Instantly: "Is sex a failure of common sense?"
"Sometimes yes, sometimes no," she shrugged, and used a finger to trace the seam on his pullover. “Mm; nice shoulders."
He stared into her eyes, smiled sadly. "I think I'd like a rain check," he husked.
"It'll be a long time before the rain stops," she said with nonchalance, slipping to the floor, scuffing into her shoes. "I live on the floor below, and I have some cramming to do. See you in class."
He walked with her to the door, suffused with a mixture of relief, desire, and uncertainty. "I'll tell you something, Marbrye Sanger, this has been the damnedest welcome I ever got, I need to sort things out."
"Don't worry about it," she said with the barest hint of pique. "You haven't flunked yet." Her departing footfalls were almost noiseless in the evening gloom.
Quantrill was still standing in the doorway when the carrel chimed for attention. He found that his name was now an input code and the terminal would answer certain queries from typed input; no voice input accepted.
When and where would he find supper? He wouldn't, that night.
What was the status of Marbrie Sanger? Marbrye — the correction was underlined — Sanger was an advanced trainee in T Section; 'Q1 clearance, no on-site restriction.
Why had Sanger visited Quantrill? A multiplex enticement-frustration test.
"Shit," he muttered, and typed another question: had he passed? No comment.
The terminal verified Sanger's instructions for the next day, adding that meals would be provided. As afterthought, he asked what courses he would take. He found the list daunting:
COVER, Unofficial, and Control
CRYPTANALYSIS
INTELLIGENCE, Theory
INVESTIGATION, Methods
LINGUISTICS
PSYCHOLOGY, Criminal
PSYCHOLOGY, Social
SCIENCE, Military, unconventional
SCIENCE, Political, and Indoctrination
SURVEILLANCE, Use and Nullification
TERMINATIONS, Covert, and Pursuit
WEAPONS, Covert and Overt
The terminal would give no coursework details. Quantrill suspected that the Sanger hotsy had already reported the results of her welcome; dimly perceived that T Section might have monitored their brief meeting. It did not yet occur to him that San Simeon might be instrumented in such a way that Marbrye Sanger had no need to report; nor that Control, while testing his responses to uncertainty, had already begun the process of instilling in him a mild and necessary paranoia.
Chapter Fifty-Five
Within a few days Quantrill learned to accept the bizarre setting in which he might jog five klicks with a half-dozen other trainees to a refurbished barn for a class; or find a dubok, a message drop, while alone with memorized instructions. He saw the lissome Sanger only in cryptanalysis class; she ignored him. At no time did any class, either in the big house or outside it, contain more than eight members.
Much of the training pitted trainees against each other; no one had to be cautioned against forming close friendships. He failed to locate the scalpel tip which little Barbara Zachary had cyanoacrylated to the back of her neck until the 'unconscious' Zachary pressed it to his throat — but he did not repeat that failure. He forgot that a one-time cipher could be generated from a telephone directory, and drew two extra cryptanalysis tasks that took him half a night to complete. The youngest of the trainees, Quantrill forgot a lot of things; but only once.
He would never forget his instructors. Marty Cross was half Cheyenne and all whip leather, a wizened wisp of a man so adept at covert pursuit that he seemed to simply materialize behind the trainee he stalked. It was Cross who taught Quantrill to become utterly still; so inert that he could stand erect in a cluttered room and be unnoticed for vital seconds.
Sean Lasser, whose middle-aged paunch danced when he laughed, always had something to laugh about after submitting to a search. Quantrill exulted the day he identified Lasser's signet ring as a garrotte complete with spring-wound wire.
Seth Howell, heavy-bodied with spidery arms and legs, had a whispery tenor and a gift for phrasing the dullest indoctrination material as though analyzing an invisible cud of tobacco. Craggy of face, prematurely graying, Howell claimed a hitch in the quad-service Rapid Deployment Force — and another in the maximum-security federal prison in Marion, Illinois. Howell's adumbration of the current political mess might not be the whole truth, but it didn't put you to sleep either. He took, for example, the Starlinger-Ahbez hypothesis.
Starlinger, a German, had long ago warned of China's expansive dreams, whatever denials she might make. With her southern borders already overpopulated, China would eventually find it necessary to expand into underpopulated Siberia.
Ahbez, a NATO strategist from Turkey, had added an alternative. China might indeed be able to expand southward if her southern neighbors, for whatever reason, became underpopulated. Ahbez theorized that China might find ways to depopulate India, or the Vietnamese peninsula, without overtly declaring war on them. She might even maintain an outward alliance while draining that ally of people.
"Now, Ahbez is a freak about germ warfare," Howell drawled, his Colorado twang lending him the air of an inspired hick; "and he figgered China might dump a few bugs down south. Well, she didn't; she gave the goddam Injuns the paranthrax they dumped on us. Makes sense. China had the technology, and thought she could hamstring us and let India take the heat.
"That explains why China didn't dump paranthrax on the RUS. She wants to avoid retaliation in kind, and depletion of RUS livestock she intends to own later. But if the Allies start an epidemic in India, — well, China's natural borders to the south could protect her long enough to produce a defense. Meanwhile, India would go belly-up.
"We think China's waiting for us to do just that. But guess what we've spotted from orbit." Howell snapped the holo projector on; the display was a map of the SinoInd lands. He spread one big hand like a tarantula, placed fingertips on Cambodia, Laos, and the other Viet republics, and slid the tarantula to ward China's heartland, Szechuan. "Viets. More of 'em than you ever saw, swarming north like ants as far as the Yangtse River.
"Some are doing winter harvests in Yunnan, feeding others who're training in little groups all over south China. And then a lot are disappearing along the Yangtse. Now, the Yangtse's a muddy bitch; even infrared doesn't tell us what's going on under its surface. Some Viets are going upriver, possibly through pressure locks under the dams that're left. One hell of a lot of Viets are popping up on the Kazakhstan front. You guess where all the rest are."
"Spam?" Quantrill could not resist the awful jest.
"That's been discussed," Howell said. "Cold storage, too. But we think they're going underground, trained as factory workers while they mass for a hundred-division offensive. Little factories, lots of 'em; a cottage-industry war. It'd be futile to impact-nuke every square meter of Szechuan. Just maybe, it's time we gave the Sinos a taste of their own medicine in Szechuan."
Graeme Duff, the bull-necked trainee from Minneapolis: "How do we send germs down into filtered tunnels?"
"Wouldn't the Sinos like to know?" Howell's smile was one-sided. "You can bet they have moles boring around every lab in this country, trying to dope that one out. And that," he said, snapping off the projector, "is where gunsels like you come in."
"We're supposed to penetrate deep cover?" Zachary was always thinking two steps ahead, thought Quantrill enviously.