“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.
V
Every priest has someone to confess to—a rabbi has another rabbi, even a Protestant minister has some ecclesiastical superior. H. Hornswell Hake had no one like that. He was a Unitarian, as alone in command as any ship’s captain on the high seas. The idea of laying his problems on Beacon Street would have struck him as ludicrous if it had entered his mind at all. And so, without a wife or steady lover, without parents, not actively in psychoanalytic therapy and even (he realized with some concern) lacking in really close friends, he had nobody to talk to.
And he wanted to talk; God, how he wanted to talk! It is not an easy thing for a man to discover that he has infected half a continent. It clawed at his mind. Hake’s life agenda was not clear to him, but parts of it were certain. Most certain of all, that his goal was not to make people sick but to make them well. Jogging, stretching-and-bending, working out with the weights, he kept thinking about Germans and Danes red-eyed and sneezing. Flat on his back, he saw himself as a Typhoid Mary on a continental scale. He was flat on his back a lot, too. The disease Hake had spread through Western Europe was what the Team called a Three-X strain, which meant only that it had so high a relapsing rate that the average sufferer could count on three recurrences of fever, trots and miseries. Hake received the best medical care and achieved five. Weeks passed before he was ready for duty again.