Crawling back to his bed, he wondered what the church would have thought of their battling minister that day, street-fighting with a barrio kid. Alys, at least, might have been delighted. And it would be very nice to have Alys delighted, in some ways, he thought, tossing angrily and very aware of Mary Jean’s tiny snores two bunks away. He counted up. He had been Under the Wire for eleven days. It seemed longer. He was not exactly the same person who had flown west from Newark. He was not at all sure what person he was, but the old Reverend Hake would not have brawled over a woman.
And the twelfth day, and the thirteenth day, and the fourteenth day came and went, and everything outside the state of Texas receded farther and farther from his thoughts. The people who mattered were Deena and Tigrito and Beth Hwa and Sister Florian and Pegleg and Mary Jean, especially Mary Jean. On the fifteenth day, behind the bunkhouse, they kissed. There was no conversation. He simply followed her around the building. When she turned, his hands were on her. For three or four minutes their tongues were wild in each other’s mouths; and then he released her and they trotted to the lecture on ChemAgents, Use of.
Hake’s glands were aflame, and concentration on Peg-leg’s drone wasn’t easy. When Hake became conscious of the youth’s suspicious glower he sat up straighter and tried to get Mary Jean (not to mention Alys and Leota and the nurse from International Pets and Flowers) out of his mind. “You got these agents,” Pegleg droned, staring at Hake while he drummed on his artificial limb, “and you will be conversant with your use of them when you leave here, any questions? Right.”
Thankfully, one of the others was smothering a yawn and Pegleg’s glare was diverted. Hake listened, trying to square what the instructor was saying with what he had been told was basic gospel. The Team’s charter did not permit the taking of human life.- All the instructors had emphasized that. Other kinds of life, though, were not protected, and Pegleg seemed to be giving them guidelines for extermination. “You take your agent V-12,” he was droning, “along with your Agent V-34 and you dump them in a pond, any questions? Right. Next day you have a solution of your O-ethyl S-diethylaminoethyl methylphos-phonothiolate, what you used to call your Agent VM, any questions? These here quantities are adjusted to your average barnyard pond of 100,000 gallons and produce your concentration of zero point two parts per million, which will kill your fish and your frogs and your small mammals, any questions?” He gazed challengingly at them, drumming on his leg. “Right. Your concentration increases with time,” he said, “and so after the first day it becomes toxic to your larger mammals as well.”
He rose painfully to his feet and limped over to the blackboard. “That’s for your what you call your aqueous dispersants,” he said, beginning to draw what looked like a bowling ball, pierced on either side with fingerholes. “Now this here,” he said, “is your schematic of these here little things in the dish. Come up one at a time and take a look.” When it was Hake’s turn, he saw half a dozen tiny pellets in a glass petri dish. He had to squint to see them; they were no more than a sixteenth of an inch in diameter. He could not see the holes at all. “These here,” droned Pegleg, “are your pellets for your spring-loaded or your carbon-dioxide-propelled devices, like your Bulgarian Brolly and your Peruvian Pen. Your pellets are platinum. Each of your little holes—” he pointed to the diagram on the blackboard—“will take two-tenths of a microliter of ChemAgent, whatever you put in them. Anybody want to guess what that is?”
Tigrito waved a hand. “Arsenic?” he ventured.
Pegleg gave him a glare of contempt. “Arsenic! You got to have a hundred milligrams anyway to do any good with arsenic; you got two hours’ latrine duty for dumbness. No. There’s three things could go in there. You can use your biologicals, like germs. Or you can use your plutonium-239, only then they can find your pellet easy with a radiation detector. Best thing is one of your neurotoxins in your phosphate-buffered gelatin, any questions?”
“How do you get anyone to swallow it,” Beth Hwa asked uncertainly.
“You got two hours too, who said anything about swallowing it?” Pegleg reached under the table and brought out what looked like an ordinary brightly colored woman’s umbrella. “This is your Bulgarian Brolly. There’s a spring-loaded gun in the shaft. You put your pellet in, load the spring, point it at the, uh, the subject and push the button. If you poke the, uh, animal with the Brolly while you push the button all he feels is the poke from the umbrella.
“Or,” he went on, stooping to pick up a large ballpoint pen, “this here is your Peruvian Pen. It’s gas loaded. You charge it with your ordinary COz soda-water capsule. It hasn’t got the range of a Brolly. And it won’t go through, like, clothes, unless you give it a double charge, and then it makes more noise. It takes your average, uh, subject about four or five days to die, because the stuff has to get out of the pellet and into his bloodstream. So you can be long gone. Other side of it is, it’s no good to stop.anybody fast, any questions?”
Hake raised his hand. “I thought the charter of the Team didn’t allow killing human beings?”
“You got two hours too. Who said anything about human beings?”
“You said it would go through clothes.” “I meant like a horse blanket,” the instructor explained. “Or like fur. But that’s not to say,” he went on darkly, “that the Other Side wouldn’t use these same things on you. It was the Bulgarians invented the Brolly in the first place, and they didn’t use it on no Airedales. You stick around, Hake. I got some little jobs for you besides the latrines. Any questions?”
But even the little extra jobs passed, and on the sixteenth day the whole crew was assigned to spraying defoliant on the three-five pasture—the animals cropped the yucca so heavily that every once in a while the inedible plants had to be killed off, to give the “buffalo grass” a chance to come back. By the time they came back Hake had solved his sexual problem, and so had Mary Jean. Wolfing down their food that night they sat touching on the wooden bench. Deena was amused. Sister Florian was tolerant. Tigrito was sulky. And Beth Hwa, that quiet, middle-aged wife of an avocado shipper from Hilo, intercepted Mary Jean on the way out of the mess hall and handed her something. Mary Jean showed it to Hake, grinning; it was a pillbox. “In case we got caught short,” she explained.
The remainder of the three weeks began to look more attractive. But on the seventeenth day Fortnum told them the Congressional Oversight Committee was coming around for its annual inspection, and they all better look sharp, and that night everything was changed. Pegleg tucked them in with the news that there was going to be a special assignment for the morrow, and in the morning he told them what it was:
“This is not, repeat not, a training mission,” he singsonged. “This is the real thing. You will be given full gear for an extended stay in the open, and the whole class is going to participate. Five of you will go by plane to Del Rio. The rest will be trucked to Big Bend National Park. We gonna have ourselves a wetback huntl” “Wetbacks?”
“Hell, yes, Tigrito! You ought to know what a wetback is. Got too many Mexes coming in and taking our jobs, you know? And it’s up to us to stop them.”
Hate said, “Wait a minute. I thought the presidential directive limited us to actions outside the United States.”
“Shit, man. They come from outside the United States, don’t they? You’re never gonna get anyplace on the Team, you keep coming up with stuff like that. Now, you listen to me. We’re going to go down to the border and we’re going to make friends with the wetbacks. Then we’re going to track back to find out where they’re coming in, and track forward to where they’re going. Any of you do good, you’ll likely get yourselves sent to St. Louis and Chicago and maybe even New York to find where they’re going there. There’s not going to be no direct action against them, that’s for the Immigration. We’re just going to locate them and get the evidence. That’s good duty. So don’t fuck it up.”