Ten minutes to pack. They looked at each other, and Tigrito announced that he was going to get to Chi if he had to kill for it, and Sister Florian suspected that it was all just a scheme to get them out of the way while the Oversight Committee inspected the installation, and Hake and Mary Jean tried to estimate their chances of being on the same truck. Or plane. But, in the event, Hake never saw the wonders of wetback life in the big cities. Just as the trucks were about to leave he was pulled off the detachment and ordered to the office of the training director and there, sitting on a wicker chair on the second-floor porch of the main building of Has-Ta-Va Ranch, talking on a hush-phone, was hairy, fidgety Curmudgeon, his gun strapped to his side.
“I didn’t expect to see you here,” said Hake.
“Course you didn’t,” said Curmudgeon, putting down the phone. “You’re going back to Europe.”
“I am? Why am I? What have you got for me to spread this time, leprosy?”
Curmudgeon looked at him thoughtfully. “Leprosy? Oh, no, Hake, that wouldn’t be any good. Hard to infect anybody. And the incubation period’s much too long. That job you did last month, that was the kind of thing. Did you know German absenteeism’s up eighty percent for the month? And, naturally,” he said, “our laboratories have just announced a real breakthrough in immunization. We’ve got enough material for sixty million shots right now. We’re selling it all over the world, and making a nice few bucks for the balance of payments. But anyway, that kind of thing was only your first mission, Hake. You couldn’t really be expected to do anything independently. No. But now we think you’re ready for the big time, and I really liked your religion proposal.”
It took Hake a second to remember the project he had been outlining next to the scuba pool, just before his fight with Tigrito. He had turned it in and heard no more about it. “I—I didn’t think anyone paid any attention to it.”
“Hell, yes, Hake! It’s a fascinating idea. If we could find a European Sun Myung Moon, or even some good messianic leader, why, we’d back him to the hilt. There are new sects springing up in Europe all the time. The important thing is somebody who has enough personal charisma to make a good pitch. Any thoughts on what sort of thing we should look for?”
“Well— Actually,” Hake said, warming up, “I did think more about it. It would be good to find someone with a special appeal to industrial workers. Or miners.”
“That’s the idea, Hake!”
“Of course, I’d need some research facilities, to look up proselytizing religions—”
“Sure you would, but not now. You won’t have time. You’ve got to catch a bus out on the highway in two hours. Then you’ll fly to Capri.”
“Capri? What the hell do I want in Capri?”
“That’s what the orders say,” Curmudgeon explained. “You’ll be met. When you get there they’ll tell you why that has to be where you’re going.”
“But— My books, for research! I’ll need them. And clothes. I’m not dressed for a trip to Italy.”
“The clothes are all taken care of, Hake. There’s somebody in Long Branch packing a suitcase for you right now—we’ve, you know, arranged a letter with your signature for your housekeeper. The clothes’ll be waiting for you when you get there.”
“But my church is expecting me back next weekl And what about the rest of the training course here?”
“You’ll probably be there in a week,” said Curmudgeon. ‘Two or three at most, probably. And as to the course— why, you’ve just graduated.”
VII
Bus to Odessa; prop plane to Dallas-Fort Worth; jet to Rome (where Hake spent ninety minutes racing back and forth on the back of a moped to collect a suitcase); jet to Capodichino Airport; monorail to the Bay; hovercraft to Capri. Hake had left Has-Ta-Va Ranch at two in the afternoon. Fourteen hours and eight time zones later, he was bouncing across the Bay at what local time said was noon but what his interior body clock could not identify at all. What he was sure of was that he was very, very tired. He was also rather close to being seasick. He had not expected a hovercraft ride to be so choppy. Each wave-top slapped fiercely against the bottom of the vessel, and his queasiness was not helped, as he landed, by the fact that the hovership terminal stank of rotting fish.
As promised, he was met. A young woman in a black ruffled shirt and black velvet cutoffs pushed her way past the would-be guides and the vendors of Capri bells and said, “Father Hake? Yes? Give me the ticket for your bag, please. I will meet you at the car park.”
Her voice seemed familiar to Hake, and so did her soupbowl hairdo. But in his precarious condition he could not identify her. When she arrived at the car park it was in a three-wheeled electric scooter, open to the air, and any impulse toward conversation was quelled by the noise of the traffic. Capri was hot. Steamy hot and smoggy hot. The fish smell was from tens of thousands of dead little finger-lings floating belly-up in the Bay or washed on the sand, and it stayed with them all through the drive up a precipitous road. Then, at the top of a bluff, they reached a pink stucco hotel, and the smell was less fish and more oil.
The woman marched Hake through the lobby and into an elevator, shushing him until they got to the fifth floor. A Chinese couple was just coming out of a room across from the elevator, and evidently having trouble with the lock. The woman leaped to help them, closed it securely, rattled the knob, returned their key and accepted their thanks, and then let Hake into the room next door. “Get some rest, Father Hake,” she advised. “I will call for you in the morning.”
She gave him his key, and closed the door behind her.
Hake found himself in a room roughly the size of his parsonage porch in Long Branch, long enough for two normal rooms and with a balcony stretching out into the Italian sun to make it longer. Piggery! It was more luxury than Hake had ever been used to. He detected a faint twinge in the place where he kept his social conscience, while another part of his conscience was telling him that he really should be getting down to thinking about the question of proselytizing religions. But he also found that it was not hard to convince himself that, after more than two weeks Under the Wire, a person was entitled to a little comfort. He kicked off his shoes and explored the room.
The bed was oval, and covered with tasseled red velvet. When Hake sat on the edge of it to rub his feet it gave his bottom no resistance. A water bed! He wound up with his posterior at about ankle level and a rigid board under his knees, and the returning ripples dandled him ut> and down for minutes. Next to the bed was what looked like the instrument panel of an airplane: buttons, dials, switches. Some were clear enough. The sunburst was for the lights. The stylized figures of a maid and a waiter for calling service. The remote control was for the television set. Others were opaque to Hake’s perceptions. But there would be time for that. He switched on the television and lay back on the rippling bed, gratefully chill beneath him after the hot ride from the hoverport.
At that moment the lights and TV went out.