrolle, and all quite well.”

“Ah.” Medina puffed on his pipe, and then smiled broadly. “Well, in that case, Hake,” he said, offering his hand, “there’s no need for us to waste time here, is there? Get a good night’s sleep. I’ll meet you for breakfast.”

Get a good night’s sleep… By the time the glass elevator had him back at his floor he was almost asleep already, but he forced himself to put Mickey on the toilet one more time. Then he dropped his clothes on the floor and crawled into bed, clicking off the lamp beside his pillow.

But even through closed eyes he perceived that the light hadn’t gone out. When he opened them he saw why. Outside the window it was broad daylight.

Nineteen days in glamorous Europe! It was a good thing he hadn’t believed in that in the first place, Hake thought; at least he was spared disappointment. Cathedrals, museums, lovely river views, castles—they saw the Cologne cathedral out of the window of a bus; the Rhine was a streak of greenish-gray through tattered clouds. In Copenhagen a whole afternoon’s schedule had to be called off, because Tivoli was closed for repairs, having been bombed silly by some unreconciled Frisian nationalists—.good deal, or might have been, because they needed the rest; but in practice what it meant was an extra six hours of riding herd on the kids. In Oslo a teacher’s strike closed the schools and left Hake’s charges to present their marmosets to a red-eyed principal taking five minutes off from the all-night contract negotiations.

After that first morning in Frankfurt, when he had gone to Alys’s room to knock her awake—and found in front of her door the neat brown boots of a Turkish major—Hake stopped expecting Alys to attempt to assault his virtue. She didn’t need to. There were plenty of other targets. If she hungered and thirsted for his flesh, she concealed it well. She spent more time with old, bald, half-blind Jasper Medina than with Hake. Although, to be fair, she spent more time with Hake than she did with anybody else. Especially the kids.

Jasper—or “Yosper”—was a puzzle. Since he was from IPF’s European customer-relations department, it followed as the night the day that he had to be a spook. But he offered no secret plans, conveyed no instructions; when Hake mentioned the name “Curmudgeon” in his presence the old man gave a cracked laugh and said, “Curmudgeon? Is that what you think I am? Let me tell you, sonny, I’m exactly what you’ll be in another forty years—only better,” he added virtuously, “because I accept the Lord as my Savior, and you don’t!”

But he was always there, he and his four silent helpers. The marmosets got their grapes and mealworms every four hours; where there was sun to make it possible, got an occasional afternoon in the open air; were brushed and groomed and picked over for fleas. The marmosets had plenty of supervision.

What the kids had was Horny Hake.

By the time they reached Copenhagen, Hake believed he had encountered every ailment young human flesh was heir to—or heiress to; especially heiress to: cuts and scrapes, sulks and sneezes, faints and fevers. (126 hours down, 344 to go—better than a quarter of the way.) By Oslo it was mostly fevers and sneezes. They weren’t serious, but they kept Hake up most nights to make sure they weren’t. Alys slept securely through to breakfast, explaining that Hake’s long experience with counseling had made him so much better at handling night alarms that there was no point, really, in her waking—-“just to be in your way, Horny.” And, of course, the Marmoset Duennas did not let themselves get involved. Their lives had become pretty easy, with the number of woolly monkeys dwindling at every stop. But adamantly they continued to refuse to have anything to do with the children; one species of sub-human primate was all they had contracted for.

Sven and Dieter, Mario and Carlos—why did Hake always have difficulty telling them apart? They were very different in height, weight, and coloring. It had to do with the way they wore their hair, all in a sort of Henry the Fifth soupbowl, and the clothes: always the same, pale blue jackets and dark blue slacks. But there was more than that. They seemed to think and talk the same way. Hake often had the impression there was only one person speaking, sometimes with a German accent, sometimes Spanish, but with only one mind behind them. “Yosper says we must go to bed early, six a.m. flight in the morning.” “Yosper advises do not drink this water, last month PLO terrorists filled reservoir with acid.” As it seemed to Hake, the mind behind them was Yosper’s.

And all of that made sense, perfect sense, if they were in fact disciplined spooks on the payroll of International Pets and Flowers, alias Lo-Wate, alias the shock troops of the cool war. But were they? Hake saw no sure signs. No unexplained absences from duty. No secret meetings. Not even meaningful glances among them, or sentences begun and left incomplete. If they were spooks, when were they going to start spooking?

More than once Hake had made up his mind to confront Yosper and demand the truth. Whatever the truth might be. But he had not gone through with it, only with hints. And Yosper never responded to them. It was not that Yosper was not a talkative man. He loved to talk. He never tired of telling Hake and Alys all the ways in which the cities they raced through were inferior to their American equivalents —not counting, now and then, the occasional place where you could get a decent smorgasbord or a worthwhile Jagertopf. And he never tired of explaining to them why Unitarians shouldn’t call themselves religious; Yosper was Church of God, twice born, fully saved, and sublimely sure that the time would come when he would be sitting next the Throne, while Hake and Alys and several billion others would be deeply regretting their failures in a much worse place. But he wouldn’t talk about anything related to espionage.

And he wouldn’t help with the kids; and of the two failures, Hake found the second hardest to live with.

By the three-quarters mark they were in Munich. The children’s sneezes were reaching a crescendo, and Hake himself was feeling the strain. He was more exhausted than he had ever been since the days in the wheelchair, and unhappy with the way his insides were conducting themselves. But there was an unexpected delight. Yosper had arranged for an American school in Munich to take the children off their hands for the whole weekend, and so the grownups had the pension to themselves and forty-eight hours to enjoy it.

The enjoyment would have been more pronounced, Hake thought, if his gut had not felt as if someone had stuffed it past its load limit with chili peppers and moldy pickles. He did not quite feel like seeing the town. Still… three hundred and sixty hours down, and only a hundred and ten to go! And no kids till Monday morning.

The pension turned out to be the top floor of a grimy little office building, on a side street near the intersection of two big boulevards. From the outside it didn’t look like much. But it was clean and to Hake, who for fifteen days had been resentfully calculating the energy costs of jet fuel, high-speed elevators and hotel saunas, it was a welcome relief from power-pigging. He did not mind that the rooms clustered around an airshaft, or that there were no porters for the luggage. He didn’t even mind the fact that he had to carry Alys’s bags as well as his own—“I’m really sorry,

Horny, but I just don’t feel up to lugging it.” He didn’t mention that neither did he.

Dinner was potluck, cooked by the proprietor and served by his wife. To Hake’s surprise, Alys showed up for it. Evidently she had run out of Turkish majors, SAS copilots and Norwegian desk clerks. She spent the afternoon in her room but appeared, wan but gracious, at the head of the dinner table. As she picked up her spoon she was brought up short by Yosper rapping a fork against his glass.

“Yosper always says grace,” said Sven—or Dieter—with a scowl.

“Of course,” said Yosper, also scowling, and then bowing his head, “Our Lord, we humble servants thank You for Your bounty and for these foods we are about to eat. Bless them to Your own good ends, and make us truly grateful for what we receive. Amen.”

As the five scowls disappeared, Mario—or Carlos—said, “It is a good custom to have, is it not so? It is like Pascal’s wager. If God is listening, He is pleased. If not, no harm is done.”

“Don’t be irreverent,” said Yosper, but mildly. “Pascal was a con-man. You shouldn’t obey God’s commandments to save your skin. You should obey because you know God exists, and the daily miracle of life proves it to you.” Alys coughed and changed the subject.

“Horny, I haven’t been idle all day,” she said sweetly, handing him a couple of newspapers and a magazine. “These were in my room. I’ve gone through them all and marked the parts that interest you.”

Yosper peered at her over his uneaten soup. “How do you know what interests him?”

“Oh,” she said brightly, “it’s a sort of research project I’ve been doing for him. He has been very interested in what he calls the increasing degradation of life—you know, all the things that mess us up— Horny, is something wrong?”

“No,” he said, and then, with more conviction, “Oh, no. Go ahead. I was just thinking about something.” What he had been thinking about was that if Yosper reported to Curmudgeon, he would surely report that Hake was doing a little unauthorized digging. But the second thought was, why not? He hadn’t been told not to be curious. And one of the things he was curious about was how Yosper would react.

Which turned out to be not at all. The man took the napkin out of his lap, dropped it on the table and waved away the plate the proprietress was bringing over from the mahogany sideboard. “You know,” he said, “I don’t think this is exactly what I’m in the mood for. What do you think, Dieter? Want to try the Hofbrauhaus?”

“Good idea, Yosper,” said Dieter enthusiastically—or Carlos; and all the others followed suit.

Alys said wanly, “Should we come too?”

“No. You wouldn’t like it.”

“Are you sure?”

He cocked his head at her—with his beard and bald head, he was beginning to look like a marmoset, Hake thought. “They have some, uh, private meetings. But,” he said cunningly, “the food’s remarkable. Sausage you wouldn’t believe. Big mugs of beer. And Schweinefleisch\ Pork, all pink and white, with that red cabbage and potato dumplings, and all that rich, fat gravy—”

Alys dropped her spoon. “Excuse me,” she said, fleeing.

Yosper grinned at Hake. “Looks like she lost her appetite.”

“Yeah. I’ll tell you, Yosper,” Hake said. “Actually, I don’t feel too fine myself. I think I’ll skip dinner and turn in early…”

At least he wasn’t sick to his stomach. Grateful for that, he chained the door to his room and opened the papers Alys had given him: A London Times, a two-day-old Rome Daily American, the international edition of Newsweek. Besides reading material, he had a secret treasure of his own: two shot-sized bottles of whiskey sours, acquired on one of the many flights when he didn’t have time to drink them. Rock and rye was good for a cold, he reasoned. Who was to say whiskey sours weren’t too?

They went down. And, surprisingly, they stayed down. They made him feel—well, not better. But at least different.

The buzz from the whiskey flavored the misery from the cold, or whatever, enough at least to make a change.

He thumbed through the news, for conscience’s sake more than interest’s:

The tax on liquid hydrogen was going up fifty percent “to finance research on making America fuel-independent within the next thirty years.” The mad killer who had fire-bombed twenty-two Chicago women wearing mood rings had been caught, and announced God had told him to do it. International Harvester had delivered its 10,000th Main Battle Tank, Mark XII, direct from the production line to the U.N. scrapping grounds in Detroit. The President declared that the bargaining-counter production rate was insufficient for the needs of upcoming disarmament talks, and proposed a special bond issue to finance 5,000 additional advanced warplanes to be built and scrapped within the next five years. (He also mentioned that the income tax would have to go up to pay for the bonds.) The microwave receivers in Texas had to be shut down for ten days because of excessive damage to the Van Allen belts; as a result coastal Louisiana was battling its heaviest spring blizzard and most of Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico were without power.

A normal enough week in America. Alys had also marked European news, but Hake didn’t really care enough to read it. He had seen enough griminess and grittiness in the past fifteen days to decide that the Europeans were not really any better off than the people in Long Branch, New Jersey, as far as the quality of life was concerned.

And besides, the quality of his own life was not seeming very good just then. The whiskey sours might have been a mistake.

Dizzily he got up and peered at himself in the mirror.

He really felt sick. Being sick alarmed Hake to a degree that a man who had been well all his life might hardly understand. He inspected his tongue (reasonably pink), his eyes (everything considered, not really very red), and wished he had something to take his temperature with.

Maybe all he needed was a little more sleep, and, to be sure, a hell of a lot more exercise. He hadn’t been able to pack his barbells. He studied his belly, looking for a sign of a paunch; his dorsals, for a hint of flab. None there—yet. But he had missed two weeks’ jogging and a dozen judo lessons on this trip, and how long could he continue to do that without penalty? He resolved to try to trap at least one of the Ocean Grovers into at least a Ping-Pong game the next morning.

But in the morning he was in no shape to do it, even if it hadn’t been Sunday and the girls off at the American school or disrupting some unfortunate church.

He bathed, shaved, dressed and unsteadily left the pension to seek a drugstore. Within three blocks he passed two of them. Both were closed, but at least they gave him the name of what he was looking for. He excused himself to an elderly gentleman sunning himself on a doorstep and asked, “Bitte, wo bist eine Apotheke?” He had to repeat it twice before he got an answer, and then the words that came back at him were not helpful. But the pointed finger was.

The druggist was a young woman who wore her red hair in ringlets. She spoke no English, nor Hebrew, nor any of the varieties of Arabic Hake summoned up. If the kibbutzim had not been so strict in their customs he might at least have had a little Yiddish to try on her. But all he had going for him was ingenuity. After that had failed four or five times it occurred to him to cough dramatically against the back of his hand and pantomine drinking from a bottle. “Ja, ja!” cried the druggist, enlightened, and reached him something off the shelf.

Blearily Hake peered at the label. Of course, it was all in German.

Antihistamin-Effekt seemed understandable enough. But what was a Hustentherapeutikum? The names of the ingredients were easier to read. Science is a universal language, and by adding a few letters and subtracting some he managed to figure out some of the things that were in the bottle. The difficulty with that was that Hake was no pharmacist, and exactly what maladies were Natriumcitrat and Ammoniumchlorid good for? When he came to the dosages he felt himself on more solid ground. Erwachsene had to mean “for adults” (if only because the column next to it was headed Kinder). And 1-2 Teeloffel alle 3-4 Stunden seemed to reveal itself.

While he was hesitating, a tall woman in a floppy hat came into the store and began peering thoughtfully at a display of cosmetics. Hake rehearsed the entire rest of his German vocabulary three or four times, and then crossed over to her for help. “Bitte, gnadige Frau,” he began. “Sprechen-sie English?”

She turned to look at him.

The face under the floppy hat was one he had last seen in a Maryland kitchen. “Pay the lady, Hake,” she said. “Then let’s you and I go where we can talk.”

If the drugstores seemed to want to close on Sundays, the bars did not. They found a sidewalk cafe, chillier than Hake would have preferred but at least remote from other people, and the woman ordered them both big brandy-snifters of raw Berlin beer with raspberry syrup at the bottom of each glass. Hake took what he estimated to be a 2-Teeldffel swig of the Hustentherapeutikum and washed it down with beer. The cold was gratifying on his palate. The taste, less so. It wasn’t what his body wanted, and the pressure in his gut increased. He felt as if he wanted to burp, but was afraid to risk it. He said. “You know, young lady, I could have you arrested.”

“Not here you couldn’t, Hake.”

“Kidnapping is certainly an extraditable offense.”

“Offense? Oh, but Hake, you didn’t file charges, did you?”

“There’s no statute of limitations on kidnapping.”

“Oh, hell, Hake, lay off the lawyer talk. It doesn’t become you. Let’s talk about realities, like why you didn’t report me to the fuzz. Have you thought about the reasons for that?”

“I know the reason for that! I, uh, I didn’t know where to report you.”

“Meaning,” she said bitterly, “that you had committed yourself to the spooks and knew you shouldn’t involve the regular police. Right? And you were afraid to tell the spooks about it because you didn’t know what would happen.”

He kept his mouth shut. He didn’t want to admit to her that he simply hadn’t known how to contact the Team until the time had passed when it seemed appropriate. He was also aware that he shouldn’t be telling this woman anything at all. Or even be talking to her. Who knew if that waiter, idly kicking at a windblown scrap of newspaper, or that teenage girl in the hot-pants suit biking down the boulevard, was not reporting to someone somewhere about this meeting?

Under other circumstances he probably would have liked being with her a lot. Whether in zipper suit or flowered spring dress and floppy hat, she was a striking-looking woman. She was at least as tall as Hake, would be taller if she wore heels, and slimmer than he would have thought of as beautiful—if, on any of their meetings, it had ever mattered whether or not she was beautiful. She was perplexing in many ways. For instance, how quaint to wear an old-fashioned gold wedding ring! He hadn’t seen one of those in… he couldn’t remember when he had seen one last.

“I don’t have much time, Hake,” she said severely, “and I’ve got a lot to say. We checked you out, you know. You’re a decent person. You’re kind, idealistic, if you picked up a stray kitten you’d find it a home. You work ninety hours a week at a dog job for slave pay. So what did they do to you to turn you into a killer?”

“Killerl”

“Well, what would you call it? They’re close enough to killers, Hake, and you’re just getting started with them. Who knows what they’ll have you doing? When you took this job, you must have known what it meant.”

It was impossible for him to admit to this young, handsome, angry woman that not only didn’t he know what the job meant, he hadn’t yet found out exactly what it was. He said thickly, “I have my own morality, lady.”

“You exactly do, yes, and yet you’re doing things that I know you know are violating it. Why?”

He perceived with relief that the question was rhetorical and she was about to answer it for him. Carrying on this conversation was getting pretty hard. And his ears were bothering him. There seemed to be a distant roaring. He tried to concentrate on her words, in spite of the growing evidence in his stomach that he was sicker than he had thought.

She said mournfully, “Why! God, the time we’ve spent trying to answer that one. What changes people like you? Money? But you can’t want money, or you wouldn’t be, for God’s sake, a minister. Patriotism? You weren’t even born in America! Some psychosis, maybe, because you were a cripple most of your life and the girls wouldn’t go near you?”

“The girls,” Hake said with dignity, “were very often willing to overlook my physical problems.”

“Spare me the story of your adolescent fumblings, Hake. I know that isn’t it, either. Or shouldn’t be. We checked you out that way, too. So what does that leave? Why would you flipflop a hundred and eighty degrees, from being an all-giver, helping anyone who comes near you any way you can, to a trouble-making, misery-spreading cloak-and- dagger fink? There’s only one answer! Hake, what do you know about hypnotism?”

“Hypnotism?”

“You keep repeating what I say, but that’s not responsive, you know. Yes, I said ‘hypnotism.’ In case you don’t know it, you show all the diagnostic signs: trance logic, tolerance of incongruities, even analgesia. Or anyway analgesia of the soul; you’d be hurting about the kind of people you’re involved with if something didn’t stop you. Even hypnotic paranoia! You pick up cues that a person not in the trance state would ignore. You picked up cues from us after we kidnapped you! That’s why you didn’t report us, you know.”

“Oh, come off it. Nobody hypnotized me.”

“As to that, how would you know? If you’d been given a post-hypnotic command to forget it?”

He shook his head obstinately.

“Oh, sure,” she sneered. “You’d know, because you’re you, right? But if you weren’t hypnotized, how do you explain signing up with the spooks?”

I can’t, he thought. But what he said out loud was, “I don’t have to explain anything to you. I don’t even know who you are—except your name’s Lee and you’re married.”

She looked at him thoughtfully from under the brim of her hat. Hake couldn’t see her eyes very well, and that disconcerted him. Well, everything about her disconcerted him. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said shortly. He was not feeling well at all, and sitting out at this trashy, chilly sidewalk cafe—Munich was having some sort of garbagemen’s strike, and the sidewalks were loaded with old, stale refuse—was not making him feel any better. And the distant yelling was louder and closer.

When he came back, the waiter had brought refills of the Berlinerweissen, and Lee had removed her hat. She looked a lot younger and prettier without it, and forlorn. She would have seemed quite appealing under the right circumstances. Which were not these. Hake realized apprehensively that he had finished the, whole first beer. The syrup at the bottom had cloyed his palate enough so that he wanted the astringency of the new one, but his stomach was serving notice that it was prepared to take only so much more insult.

“As to who I am, Hake,” she said moodily, “I’ve blown my cover to you already, haven’t I? So my name is Leota Pauket. I was a graduate student at—never mind where. Anyway, I’m not even a graduate student any more. My dissertation subject was disapproved, and that’s what started all this.”

“I hope you’re going to tell me what you’re talking about.”

“You bet I am, Hake. Maybe more than you want to know.” She took a long sip at the new beer, staring out at the littered street. “I’m a Ute.”

“You don’t look Indian.”

“Don’t wise off, Hake. I’m a Utilitarianist. I used to belong to the Jeremy Bentham Club at school. You know: ‘the greatest good of the greatest number,’ and all that. It was a small club, only six of us. But we were closer than brothers. I’ve had to deal with some pretty crummy people since I got into this, Hake. There are bad ones on the other side too, as bad as your lot, and I can’t always pick my allies. But back at school they were a good bunch, all grad students, all in economics or sociology. All first-class human beings. My dissertation advisor was our faculty rep, and she was something else. She’s the one who suggested the topic to me: Covariants and correlatives: An examination into the relationship between degradation of non-monetary standard of living factors and decreasing international tensions. She helped—”

“Hey!” Hake sat up straighten “Can I get a copy of that?”

“My dissertation? Don’t be stupid, Hake. I told you I never finished it. Still,” she added, looking pleased, “I do have the preliminary draft somewhere. I suppose I could find a copy if you really wanted to read it.”

“I do. Truly I do. I’ve been trying to dig up that sort of information myself.”

“Hum.” She took another sip of the beer, looking at him over the wide rim of the glass. “Maybe there’s hope for you after all, Hake. Anyway. She’s the one who put us on the track of your spook friends. She said it was impossible all these things could have happened at random. Something had to be behind it. The more I dug, the more sure I was that she was right. Then she got fired. She was paid on a government teaching grant. And the grant was canceled. And then the man who replaced her rejected my whole dissertation proposal. And the new faculty advisor to the JBC recommended we dissolve it. So we did—publicly. And we went underground. That,” she said, counting on her fingers, “was one, two—three years ago.” Hake nodded, watching her fingers. “It wasn’t hard to make sure of our facts: the United States was deliberately sabotaging other nations. It wasn’t even hard to find out which agency was doing it—we had help. Then the question was, what do we do about it? We thought of going public, TV, press, the whole works. But we decided against. What would we get? A ten-day sensation in the headlines, and then everybody would forget. Just printing what these people do legitimizes it; you’ve been in Washington, you’ve seen the statues to the Watergate Martyrs. So we decided to fight fire with fire— Hake? What’s the matter with you?”

He was pointing at her ring. “Now I know where I saw you first! You were the old lady on the bus!”

“Well, of course I was. I told you we had to check up on you.”

“But how did you know where I was going to be?”

She seemed uncomfortable. “I told you we had help.”

“What kind, of help?” He was finding it harder and harder to follow the conversation, or even to sit upright in his chair. The yelling was now very close, and down the broad avenue he could see an advancing parade of marchers in white robes and peaked wizard hats. He couldn’t read the placards they carried, but they seemed to be chanting “Gastarbeiter, raus! Gastarbeiter, raus!”

“None of your business,” she said loudly, over the shouting of the paraders. “Anyway, shut up about that, Hake. I’m trying to tell you—Hake! What are you doing?”

“He realized he was on the ground looking up at her. “I think I’m fainting,” he explained; and then he did.

What happened next was very unclear to Hake. He kept waking briefly, then passing out again. Once he was in a room he didn’t recognize, with Leota and a man he didn’t know, somehow Oriental, bearded, bending over him. They were talking about him:

“You’re not a doctor, Subirama! He’s too sick for your foolishness!”

“Ssh, ssh, Leota, it is only something to relieve the pain, a little acupuncture, it will bring down the fever—”

“I don’t believe in acupuncture,” Hake said, but then he realized that it was a long time later and he was in a different place, what seemed to be a military ambulance plane, with a black woman in a nurse’s uniform who peered at him queerly.

“This isn’t acupuncture, honey,” she soothed, “just a little shot to make you feel better—”

And when he woke up again he was in a real hospital. And it had to be back home in New Jersey, because the doctor taking his pulse was Sam Cousins, whose daughter had been married in Hake’s own church. His throat was painfully dehydrated. He croaked, “What—what happened, Sam?”

The doctor put his wrist down and looked pleased. “There you are, Horny. Nice to have you back. Orderly, give me a glass of water.”

As Hake was greedily taking the permitted three sips, the doctor said, “You’ve been pretty sick, you know. Here, that’s enough water just now. You can have more in a minute.”

Hake followed the glass wistfully with his eyes. “Sick with what?”

“Well, that’s the problem, Horny. Some new kind of virus. All the kids got it too, and so did Alys. But it doesn’t bother young children much. Or old people. The ones it really knocks out are the healthy prime-of-lifers, like you.” He got up. “I’ll be back in a while, Horny, and we’ll have you out of here in a day or two. But right now,” he said, nodding to the orderly, “no visitors.”

“Yes, doctor,” said the orderly, closing the door behind him and turning toward Hake, and then Hake took a closer look at the hairy, lean man wearing those whites. It was almost not a surprise.

“Hello, Curmudgeon,” he said.

“Not so loud,” said the spook. “There’s no bugs in the room, but who knows who’s walking down the corridor outside?”

He pulled some newspapers out of the bedside table. “I just wanted to give you these, and let you know we’re thinking of you. The Team’s got a new assignment for you as soon as you’re well enough.”

“New assignment? Cripes, Curmudgeon, I haven’t even done the first one yet. Why would you give me another assignment when I screwed this one up by getting sick?”

The spook smiled and unfolded the papers. Several stories were circled in red:

said the New York Times, and

said the Daily News, over a picture of long lines of men waiting to get into a public lavatory in Frankfurt.

“What makes you think you screwed up?” asked Curmudgeon.