Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  “Hypnotism?”

  “You keep repeating what I say, but that’s not responsive, you know. Yes, I said ‘hypnotism.’ In case you don’t know it, you show all the diagnostic signs: trance logic, tolerance of incongruities, even analgesia. Or anyway analgesia of the soul; you’d be hurting about the kind of people you’re involved with if something didn’t stop you. Even hypnotic paranoia! You pick up cues that a person not in the trance state would ignore. You picked up cues from us after we kidnapped you! That’s why you didn’t report us, you know.”

  “Oh, come off it. Nobody hypnotized me.”

  “As to that, how would you know? If you’d been given a post-hypnotic command to forget it?”

  He shook his head obstinately.

  “Oh, sure,” she sneered. “You’d know, because you’re you, right? But if you weren’t hypnotized, how do you explain signing up with the spooks?”

  I can’t, he thought. But what he said out loud was, “I don’t have to explain anything to you. I don’t even know who you are—except your name’s Lee and you’re married.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully from under the brim of her hat. Hake couldn’t see her eyes very well, and that disconcerted him. Well, everything about her disconcerted him. “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said shortly. He was not feeling well at all, and sitting out at this trashy, chilly sidewalk cafe—Munich was having some sort of garbagemen’s strike, and the sidewalks were loaded with old, stale refuse—was not making him feel any better. And the distant yelling was louder and closer.

  When he came back, the waiter had brought refills of the Berlinerweissen, and Lee had removed her hat. She looked a lot younger and prettier without it, and forlorn. She would have seemed quite appealing under the right circumstances. Which were not these. Hake realized apprehensively that he had finished the, whole first beer. The syrup at the bottom had cloyed his palate enough so that he wanted the astringency of the new one, but his stomach was serving notice that it was prepared to take only so much more insult.

  “As to who I am, Hake,” she said moodily, “I’ve blown my cover to you already, haven’t I? So my name is Leota Pauket. I was a graduate student at—never mind where. Anyway, I’m not even a graduate student any more. My dissertation subject was disapproved, and that’s what started all this.”

  “I hope you’re going to tell me what you’re talking about.”

  “You bet I am, Hake. Maybe more than you want to know.” She took a long sip at the new beer, staring out at the littered street. “I’m a Ute.”

  “You don’t look Indian.”

  “Don’t wise off, Hake. I’m a Utilitarianist. I used to belong to the Jeremy Bentham Club at school. You know: ‘the greatest good of the greatest number,’ and all that. It was a small club, only six of us. But we were closer than brothers. I’ve had to deal with some pretty crummy people since I got into this, Hake. There are bad ones on the other side too, as bad as your lot, and I can’t always pick my allies. But back at school they were a good bunch, all grad students, all in economics or sociology. All first-class human beings. My dissertation advisor was our faculty rep, and she was something else. She’s the one who suggested the topic to me: Covariants and correlatives: An examination into the relationship between degradation of non-monetary standard of living factors and decreasing international tensions. She helped—”

  “Hey!” Hake sat up straighten “Can I get a copy of that?”

  “My dissertation? Don’t be stupid, Hake. I told you I never finished it. Still,” she added, looking pleased, “I do have the preliminary draft somewhere. I suppose I could find a copy if you really wanted to read it.”

  “I do. Truly I do. I’ve been trying to dig up that sort of information myself.”

  “Hum.” She took another sip of the beer, looking at him over the wide rim of the glass. “Maybe there’s hope for you after all, Hake. Anyway. She’s the one who put us on the track of your spook friends. She said it was impossible all these things could have happened at random. Something had to be behind it. The more I dug, the more sure I was that she was right. Then she got fired. She was paid on a government teaching grant. And the grant was canceled. And then the man who replaced her rejected my whole dissertation proposal. And the new faculty advisor to the JBC recommended we dissolve it. So we did—publicly. And we went underground. That,” she said, counting on her fingers, “was one, two—three years ago.” Hake nodded, watching her fingers. “It wasn’t hard to make sure of our facts: the United States was deliberately sabotaging other nations. It wasn’t even hard to find out which agency was doing it—we had help. Then the question was, what do we do about it? We thought of going public, TV, press, the whole works. But we decided against. What would we get? A ten-day sensation in the headlines, and then everybody would forget. Just printing what these people do legitimizes it; you’ve been in Washington, you’ve seen the statues to the Watergate Martyrs. So we decided to fight fire with fire— Hake? What’s the matter with you?”

  He was pointing at her ring. “Now I know where I saw you first! You were the old lady on the bus!”

  “Well, of course I was. I told you we had to check up on you.”

  “But how did you know where I was going to be?”

  She seemed uncomfortable. “I told you we had help.”

  “What kind, of help?” He was finding it harder and harder to follow the conversation, or even to sit upright in his chair. The yelling was now very close, and down the broad avenue he could see an advancing parade of marchers in white robes and peaked wizard hats. He couldn’t read the placards they carried, but they seemed to be chanting “Gastarbeiter, raus! Gastarbeiter, raus!”

  “None of your business,” she said loudly, over the shouting of the paraders. “Anyway, shut up about that, Hake. I’m trying to tell you—Hake! What are you doing?”

  “He realized he was on the ground looking up at her. “I think I’m fainting,” he explained; and then he did.

  What happened next was very unclear to Hake. He kept waking briefly, then passing out again. Once he was in a room he didn’t recognize, with Leota and a man he didn’t know, somehow Oriental, bearded, bending over him. They were talking about him:

  “You’re not a doctor, Subirama! He’s too sick for your foolishness!”

  “Ssh, ssh, Leota, it is only something to relieve the pain, a little acupuncture, it will bring down the fever—”

  “I don’t believe in acupuncture,” Hake said, but then he realized that it was a long time later and he was in a different place, what seemed to be a military ambulance plane, with a black woman in a nurse’s uniform who peered at him queerly.

  “This isn’t acupuncture, honey,” she soothed, “just a little shot to make you feel better—”

  And when he woke up again he was in a real hospital. And it had to be back home in New Jersey, because the doctor taking his pulse was Sam Cousins, whose daughter had been married in Hake’s own church. His throat was painfully dehydrated. He croaked, “What—what happened, Sam?”

  The doctor put his wrist down and looked pleased. “There you are, Horny. Nice to have you back. Orderly, give me a glass of water.”

  As Hake was greedily taking the permitted three sips, the doctor said, “You’ve been pretty sick, you know. Here, that’s enough water just now. You can have more in a minute.”

  Hake followed the glass wistfully with his eyes. “Sick with what?”

  “Well, that’s the problem, Horny. Some new kind of virus. All the kids got it too, and so did Alys. But it doesn’t bother young children much. Or old people. The ones it really knocks out are the healthy prime-of-lifers, like you.” He got up. “I’ll be back in a while, Horny, and we’ll have you out of here in a day or two. But right now,” he said, nodding to the orderly, “no visitors.”

  “Yes, doctor,” said the orderly, closing the door behind him and turning toward Hake, and then Hake took a closer look at the hairy, lean man wearing those whites. It was almo
st not a surprise.

  “Hello, Curmudgeon,” he said.

  “Not so loud,” said the spook. “There’s no bugs in the room, but who knows who’s walking down the corridor outside?”

  He pulled some newspapers out of the bedside table. “I just wanted to give you these, and let you know we’re thinking of you. The Team’s got a new assignment for you as soon as you’re well enough.”

  “New assignment? Cripes, Curmudgeon, I haven’t even done the first one yet. Why would you give me another assignment when I screwed this one up by getting sick?”

  The spook smiled and unfolded the papers. Several stories were circled in red:

  new virus cuts production 40% in swedish factories

  said the New York Times, and

  danes gripe, germans cough

  said the Daily News, over a picture of long lines of men waiting to get into a public lavatory in Frankfurt.

  “What makes you think you screwed up?” asked Curmudgeon.

  V

  Every priest has someone to confess to—a rabbi has another rabbi, even a Protestant minister has some ecclesiastical superior. H. Hornswell Hake had no one like that. He was a Unitarian, as alone in command as any ship’s captain on the high seas. The idea of laying his problems on Beacon Street would have struck him as ludicrous if it had entered his mind at all. And so, without a wife or steady lover, without parents, not actively in psychoanalytic therapy and even (he realized with some concern) lacking in really close friends, he had nobody to talk to.

  And he wanted to talk; God, how he wanted to talk! It is not an easy thing for a man to discover that he has infected half a continent. It clawed at his mind. Hake’s life agenda was not clear to him, but parts of it were certain. Most certain of all, that his goal was not to make people sick but to make them well. Jogging, stretching-and-bending, working out with the weights, he kept thinking about Germans and Danes red-eyed and sneezing. Flat on his back, he saw himself as a Typhoid Mary on a continental scale. He was flat on his back a lot, too. The disease Hake had spread through Western Europe was what the Team called a Three-X strain, which meant only that it had so high a relapsing rate that the average sufferer could count on three recurrences of fever, trots and miseries. Hake received the best medical care and achieved five. Weeks passed before he was ready for duty again.

  Not that he was either idle or alone. When he was relapsing, Alys Brant, Jessie Tunman and half a dozen others rallied round with soup and solicitude; when he was up and about, Jessie was there with concerns about the Carpet Caper and the next budget meeting, his LRY director with plans for the Midsummer Magic Show benefit and worries about which teenagers were into what drugs, Alys Brant with her own inevitable self. Alys had had only the lightest touch of the sickness, but it was enough to give her strong sympathy with Hake’s bouts, and that was more sympathy than Hake felt able to deal with. He kept her at bay by sending her off on library-research jobs for him, and by the time he was well enough to get back to church for a Sunday morning sermon he had decided what he wanted to do. Like many a minister before him, he was going to work out his problems on the congregation.

  The weather had turned hot. Hake walked slowly over to the church before the service, pacing himself to keep from working up a sweat or increasing his respiration—he did not want to breathe in any more of the smoggy air than he had to, especially with the special tinctures of the pizzeria next to the church. In this kind of weather he either ran at daybreak, when it was still cool, or gave up running entirely. He unlocked the church door and propped it wide.

  It was an old church and a small one, but it was Hake’s own. His heart lightened as he went inside, studying the worn carpet, neatening the racks of name badges waiting for the congregation. The paint was chipping on the ceiling again. Hake frowned. The Team had been spendthrift in providing luxuries for his own use—the wind generator, new office furniture, beautifully functioning fittings in the bathroom, even a redone kitchen when bachelor Hake almost never cooked a meal. It was time they put a little of that money into the church. Perhaps new floor coverings so that they could give up the fundraising Carpet Capers. Next time he talked to Curmudgeon— But when would that be? And maybe—maybe, after this morning’s sermon, there would be no handouts from Curmudgeon ever again. That would be a pity, perhaps. But it would be better than living with guilt.

  “As most of you know,” he began, “I spent several weeks in Europe last month, and it has made me think about the world. Some of what I’m thinking I don’t like. I look at the world, and I see a crazy kind of race where the way to win isn’t to run faster than the other guy but to trip him up. It isn’t war. But it isn’t peace, either, and it is degrading the quality of life for everybody, for ourselves as well as for the rest of the world.” Because of the warm spring weather, there were only about thirty-five people in the church, cross-legged on the floor, slouched on beanbag pillows or sitting properly erect at the benches along the sides of the room. They were all listening attentively—or, if not attentively, with that polite expression of passive acceptance that he had seen most Sunday mornings of his life from this pulpit. “Some of it is economic,” he said, “so that we play games with each others’ currencies, raiding the pound and speculating on the mark; dumping gold on the market when the dollar softens, and buying it up to hoard when the Russians or the South Africans or the Indians start to sell. Some of it is mercantile. We sell wheat for less than it costs to raise, to countries that ship us TV sets for less than they cost to make. And some of it—” he hesitated, looking at the words he had written down, looking for the courage to go beyond them—“some of it is psychological. We censure the Spaniards for not giving freedom to the Basques, and we snub the rest of the world for interfering with our own dealings with the Navajos.”

  The eyes were glazing now, as he had known they would be, but doggedly he went on reciting statistics and explaining policies. Even Ted Brant, lying back against the beanbag, knees up, one arm possessively around Alys’s shoulder, the other hand resting on Sue-Ellen’s knee, was no longer looking hostile, only bored, while Alys was nodding at every point. It wasn’t agreement, really. She was just acknowledging the use Hake was making of the information she had supplied him. Hake went on with his catalogue: aid to defectors, support to dissidents, jamming of broadcasts, dumping of pollution—“those thousand-meter stacks get rid of our own pollution,” he said, “but only by throwing it up high enough so that it comes down on London and Copenhagen.” Allen Haversford was no longer glassy-eyed. The director of International Pets and ” Flowers was listening with full, if noncommittal, attention, and so, surprisingly, was Jessie Tunman.

  Hake rounded into his moral. “What I have come to believe,” he said, “is that it is not enough not to be at war. We need more. We need tolerance and caring. We need to give credit to those who disagree with us for being perhaps wrong, but not villains. We need to accept diversity and encourage individuality. We need to abandon suspicion as a way of life, and turn away from either preemption or revenge. And we need to find within ourselves the solutions to the problems we make, instead of trying to make our own condition relatively better by making someone else’s relatively worse. And now,” he said, “Ellie Fratkin and Bill Meecham will entertain us with one of their lovely cello and piano duets.”

  To the strains of Schubert—or maybe it was Kabalevsky, he had misplaced his notes and when Bill and Ellie played, all the selections sounded about the same—he sat on the platform and looked out over his congregation. To the extent that Hake had family, they were it. He knew them from the inside out—inside best, as he knew his adopted Uncle Phil not as the steely-eyed IRS examiner but as the hiccoughing and amiable drunk who showed up at one of his hospital stays with a wetting, weeping baby doll as a get-well present, having forgotten what sex his sister-in-law’s stepchild happened to be. Bland Teddy Cantrell, squatting like a Buddha and nodding to the music, would always be the tearful suicide-attempter who had set fir
e to Hake’s study with a starter’s pistol when his wife left him. One of the times his wife left him. The two gay Tonys, the stablest and most dignified couple in the church as they leaned shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall, had blubbered their hearts out to him while deciding to come out of the closet. How many of them had he reached with what he had had to say? And as the coffee came out and the parishioners drifted around, he listened to the comments. “Really elevating,” said the tall Tony, and the plumper, younger one said, “You always make me feel good, Horny.” Jessie Tunman: “I only wish you were that open-minded about other things, Horny.” Elinor Fratkin, hissing into his ear the moment she caught him alone: “I’m simply ashamed, Horny! How can I face William when you didn’t say that what we were playing was his own transcription of the Bach partita?” Frail old Gertrude Mengel, tottering to him on a cane: “Oh, Reverend Hake, if only my sister could be hearing you! It might have kept her off drugs.” Alys Brant, lingering next to him while Ted clutched her hand and stared resolutely away, “I loved the way you put it all together. When are we going to New York to finish the research?” Teddy Cantrell: “You’ve given us a lot to think about.” And just behind him, Allen Haversford, eyes hooded, stiffly shaking Hake’s hand: “You certainly have, and I want to talk to you about it at some length, Reverend Hake, but not just now.”

  Did that sound like a threat? At least a warning? For better or worse, it was about the only sign he had that anyone had really listened to him. He went back to his home, spent the day fiddling with filing sermons and putting together reports for the Monday Board meeting, watched television for a while and decided to go to bed early; and when he flushed his toilet that night it spoke to him in Curmudgeon’s voice.