“Thank you,” I said. The occasion seemed to call for it, so I got to my feet, and we faced one another across the desk. P extended his hand, and very solemnly I took it. It was the kind of handshake that follows the awarding of a medal, and P seemed perilously close to kissing me on both cheeks.
Instead, he said, “For the duration of this operation, your code name will be Q. All correspondence concerning you will employ that designation, and the men at the site will know you only by that name. Understood?”
I said, “I’m Q?”
“Yes.”
I looked around. L. M. N. O. P. “Of course,” I said. “I’m Q! Who else?”
P said, “I beg your pardon?”
“Nothing,” Q told him. “It’s a private joke.”
10
Picture, if you will, a rolling countryside green with verdant spring. A small dark-watered lake fills the center of a cupped valley, surrounded by wooded hills, forested with pine and oak and maple. On the eastern shore of the lake there are the only signs of human occupancy: a pier, a small beach, a float, a boathouse. A smooth, undulant, green lawn sweeps up-slope from these to a large sprawling house of gray fieldstone; this could be a private manor, or a rest home, or a small and exclusive resort. There are stables, occupied by real horses, to one side of this building, and a long garage, occupied by real automobiles, to the other. A narrow blacktop road continues up the face of the ridge beyond this building, into the woods, over the top, and down the other side through thick forest to a small state highway not quite three miles away. The country-side all around the lake is beautiful, wild, lush, crisscrossed by narrow trails and enclosed by electrified fencing.
The time is six-forty A.M. Because the month is April, a slow, gentle, chilling drizzle is leaking interminably from heaven, and the temperature is hovering around fifty. Through this beautiful, bleak, half-lit predawn landscape two men in gray sweatsuits are running. They are trotting end-lessly along a path that circles the lake. They are running around the lake, and around the lake, and around the lake. They must be idiots.
One of the two is a burly blocky blond-haired bloke named — or so he says — Lynch. The other, known to Lynch and everyone else around here — you can’t see them; they’re asleep — as Q, is yours truly, J. Eugene Raxford, your correspondent. Lynch, red-faced, as healthy as a moose, is trotting along like a well-oiled wind-up toy. Beside him, I am wheezing, I am puffing, I am panting, I am flailing my arms around and no longer making any attempt to keep my knees as high as Lynch likes them.
This was the morning of my fifth day at this place, which was what P had referred to as “our site.” Judging from the nighttime automobile trip Angela and I had taken here from P’s office, we were somewhere in upstate New York, or possibly in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Although it might also have been in Rhode Island, Vermont, or New Hampshire. Wherever it was, its name was Hell.
In the last five days I had learned something I’d never known before: pacifism makes one flabby. You might think walking on picket lines, marching in demonstrations, cranking mimeograph machines, and running away from mounted policemen are activities that would keep one in relatively good physical shape, but apparently they do not. At any rate, Lynch and his confreres — no letters for these people, they all had names, one monosyllabic name each — were convinced that I was in terrible physical shape, and after they’d run me around the lake a few hundred times, my tendency was to believe them.
The first day had been the worst. It had been after dawn before we’d finally arrived here, and when Angela and I were shown our connecting rooms and left alone, we were both so tired that neither of us so much as checked to see if the linking door was locked. (It was, we later learned, not.) I was awakened at noon, over my strident protests, chivvied downstairs for a breakfast of orange juice, steak, scrambled eggs, milk, coffee, toast and orange marmalade, and introduced to a beefy bunch termed, blithely, “your instructors.” The one who called them that began the introductions by introducing himself: “Karp. I handle the administrative end at the site here.”
And the others: “This is Lynch, who’ll be seeing to your physical condition. Walsh, here, is your code man. And here’s Hanks, your judo instructor. And—”
“I’m a pacifist,” I said. “Maybe they didn’t tell you.”
He looked at me with the expressionless eyes of a philanthropist doing a good deed among the lower orders. “Hanks,” he said, “will instruct you in some of the principles of self-defense.” He looked away, and continued the introductions: “This is Morse, your swimming instructor. Here’s Rowe, fencing and gymnastics—”
I said, “More self-defense?”
Another blank look, and he said, “Quite. And finally. Duff here, your electronics technician.” Turning to me full-face now, he said, “As I understand it, you are a special case, Q, not one of our normal recruits. We have been given just five days to turn you into something with at least a minimum of survival potential, and if we are to get anywhere at all we shall require your full and unstinting co-operation. We shall not, I promise you, waste any of these five days instructing you in anything useless or abstract, so please do not waste time objecting to elements of the course. I take it you would prefer to survive.”
“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble,” I said, “I’d appreciate it very much.”
“It won’t be too much trouble,” he told me. “Walsh, will you take Q along now?”
Walsh was my code man. He took me away for an hour to a small room where he filled me full of codes, passwords, signals, counteractants, emergency over-rides, and I don’t know what all. “Don’t worry if it isn’t all sinking in,” he said at one point. “We’ll have several sessions.”
“Oh, good,” I said.
Lynch had me next. Down to the locker room we went, changed into sweatsuits, and off for the first but not the last time around that bloody lake. For an hour I ran, I did calisthenics, I climbed ropes, I jumped up and down, and I did a lot of loud breathing through my mouth. When at last the hour was done, Lynch looked at me and said, sourly, “They expect miracles, don’t they?”
Duff, my electronics technician, was next. We met in a long low-ceilinged room full of electronic equipment, at which Duff generally waved, saying, “Here is some of the equipment you may be called upon to use. Our purpose is to familiarize you with it.”
Sure.
Next was Rowe, fencing and gymnastics. Rowe handed me a blunt épée, attacked me à la Douglas Fairbanks a few times, and said, “Well, the hell with that. If they come at you with swords you’ll die, that’s all. Let’s go to gymnastics.”
I said, “They don’t come at people with swords very much any more, do they?”
“Sometimes,” he said. “Not often. Swing on those rings over there.”
After Rowe came Morse, my swimming instructor, who said, “Can you swim at all?”
“I can swim very well,” I told him.
“Thank God for small favors,” he said. “I am now going to teach you to swim silently. Get in the water.”
I said, “Do you know it’s cold out here?”
“No, it isn’t,” he said. “Now, in order to swim silently—”
Then came lunch, a welcome respite, and the first time I’d seen Angela that day. The people here didn’t know her name either, but they didn’t call her by a letter, they just called her Miss. She said, “How are you doing?” and I said, “They’re trying to kill me. Nothing to worry about.”
After lunch I saw Duff again, and had another go at the electronic equipment. He also took some of my measurements, for various electronic things he intended to attach to me one way and another, and I went away from there, somewhat bemused, to be thrown around a padded floor for an hour by Hanks, my judo instructor, who couldn’t care less about my pacifism; whether or not I ever used what he taught me was not his concern. Then Walsh the code man again, and some more silent swimming with Morse, and another go at the gymnasium with Rowe, on and on, ultimately ending at ten o’clock at night with an incredible massage from Lynch. “One thing we don’t want,” Lynch said, pummeling me, “is for them muscles to tighten up.”