by The Cool War
Hake drove gingerly through the erratic kids and into the church lot. Between his car and the front door he paused every few steps, to pick up empty Coke cartons and wedge-shaped pizza containers.
After the spicy smells from the pizzeria, the interior of the church smelled strongly of must and dust, but it was looking good. The First Unitarian Church of Long Branch now had a new green and gold nubbly carpet down its main hall, in a pattern guaranteed to drink up spilled wine and hide cigarette burns, and the contractors swore that its roof would no longer leak. So the Team was continuing to reward him and his. He eased himself stiffly and painfully into the torn leather chair in his study—that was another part of the payoff, to be sure—and began to make notes for the Buildings and Grounds Committee:
1. Cut lawn.
2. Prov. wst bskts nr pzria (worth trying?)
3. Check roof for leak after next rain.
4. Carpet gntee in safe dep box?
5. Plants watered? Lawn? Shrubs?
He had a list of fifteen items before he was done, and another of ten for Decorations and Special Functions. They were something to give Jessie to show where he had been, anyway. More or less content, Hake got up to prowl the church. All was in order. The familiar rooms were neat, if dusty. The main meeting hall, of course, was not. Social Action had been meeting there again. As he was pushing the chairs back into position and dumping ashtrays he heard a shrill peep-peep-peep from the parking lot.
He stopped and frowned. Was’ there another Tata in the neighborhood? Or another car with the same waspy, petulant horn? He finished quickly and locked up behind himself.
There stood his Tata, crystal bubble and bright yellow paint. But as he slid under the bubble he saw a note pinned to the steering wheel:
Our bargain still holds. Get out of this car at once.
It wasn’t signed, but it didn’t have to be. It was one of the Reddi brothers, of course. He sat paralyzed for a moment, and then it penetrated his mind that “at once” might very well mean “at once.” He slid out from under the bubble and stepped back, looking around for someone to talk to about this unexpected problem.
There was a faint hissing sound from the car, a little like the buzz of a young rattlesnake.
Hake had learned something Under the Wire. He dropped flat on the damp asphalt. There was a blast of white fire and a crack like a giant whip. The shattered crystal bubble flew into the air; the yellow chassis of the Tata peeled outward, and it began to burn.
It was not a very big explosion. The hydrogen fuel was mostly in solid suspension in metal, and it burned rather than blowing up. But it was enough to destroy the car, and it surely would have been enough to destroy Hake, too, if he had been inside it.
When he was through with the police, and the firemen, and when the wrecker had come to tow what was left of his three-wheeler away, one of the policemen walked him to the door. He didn’t need it; he wasn’t hurt. But he was glad enough for it, except for the cop’s conversation, which was about how unsafe your hydrogen cars were compared to your good old gas-burners—
“Have there been a lot of, uh, accidents like this?”
“No. But it stands to reason.”
At his door, Hake thanked the policeman and headed for his bedroom. To his surprise, ‘Jessie Tunman was there before him. She was in his little private sitting room, not the one he used for counseling, studying the tool kit he had brought from Under the Wire. “Those are my personal possessions!”
She blinked up at him, startled but self-possessed. “What in the world happened to you?”
He said, “My car blew up. Total loss.”
“Well, I sent off your check for the insurance’, so I guess you’re covered. Those things aren’t safe, you know.”
J i IC V^UU I » V Ul IV/
He said, “Thank you but, Jessie, I’d prefer you didn’t touch my possessions.”
She nodded noncommittally. “Sure have been a lot of changes around here, Horny. Car blowing up. You getting yourself all beat up. All this new stuff—”
“And here’s another change. Please don’t come into my part of the house when I’m not here.”
She stood up, skinny legs unwinding. She was taller than he was, but she seemed to be looking up at him. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “that’s one of the changes. You wouldn’t have spoken to me that way six months ago.”
As the door closed behind her Hake debated getting up to lock it. It seemed too pointed, at least until she was well out of hearing. He didn’t need Jessie to tell him how he had changed. He was aware of all the many ways in which the present H. Hornswell Hake D.D. was utterly unlike the one she had come to work for, just a few years before.
He kicked off his shoes, pulled the shirt over his head and felt at least a little cooler. It occurred to him that he could easily be as cool as he chose. With the new dispensation, why not an air-conditioner? The Team would pay for one if he ordered it, and the overhead wind generator, whose constant ratchety whine was beginning to get noisy again, could power air-conditioning enough for ten houses like this. If he wanted it. If he were that much of a power-pig-
If he had changed that much.
He sighed and pushed the heap of burglar tools to the back of his dresser, and there were the Incredible Art’s neglected tapes and fiches.
Well, why not? He had nothing more pressing.
The difficulty was that there were so many of them. But they were all marked, and one, bearing the note “Short course on the basics,” looked like a good place to start. This one, Hake observed, was a video cassette. Easy enough. He slipped it into the tape deck of his bedside TV set, and leaned back on the pillow to watch.
It seemed to be a slide talk prepared for college freshmen, but held his interest as he watched all the way through.
If you jab a person with a pin, you expect him to hurt. If he doesn’t hurt, or says he doesn’t, his behavior is contrary to expectation. If you are of an inquiring turn of mind, you try to understand why he is behaving that way, and when you know the reasons the behavior is no longer contrary. It is now what you expect.
If Harry is walking across a room which he can plainly see contains an obstacle, we expect him to avoid stumbling over it.
If Jacqueline attempts to unclench her fist, we expect her to succeed.
If Wilma cannot remember the color of her kindergarten teacher’s hair, we expect the memory to stay lost; and if all of these expectations are defeated we ask why. Is Harry blind and Jacqueline paralyzed and has someone just shown Wilma a Kodachrome of her kindergarten class? Say, no. But say instead that we discover that someone has suggested to each of these people that they behave as described. Now we are on the track of a solution to these puzzles, and we learn that the solution has a name. It is called “hypnosis.” And there is a theory. In fact, Hake discovered, there were God’s own quantity of theories, all the way back to Franz Anton Mesmer’s own in the year 1775.
Mesmer was a doctor, and he thought he had found a way to cure some kinds of illnesses without nostrum or knife—considering the state of medicine at the time, a very good way to go about it. It rested on what he called “animal magnetism.” If he made certain mysterious passes with his hands near a subject’s head, and then commanded the subject to do certain things, the subject would do them. Even if they were quite strange. Even if what he was told to do was to get well. Even when, you would think, they would normally be impossible. He could command the subject to go rigid, and get him stiff as a board. He could command the subject to feel no pain. Then he could pinch him, poke him, even burn him.
All that was well reported, and seemed to be objectively true. The patients said it was true. Observers said it was true. Dr. Mesmer himself said it was tfue. He then went on to say he knew why it was true. He said there was a magnetic fluid—he even allowed it to be called a “mesmeric fluid”—which surrounds everyone, and the passage of the hands through the fluid rearranges it to change the state of animal magn
etism in the subject, thus producing the effects described.
That’s where he made his mistake, because scientists then went looking for the fluid. There isn’t any. It doesn’t exist.
Denials and objections flew, and continued to fly for more than two centuries, but, whatever you called it, the thing did just what Mesmer had claimed for it. Even more. People had their teeth filled under hypnotic commands to feel no pain, and got up from the dentist’s chair smiling and grateful. Women had babies with no other anesthesia, and laughed and chattered through the delivery.
There were, to be sure, a few little anomalies.
As electronic technology began to invade medical, experimenters reported some puzzling results. If they measured the electrical potential of the nerves affected, no matter how comfortable the subject said he was, those nerves were twanging. And if they got the subject into automatic writing, his mouth might say, “Gee, no, that doesn’t hurt,” but his hand would be scribbling, “Liar.”
And all that was very interesting, Hake thought when he had finished, but what did it mean? If it had anything to do with his behavior, or Leota’s, or the Team’s, he could not detect the relationship.
He realized his feet were getting cold. He put his slippers on and padded into the bathroom to make himself a glass of instant coffee. While he was waiting for the water to run hot he peered at himself in the mirror, absently aware that the nose looked almost human and the bruises were beginning to fade, half listening to the whir of the ventilator and the diffident gurgle of the john, his mind full of hypnotism.
He now knew more than he had ever wanted to know about the subject, but not the thing that would clarify the world for him. Maybe he was looking in the wrong place? Maybe he should have been reading Trilby instead of listening to Art’s tapes?
And tardily he realized that the toilet was still running. Not only that, but splashing and gurgling louder than ever.
“Oh, cripes,” he said out loud. He had forgotten to check for messages.
He pressed his thumb onto the pattern-recognizing moire of the flush lever, and Curmudgeon’s voice snarled gloatingly, “Got yourself in the soup again, didn’t you, Hake? Maybe it’ll teach you a lesson. You’re fooling with some dangerous characters, and right now I can’t spare much Team cover for you. So lay low. Stick with that bunch of pagans you call your congregation. Talk about the whooping crane and the sanctity of interpersonal relationships and stay off the hard stuff, you hear me? That’s an order. Do you remember what you’re supposed to say when I give you an order?” There was a tiny beep, and then only the faint whisper of the running tape, waiting.
Hake remembered. “I understand and will comply,” he said reluctantly. A moment later the tape sound stopped, and the toilet was only a toilet again.
Thoughtfully, Hake used it for the purpose for whicV it was intended. The team’s communications were astonishingly quick; he was being more closely watched than he had realized. Of course, the blowing up of the car had attracted attention. It was not the sort of thing that would not be noticed. But still—how had they known so fast?
He washed his hands and went back into his bedroom, and Alys Brant said sweetly, “Hello, Horny. I hope you’re glad to see me.”
Hake stopped cold. Alys was propped on his bed, feet demurely tucked under her. She had done something new to her hair, but it had not made her less attractive; the way she looked was sweet and trusting. Nevertheless! “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Please don’t be angry, Horny, dear. I need a place to stay. Just for a night or two, until I can get to my aunt’s place.”
“Alys,” he said, “for Christ’s sake! Don’t you know Ted and Walter already blame me for taking you away from them?”
“Oh, them,” she said. She shrugged and stretched. ‘They’ll get over it. You have nothing to do with it. I made up my mind to leave them long ago. I just need to be free—good heavens, you know all that; you listened to us complain and fuss and go over the same thing over and over again in counseling. So now I’ve moved out. I’ve been staying with—a friend. But that got impossible, too, so I came here. I just don’t have any other place to go, Horny.”
“It’s completely out of the question, Alys!”
She sat up, covering a yawn. “Nobody’s ever going to know. Except Jessie, maybe. But she’s very loyal to you. Horny? Have you got anything to eat? I’ve been walking for hours, and carrying those bags.” She looked toward an overnight case and a plastic shopping bag, neatly tucked by Hake’s dresser. “Not much, are they? But all my worldly goods.”
Angry, Hake walked over to it and threw a sweatshirt over the pile of burglar tools.
“I already saw that stuff,” Alys pointed out. “And I was listening to you in the bathroom while you were getting ready to tinkle. You were talking to somebody. And I’ve been meaning to ask you for some time what you were into with dear old Leota Pauket. It’s some kind of spy thing, isn’t it, Horny? Would you like to tell me all about it while we eat?”
He sat on the edge of his bedside armchair and regarded her. The woman was full of surprises. “How do you know Leota Pauket?”
“Went to school with her. I hadn’t seen her in years— then, last spring, I just bumped into her on the street. Right outside the rectory here, as a matter of fact. We had a few drinks, she wanted to know what was happening in my life. Well, we had just been through one of those long, stupid sessions with you, and I told her all about it, and you seemed to fascinate her. She wanted to know all about you.
Do you remember that really nasty weather we had, just before we went off to Europe with those kids?”
Hake nodded. “When you were here for counseling.” It wasn’t hard to remember; that was the session that had been interrupted by his summons to the Team.
“Well, that was when it was.”
“You didn’t say anything to me.”
“Well, really, Horny! Why should I? I had no idea you knew her—in fact, I guess you didn’t. But then in Munich, she was the one who brought you back to the hotel. She was wearing a wig, but it was Leota, all right. As soon as she saw me getting out of the elevator she ducked out. And then I got a note from her. Real spy stuff: ‘Please don’t mention me, ever. I’ll explain when I see you. It’s important.’ Something like that.”
Horny Hake sat thoughtful for a moment. At least that explained how Leota had turned up on the bus to Washington. She must have known he was being drafted into service as soon as he did.
But it didn’t change the present realities. “Notwithstanding all that, Alys, you’ve got no business here now. What’s going to happen if your husbands find out?”
“We’ll just have to make sure they won’t find out, right, Horny? I mean, it looks like you’re pretty good at keeping secrets. You surprise me, honestly you do.”
He groaned. “Alys, I give you my word, you’re getting into more than you can handle. Is there any possible way I can believe that you’ll forget all this?”
She shook her head. “Huh-uh.”
“This isn’t any game! How do you think I got these lumps? People get killed!”
“It sounds really interesting, Horny.”
“This room could be bugged right now. If Curmudgeon finds out you’re involved I don’t know what he’ll do.”
” ‘Curmudgeon.’ That’s a name I hadn’t heard before.” She stood up. “Let’s go in the kitchen and get some dinner started, and then while we’re eating you can begin at the beginning and tell me all about it. You can take your time. We’ve got all night.”
XI
Hake woke up from a profound and actively dreaming sleep, and did it instantly.
In the split second between the moment he realized he was awake and the moment he opened his eyes, he achieved a synoptic flash of memory. It took in everything. It included finding Alys in his room, talking to her, eating with her and, by what had seemed at the time a logical and inevitable progression, going to bed with her; and he
even knew at once what and who had awakened him.
The figure standing beside his bed, tall, skinny and silent, was Jessie Tunman. Her eyes glittered, and she was soundlessly shaking his shoulder. She glanced contemptuously at the nude and sleeping form of Alys Brant, and retreated to the door.
Hake pulled his robe on and followed her. He whispered savagely, “You have no right coming into my room!”
“Her? I don’t care about her.” The glitter in her eyes was triumph. “Orders from Curmudgeon. Get yourself dressed and come out into the office.”
He stopped with the sash of his robe half knotted. “What do you know about Curmudgeon?” he demanded.
“Just do it.” He had never heard that tone from her, a senior-citizen gloat over the smart-assed kid. She did not linger to explain. She turned and marched down the hall, and even the way she walked was smug.
Of course, he thought, Jessie was the one! She had spied him out for recruitment to begin with. Her previous career had been “government employee.” She hadn’t lied on the job application, she had merely failed to say what part of the government she had worked for. And no doubt she had been observing him carefully all the while she typed his sermons and filed his mail, judging from arcane clues (whether he took the liverwurst on rye or the cheese on a toasted roll) what his performance would be in the field. He had had no privacy at all! Jessie checking him out for the Team. Alys reporting to her old school chum, Leota. He might just as well have lived his life in Macy’s window.
The way that Alys lay, curled comfortably in one undemanding corner of his bed, was exactly as she had been when he woke. Her eyes were closed. There was no doubt in Hake’s mind that she was wide awake behind them. Shaved and showered in less than five minutes, he pulled on his clothes without speaking to her. It was convenient for both of them that they should agree to pretend she was still asleep. For her because she did not have to take a part in this scene; for him because he was not sure what he wanted to say to her. Not until he found out what Jessie had to say, at least. Not even then, most likely, though there was no doubt that he would have to say something anyway.
