“That’s what we’re going to stick up a cow’s ass,” said Deena. There was the sort of silence that follows a wholly unsuccessful joke, until Deena said, “No kidding. That’s the job for tonight. We’re going to move in on the three-five herd, locate the heifers and smear some of this on their, excuse the medical terms, their private parts. I don’t mean rectums, I mean vaginas. But if you can’t figure out which is which you have to do both.”
The silence protracted itself, but changed in kind; now it was the silence that surrounds a group of persons wondering if somebody was playing a very bad joke of which they were the butt. Deena chuckled. “It’s a simulation,” she explained. “Represents an actual operation, of which you may, or may not, hear more before you leave here.”
“Some operation,” snarled Sister Florian.
“Well, you’re excused from that part,” said Deena. “You’re going to be our lookout.”
“I don’t need to be excused from anything,” the nun said angrily. “I’m only saying I hate it.”
“Sure you do. But you’ll thank me for it some day. Why, the time will come when you’ll all look back on these good times Under the Wire and say— Hold it!”
A loose stone slid down the arroyo slope, followed by Tigrito, sulking back from his patrol. “No cowboys anywhere I could see,” he reported. “Hey, man. Let me get some of that heat.” He sat down next to Mary Jean on the other side, and put his arm around her.
“What about the herd? Did you find them?”
“Oh, sure, man. Nice and sleepy, ‘bout half a mile away.”
“Then we go. You too, Tiger. On your feet, Mary Jean, and from now on no talking. Tiger leads, I go last. When he has the herd in sight he stops and you all take a handful of this gunk and start smearing.”
“How do we tell which is a heifer? In fact, what’s a heifer?”
“If you can’t tell you just do them all. Move out, Tiger. Glasses on, everybody.”
Through the IR spectacles Hake saw the scene transformed. There was residual heat in the slope of the hill, so that they were moving over dully glowing rocks; Tigrito, ahead of him, was bright hands and head moving around a much darker torso, and the wire overhead was a dazzle of bright spots, obscuring the stars. He could not even see the red and blue-green laser beacons through it, and when he took his eyes away it took some time to adjust to the relative darkness. It was a long, hard downhill crawl, then a harder uphill scramble. There the top of a ridge had been shaved away to accommodate the rectenna and the wire was no more than ten feet above the ground. They all walked stooped and half-crouched across the ridge and didn’t straighten out until they were sliding down the loose fill the bulldozers had pushed onto the other side. It was said that touching the rectenna might not kill. None of them wanted to find out.
The three-eighths buffalo-five-eighths cattle hybrid herd was resting peacefully at the bottom of the slope, uninterested in the human beings creeping toward them. The three-fives were bred for stupidity as well as for meat and milk, and the breeding had been successful all around. What they liked to eat was the blossom from yucca—which is why, Hake learned, the yucca’s other name was “buffalo grass”—and on that diet they fattened to slaughter size in three years.
Deena gathered the troops around her and, one by one, squeezed a sticky, oily substance into each palm, and waved them toward the herd. They picked their way down the sliding, uneasy surface. Hake slipped and fell, and as he recovered himself he heard Tigrito whine, “Hey, man! You wasn’t here before!”
A bright light overwhelmed the IR lenses—Deena’s; it showed a man in a stetson and levis, pointing a gun at Tigrito. “Got ya,” the man crowed. “Y’under arrest, ever’ one of you, get your hands up!”
Mean rage filled Hake’s skull. The bastard had a gun! If Hake had had one of his own— He didn’t finish the thought, but his fingers were curling around a trigger that wasn’t there. And he wasn’t alone. Tigrito, still whining and complaining, was moving slowly toward the man; and behind the cowboy, Sister Florian reached out for his throat. Not quietly enough; the man half heard her and started to turn, and Tigrito launched himself on him, bowled him to the ground. The gun went flying, Tigrito’s hand rose and fell.
And it was all over. Tigrito rose to his knees, still holding the rock he had caught up to bash the man’s skull with. “Did I kill the fucker?” he demanded.
Deena was bending over him with the light. “Not yet, anyway. Hellfire. All right, let’s get on with it. Sister, you stay here and keep an eye on him. The rest of you, go get those cows!”
What Hake retained longest of the incident was a startling fact. He had been willing to kill the cowboy. If he had been asked the question as a theoretical matter, before the fact, he would have denied the possibility emphatically. Ridiculous! He had no reason. He had nothing against the man. There was no real stake riding on the incident. He was certainly not a killer! But when the moment came, he knew that if he had had a gun he would have pulled the trigger.
Actually, the man had not died. They had gone about their farcical task of slapping goo under the cattle’s tails, and then taken turns to carry the still unconscious man all the long way Under the Wire to the barracks. As far as Hake knew, he was alive still; at least he had been when the truck from Has-Ta-Va carried him away with a concussion and possible skull fracture, but breathing. The six of them looked at each other in the barracks, hands, faces and clothes smeared with green paint—it was not until they reached the lighted dugout that they knew what Deena had spread in their palms. As Hake fell into bed, for the forty-five minutes before reveille, he thought there might be repercussions. He also thought he knew what had been so strange about the expressions on the faces of all his comrades. They had all been very close to grinning.
But in the morning, when Fortnum fell them out in the pre-dawn light, no word was said about the incident. They ran their mile, swilled down their breakfast, spent their hour on the obstacle course and showed up for Deena’s class in computer-bugging. After ten minutes of drill on the nomenclature of the machine Hake could not stand it any more. “Deena,” he said, “how is the guy?”
She paused between “bit” and “byte” and looked at him thoughtfully. “He’ll be all right,” she said at last.
“Are we in trouble?”
“You’re always in trouble until you get out of this place,” she said. “No special trouble that the Team can’t handle. It’s happened before.”
The whole group knew about what had happened, and one of the ones who had stayed behind put his hand up. “Deena, what the hell were you-all doing out there, anyway?”
Deena glanced at her watch. “Well— Tell you what Pegleg’s off with the plane, Fortnum’s gone to pick up supplies and I have to make a report. I’m going to leave you on your own for, let’s see, ninety minutes. Only, so you shouldn’t waste your time, you’ve got two assignments, with prizes for the winners. First, see if you can figure out what the exercise was last night. Second, I want each one of you to think up an Agency project. You’ll be judged on originality, practicality and effectiveness, and so you’ll know it’s fair I’m going to let Fortnum do the judging.”
“How do we find out about the exercise?” asked Beth Hwa.
“That’s your problem,” Deena said agreeably.
“What are the prizes?” Hake asked.
“That’s easy. Everybody but the first prize-winner in each category gets punishment duty. So long; you’ve got eighty-eight minutes left.”
They had never been on their own before in the middle of the day, were not sure how to handle it. A dozen of the group drifted toward the scuba pool, Hake included; included also, most of the six who had gone on the exercise. The reasons had nothing to do with the problems. It was a way of getting some of the paint residue off, and a way, too, of waking up that underslept part of their brains that wanted more than anything else to crawl back into the bunkhouse. They stripped down to the all-purpose underwear and quenched themselves in the tepid and stagnant water.