Hake stared at the tabletop, calculating angles in his mind. “Why, that’s brilliant, Yosper.” He shook his head. “Damn it! Why kill them off? Why don’t we just let them go ahead and make hydrogen for us?”
Yosper was scandalized. “Are you crazy, Hake? Do you know how much of a drain on the balance of payments you’re talking about? We’ll make a deal, all right, but we’ll make it with the sheik. After we take these hippies out. Blow up the tower. Kill off the plants—we’ve got a great little fungus specially bred by our good friends in Eatontown. They’ve borrowed beyond their means to get this thing going, and when we’re finished with them they’ll be bankrupt. Then old Hassabou comes back to power, and we make a deal.”
“Let’s get on with it,” Jessie Tunman complained. “Did Horny get the job on the tower so he can let us in?”
Hake glared at her, then admitted, “Well, actually, no. I mean, they’ll give me a job, but not for a couple of weeks. They hired Leota right away.”
“Hake!” Yosper exploded. “You failed your assignment!”
“I couldn’t help it! They said I was overqualified—whose fault is that? I didn’t make up the cover identity!”
“Boy,” said Yosper, “you just lost most of your bargaining power, you know that? We spent five effing months getting you ready for this because you spoke the languages, could get by with the locals—and now you’re no place!”
Jessie Tunman looked up. “Maybe it’s not so bad,” she said.
“Don’t talk foolish, Jessie! If we wanted to storm the tower we wouldn’t have bothered with lover-boy in the first place.”
“He’s still here. He just doesn’t have an ID to get into the tower.”
“That’s right, but— Oh,” Yosper said. “I see what you mean. All we have to do is get him an ID.” He beamed at Hake. “That shouldn’t be too hard, considering our resources, at that. You got anything else to say, boy? No? Any more questions about what this mission is all about?”
“I do have one. Why do we have to destroy it? Why don’t we just steal the plants and build our own?”
Yosper shook his head. “Boy, don’t think. Just do what you’re told. We’ve had the plants for three years. They’re no good to us.”
“Sure they are. That coast looks a lot like Florida.”
“Hake,” the old man said kindly, “Miami Beach is in Florida. All that land’s built up, or didn’t you notice? God has chosen to give these creeps just what you need for this kind of installation—sunlight, water, port facilities. Most of the U. S. of A.‘s too far north. Even around Miami you’d only be getting forty or forty-five percent yield in the winter. Get it up to where you really need it, around New York or Chicago, not to even think about Boston or Seattle or Detroit, and you just don’t have power to speak of at all for three or four months of the year.”
“Yosper,” Hake said, “doesn’t that suggest to you that maybe God is telling you something?”
The old man cackled. “Bet your ass, boy. He’s telling me that we’ve got to use the gifts He gave us to do His will! And that’s just what we’re doing. If God wanted the Persian Gulf to have our power, he would have put Pittsburgh there. Oh, maybe we could use it around Hawaii—or even better, like Okinawa or the Canal Zone, if we hadn’t given them away when we didn’t have to. You got to figure the useful areas are between twenty-five north and twenty-five south, and in God’s wisdom He has seen fit to put nothing but savages there. Switch that thing off, Jessie.” He stood up. “I got to go talk to Curmudgeon and the sheik,” he said. “You people just take it easy for a while. You, Hake? I think you better stay in your stateroom till we need you. Tiger’ll show you where it is.”
As it began to grow dark they fed him. A very young black child in a tarboosh knocked on the door and passed in a tray. “Bismi llahi r-rahmani r-rahim,” he piped politely. Hake thanked him and closed the door. The polite form was an invocation of the compassionate and merciful Allah, and Hake could only hope that the sentiments were shared by the members of the crew whose voices had finished changing. The food was lamb, rice and a salad, all excellent. Hake ate cheerfully enough. He was getting used to the patterns of working in the cloak-and-dagger business, long periods of waiting for something to happen without knowing what it was going to be, long periods of doing something without quite knowing what it was for. And now and then, for punctuation, somebody hitting him or blowing up his car.
He had not only got used to it, he was almost coming to accept it. At least for himself. For Leota— That was something else, and worrisome. Neither Yosper nor Jessie Tunman had said where they proposed to get an ID to copy, but Hake was far from sure they would not think the one Leota had been given a good source.
No one had told him he was a prisoner, and nothing stopped him from opening the door and joining the others.
He didn’t want to. Watching them play their silly spy games was unappealing. They acted like—
They acted like half the world, he told himself, playing a role. Dramaturgy. “Thinking with.”
As The Incredible Art had said, if you looked with open eyes, that explained so many of the fads, lunacies, causes, passions, meannesses and incongruities of human behavior! It even explained Hake himself. It explained why he had played the game of being a minister so long… and then the game of cloak-and-dagger spook… and then the game of rebel against the skullduggery. It explained why Yosper played Christian and criminal at the same time, why Leota played revolutionary and harem slave; and it explained how the world got into such a mess to begin with. Because we all play roles and games! And when enough of us play the same game, act the same dramaturgic role, at one time—then the game becomes a mass movement. A revolution. A cult. A religion. A fad.
Or a war.
He put his tray outside the door and leaned back on the neat, narrow bunk. There was an important piece missing in all of this. The cause. How did all these things get started?
The question was wrong. It was like asking why the locusts came to Abu Magnah. No individual locust had made the decision to attack the city, there was no plan, there was not even a shared genetic intent. If one examines the fringes of a locust swarm, what one sees is a scattering of individual insects flying blindly out, twisting around in confusion and then flying back in to join the cloud. What moves the locust swarm from one place to another is the chance thrust of wind. The swarm has no more volition than a tumbleweed.
And he, and Yosper, and Leota, and everyone else—what were they doing, if not devoting all their strength to being a part of their particular swarm? Causes and nations moved where chance pushed them—even, sometimes, into a war of mutual suicide, when both sides knew in advance that neither winner nor loser could gain.
Exactly like locusts—
Someone tapped at his door.
Hake sat up. “Yes?” he called.
It opened on the child who had brought his dinner, looking fearful. In barbarous English he said, “Sir, I have brought you tea, if God wills it.”
Hake took the tray, puzzled. “It’s all right,” he said kindly, but the boy’s fright did not diminish. He turned and bolted. Hake sat down and put the tea on the night table, his train of thought shattered. Not that it mattered. None of it was really relevant to the present problem, which was pure survival, his own and Leota’s.