Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

Rachel Neidlinger, his maternity case, was getting ready to nurse newborn Rocco and needed no comforting. Two floors higher, old Gertrude Mengel was delighted to have company. She showed it, of course, by spilling out on him her week’s burden of complaints against the floor nurse and boasting about the tininess of her veins, so hard for the doctor to get a hypodermic into. Hake gave her the appropriate twenty minutes to discuss her symptoms and her hopes, most of both imaginary. As he rose to go she said, “Reverend? I’ve had a postcard from Sylvia.”

“That’s marvelous, Gertrude. How is she?”

“She says she’s got a job making hydrogen.” The scant old eyelashes fluttered to announce tears nearby. “But I think she’s with those bums again.”

Internally Hake groaned. Seventy-year-old Gertrude had been trying to mother her fifty-five-year-old sister ever since their parents died. It was like trying to mother a china egg in a nest, and Sylvia would not even stay in the nest. “I’m sure she’ll be all right. She’s not, ah, using anything again, is she?”

“Who can tell?” Gertrude said bitterly. “Look where she is! What kind of place is A1 Halwani?”

Hake studied the card, a gold-domed mosque overshadowed by a hundred-meter television tower, with blue water behind them. Sylvia had done her own Hegira or Stations of the Cross all her life, tracing the passion of the counterculture from the East Village and Amsterdam through Corfu and Nepal. She had begun late and never caught up. And never would. “It’s not a bad place, Gertrude,” Hake was able to reassure her.

“An Arab country? For a Jewish girl?”

“She’s not a girl any more, Gertrude. Anyway, there’s a lot of people there who aren’t Arabs. It was almost a ghost town for years, after the oil was gone, and then all sorts of people moved in.”

Gertrude nodded positively. “I know what sorts of people, bums,” she said.

It was no use arguing, although all the way through his bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich in the coffee shop downstairs Hake was thinking of reassuring things that he could have said. But hadn’t, because there was no point in it; she didn’t want to hear. The final pay-out for being a caring minister, aad giving your flock the benefit of your insights, was that more than fifty percent of the time they didn’t want to receive them.

Nevertheless he had made the effort, and with that half of his mind not preoccupied with the buzzing questions he was conscious of virtue. A new question added itself to the swarm, but this one rather welcome: it was only intellectually interesting, not a worry. What had Gertrude meant about her sister getting a job making hydrogen? Hake knew vaguely where the hydrogen came from, and this A1 Halwani seemed to be in the right part of the world. But he was far from sure of details. His own experience with power generation had been a long way from the theoretical level.

When the Israelis destroyed the Near East’s petroleum reserve with their shaped nuclear charges, they had not burned all the oil. But what was left unpumped was highly radioactive. If the hippies in Kuwait or wherever were now generating hydrogen by burning that oil, they were releasing radioactive isotopes into the world’s air. No one had said that publicly that Hake had ever heard, but Hake was now quite ready to believe that there was a lot that was never said publicly. If there was a creditable reason, that had to be it. There would be no other reason to turn down fuel that did not in any way damage the environment, when you only had to look out of your window to see how badly the environment had been damaged. And it was not as if the United States were not importing fuel already. The Mexican and Chinese wells were still pouring ten million barrels a day into American refineries, even if their prices were becoming exorbitant. Especially because their prices were becoming exorbitant.

Anyway, was that how the hippies were doing it? He had heard something, somewhere, about solar power. The trick was to catch the energy of the sun in mirrors or lenses, boil sea-water pure, split the H 20 into its parts, chill the hydrogen into liquid and pack it into tanks. Of course, the trick was more complicated than it seemed. To direct the sunlight to a boiler or still meant putting motors on the mirrors to follow the sun across the sky; meant keeping them clean;

meant finding a place where there was plenty of sun and plenty of water and plenty of cheap land— and a deep-water port or a pipeline to move the LH, to where it was useful. A1 Halwani sounded like the right kind of place.

By the time he had turned all that over in his mind he had jogged back to the parsonage where Jessie was waiting for him with news. “A Mr. Haversford called,” she announced, eyes flashing with curiosity. “He asked you to come to a special meeting of the Board of International Pets and Flowers.”

“Thank you, Jessie,” he said, but she followed him to his own quarters. She stood in the doorway, watching him take off his jacket and pull his sweatshirt over his head. It was one of the habits in her that he most disliked.

“I didn’t know you were on the Board of IPF,” she said.

“It just happened.” He was excusing himself to her again, of course; what he should be saying was telling her not to come into his private rooms. But he couldn’t even do that because technically she wasn’t; the tips of her sensible shoes were just at the sill of the door. Inspiration struck. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Call Alys Brant for me and tell her that I won’t be able to make the library trip because I’ve got to go to this meeting.”

“She’d like it better if you called her yourself,” she observed.

“I know she would, but please, Jessie.”

“Huh.” Grudgingly she disappeared, but a moment later she was back in the doorway. “She says all right, shell make it next Wednesday instead, same time.”

Well. “All right,” he said. Next Wednesday would have to take care of itself. Meanwhile he had his barbells out and began the regular series of exercises, wishing Jessie would go away and take Alys Brant with her.

Jessie didn’t. She watched him bend and stretch in silence for a moment, then sighed. “You’re a pretty lucky man, Horny,” she observed.

“I know,” he panted, turning away from her as he bent from side to side. Just having her watch him made him uncomfortable enough. When she ventured personal remarks it was worse. Personal matters seemed so out of character for a woman with all the personality traits of a retired Civil Service employee, which of course was what she was. “I’m especially lucky to have you for a secretary,” he thought to say at last, but she was already gone.

Was he all that lucky? Well, sure, he thought to himself, shrugging all the pectoral muscles forward as he watched himself in the mirror. For someone who had been at death’s door a couple of years earlier, whose best hope had seemed to be an uneventful and probably rather short life in a wheelchair, he had a lot of interesting things opening up.

Not that he hadn’t been lucky enough before. He had survived the wars of his infancy, after all, and even in a wheelchair good things had happened. There were plenty of helping hands stretched out to a kid who was an orphan and a displaced person and handicapped: Scholarships. Grants. Medical services. Counseling. There were plenty of girls, too, who were willing to stretch out to him. The skinny tall youth in the wheelchair was appealing. More than that. Nonthreatening. “I’ll ride with you in the elevator, Horny, here, let me take your books.” “Horny, let me help you into the car.” “Why don’t you come over tonight, Horny, and we’ll quiz each other for the Psych test?” Hake remained a virgin until he was twenty, at least technically he did, but not because of any lack of attractive and friendly persons willing to meet him well over halfway. What kept him a virgin, or, well, pretty much so, was something within himself. He did not want pity. And he detected it in every overture offered.