Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

And on the way back, there was Alys’s van again, picking its way around the construction toward his house. “Hell,” said Hake. He didn’t think she had seen him, so he changed course and jogged up the wide streets to his church. On weekdays the trustees had established a nursery school to maximize use of the church facilities, and the parking lot, which doubled as a playground, was full of three-foot-high human beings and taller, tenser teachers, doing the Alley Cat to music from a battery-powered cassette recorder. “Hello, hello,” called Hake, dodging past them and into the building.

As he had expected, no one had set up the chairs for that evening’s MUSL-WUSL meeting. Most days that would have been an annoyance, but today it was a good way to use up twenty minutes or so while Alys made up her mind he wasn’t going to be at the rectory and went away.

He pushed the chairs into a circle meditatively. Counseling didn’t go as well as it used to. Or went in a different way. When he had been in the wheelchair the women who came to him told him all sorts of things—censused their orgasms, clinicked their preferences. They still did. But they sat straighter and smiled more often when they did. There was a kind of receptivity in the air that had not been there before with the women. And sometimes now the men seemed, well, fidgety. Like Ted Brant. Perhaps the ministry was a mistake. Perhaps the operation that had taken him out of the wheelchair had been a mistake, for that matter. It did seem to interfere with counseling. But he couldn’t undo the operation, and how could he undo the ministry? At thirty-nine you didn’t make a career change lightly—

Except that maybe he war making one. Clergyman to spy. It was not what he had ever intended. He had certainly not sought it. But he couldn’t deny that there was something about playing cloak-and-dagger games that seemed like fun…

The kids were coming back from their lunch recess, which meant the church would no longer be habitable for the next couple of hours. Hake straightened the last of the chairs and started out. On the way he paused at the suggestion box, trying to remember. Had he opened it after the service yesterday? Not that there was ever much in it. He took out his key and unlocked it; yes, there was something. A paper clip. A pledge envelope— why couldn’t people remember they were supposed to hand them in to the ushers? A note scribbled on the corner of the service program: “Can’t we have some guitar music any more?” And an envelope marked:

Rev. H. Hornswell Hake From his friends at the Maryland phone company.

Personal.

The door to the main meeting room opened, and Hake turned, the envelope in his hands, ready to repel an unauthorized invasion of four-year-olds. But it wasn’t the kids from the nursery school, it was Alys Brant. She strode toward him with a flounce of green skirts and said, “Thought I’d find you here, Horny. Here you are. Is this what you wanted?”

Hake jammed the envelope in his pocket and took from her a sheaf of photocopies of CRT prints. It took him a moment to redirect his thoughts from his friends at the Maryland phone company to the curiosity that he had hoped Alys might satisfy. The stories seemed to be about oil tankers running aground and grain silos blowing up. They were not at all what he had wanted, but his ministerial training led him to express that thought by saying, “They’re just fine, Alys.”

“You don’t look pleased.”

“Oh, no! I’m very pleased. But actually—well, I can’t make much sense of these things. I was hoping for, more like books.”

“Books!”

He nodded, then hesitated. “I don’t know if I explained what I wanted to you very well. Doesn’t it seem to you that the quality of life has got worse in the last few years? Of course, I’m older than you are—”

Silvery laugh. “You’re not old, Horny, not with that bod!”

“Well, I am, Alys, but you must have noticed it too. So many things go wrong—not just tankers fouling beaches. Everything. And I thought somebody else must have noticed that and written a book about it.”

“A book!”

“Or maybe a TV special?” He paused, feeling his way. It did not seem wise to say anything that Curmudgeon might construe as breaching security, so he couldn’t come up and tell her that he wanted to know how long nations had been playing trip-up games with each other. “The way nothing seems to work,” he said at last. “Drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. Never having enough energy, and never doing anything about it. More mosquitoes than there ever used to be. All that.”

She said thoughtfully, “Well, yes, I suppose there’s something. But books! You know, Horny, you’re almost obsolete! Still—what you want is to browse, right? And for that we’ll have to take you to a decent library.” She pulled a date book out of her shoulder bag and thumbed through it. “Wednesday,” she decided. “I’ve been thinking about going in to New York then anyway—maybe see a matinee, have a nice lunch somewhere—”

“Really, Alys, I don’t want to put you to all that trouble.” “Nonsense! I’ll take the car. Pick you up at the rectory around—what? Eight? It’ll be fun! We’ll have the whole morning to do your library thing—and then, who knows?” She pressed his hand warmly and left him standing there.

Warning bells were going off in Hake’s brain. She was a very attractive woman, but under the rules a protected species. Not to mention Ted.

Belatedly he remembered the letter from his Maryland telephone friends. It said:

Dear Rev. Hake:

There are two questions I would like to put to you.

Why didn’t you report what we did?

Why did you agree to hurt people you don’t even know?

Please see if you can figure out the answers. Some day I will ask you for them.

There was no signature. He folded the letter up and then, reconsidering, tore it into tiny pieces, went into the men’s room and flushed it down the toilet, ignoring the stares of two small boys from the nursery school. They were good questions. He didn’t need to be told to think them over. They were what he had been asking himself for some time.

In the next thirty-six hours, the power-piggery summons was withdrawn because of a technical defect, and Hake woke to find that traffic had been rerouted along the ocean-front while the road before the rectory was repaired—after six years of potholes and detours! He could no longer entertain the hypothesis of coincidence. Somebody was looking out for him, and doing a good job.

The questions from his whilom kidnapper were nowhere near an answer, any more than the hundred other questions that whined around his mind like Jersey mosquitoes circling for the attack. He had no answers. He could hear them droning away nearby in every thought, while he was counseling, while he was dictating to Jessie, while he was munching a quick, and already cold, slab of pizza in his church study between another long talk with the cleaning lady about scrubbing the ladies’ room and his weekly meeting with the Social Action chairman. Every once in a while the mosquitoes lunged in and stung, and then that spot itched annoyingly for a while. The rest of the time he put them out of his head.

For a wonder, Social Action finished its business in five minutes and Hake had a whole unbudgeted hour. Back correspondence? Next week’s sermon? He reviewed the options and settled on parish calls. Two of his flock were in Monmouth Medical Center, one in geriatrics and one in maternity, and he was overdue for seeing both of them.

Next to counseling, Hake considered visiting the sick about the most useful thing he did, especially the old and lonely sick who had no one else to call on them. It was a whole other exercise than problem-solving, as in counseling, or in moral leadership, as in his weekly sermon. The sick and old didn’t need any more leadership. They had nowhere left to go. And they had passed the point of problem-solving, since the only problem they had left was beyond anyone’s solution, ever.