Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

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The Cool War: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Fred Pohl, multiple winner of science-fiction’s top awards, presents a breathtaking romp through the energy-poor world of the 2020s—a gripping chase-intrigue novel with a highly unlikely stand-in for James Bond.
One day, the Reverend Hornswell Hake had nothing worse to contend with than the customary power shortages and his routine pastoral chores, such as counseling the vivacious Alys Brant—and her husbands and wife. At nearly forty, his life was placid, almost humdrum.
The very next day, Horny Hake was first enlisted as an unwilling agent of the Team—secret successor to the long-discredited CIA—and then courted by an anti-Team underground group. In practically no time at all, Horny and Alys were touring Europe on a mission about which he knew zip, except that it was a new move in the Cool War, the worldwide campaign of sabotage that had replaced actual combat.
For the team and its opponents, though, the Cool War could be as perilous as any hot one, as Horny Hake discovered when he came up against
• Leota, lovely leader of the underground cabal, dedicated to destroying the Team;
• Yosper, the Bible-thumping, foul-mouthed nonogenarian killer;
• The Reddi twins, professional terrorists who turned up in the oddest places at the worst times and always managed to make Horny’s life miserable;
• And Pegleg, master of such lethal toys as the Bulgarian Brolly and the Peruvian Pen.
Picaresque and fast-moving, THE COOL WAR is also a deeply ironic, often hilarious, yet thought-provoking look at where we could be, some forty years from now.

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After that first morning in Frankfurt, when he had gone to Alys’s room to knock her awake—and found in front of her door the neat brown boots of a Turkish major—Hake stopped expecting Alys to attempt to assault his virtue. She didn’t need to. There were plenty of other targets. If she hungered and thirsted for his flesh, she concealed it well. She spent more time with old, bald, half-blind Jasper Medina than with Hake. Although, to be fair, she spent more time with Hake than she did with anybody else. Especially the kids.

Jasper—or “Yosper”—was a puzzle. Since he was from IPF’s European customer-relations department, it followed as the night the day that he had to be a spook. But he offered no secret plans, conveyed no instructions; when Hake mentioned the name “Curmudgeon” in his presence the old man gave a cracked laugh and said, “Curmudgeon? Is that what you think I am? Let me tell you, sonny, I’m exactly what you’ll be in another forty years—only better,” he added virtuously, “because I accept the Lord as my Savior, and you don’t!”

But he was always there, he and his four silent helpers. The marmosets got their grapes and mealworms every four hours; where there was sun to make it possible, got an occasional afternoon in the open air; were brushed and groomed and picked over for fleas. The marmosets had plenty of supervision.

What the kids had was Horny Hake.

By the time they reached Copenhagen, Hake believed he had encountered every ailment young human flesh was heir to—or heiress to; especially heiress to: cuts and scrapes, sulks and sneezes, faints and fevers. (126 hours down, 344 to go—better than a quarter of the way.) By Oslo it was mostly fevers and sneezes. They weren’t serious, but they kept Hake up most nights to make sure they weren’t. Alys slept securely through to breakfast, explaining that Hake’s long experience with counseling had made him so much better at handling night alarms that there was no point, really, in her waking—-“just to be in your way, Horny.” And, of course, the Marmoset Duennas did not let themselves get involved. Their lives had become pretty easy, with the number of woolly monkeys dwindling at every stop. But adamantly they continued to refuse to have anything to do with the children; one species of sub-human primate was all they had contracted for.

Sven and Dieter, Mario and Carlos—why did Hake always have difficulty telling them apart? They were very different in height, weight, and coloring. It had to do with the way they wore their hair, all in a sort of Henry the Fifth soupbowl, and the clothes: always the same, pale blue jackets and dark blue slacks. But there was more than that. They seemed to think and talk the same way. Hake often had the impression there was only one person speaking, sometimes with a German accent, sometimes Spanish, but with only one mind behind them. “Yosper says we must go to bed early, six a.m. flight in the morning.” “Yosper advises do not drink this water, last month PLO terrorists filled reservoir with acid.” As it seemed to Hake, the mind behind them was Yosper’s.

And all of that made sense, perfect sense, if they were in fact disciplined spooks on the payroll of International Pets and Flowers, alias Lo-Wate, alias the shock troops of the cool war. But were they? Hake saw no sure signs. No unexplained absences from duty. No secret meetings. Not even meaningful glances among them, or sentences begun and left incomplete. If they were spooks, when were they going to start spooking?

More than once Hake had made up his mind to confront Yosper and demand the truth. Whatever the truth might be. But he had not gone through with it, only with hints. And Yosper never responded to them. It was not that Yosper was not a talkative man. He loved to talk. He never tired of telling Hake and Alys all the ways in which the cities they raced through were inferior to their American equivalents —not counting, now and then, the occasional place where you could get a decent smorgasbord or a worthwhile Jagertopf. And he never tired of explaining to them why Unitarians shouldn’t call themselves religious; Yosper was Church of God, twice born, fully saved, and sublimely sure that the time would come when he would be sitting next the Throne, while Hake and Alys and several billion others would be deeply regretting their failures in a much worse place. But he wouldn’t talk about anything related to espionage.

And he wouldn’t help with the kids; and of the two failures, Hake found the second hardest to live with.

By the three-quarters mark they were in Munich. The children’s sneezes were reaching a crescendo, and Hake himself was feeling the strain. He was more exhausted than he had ever been since the days in the wheelchair, and unhappy with the way his insides were conducting themselves. But there was an unexpected delight. Yosper had arranged for an American school in Munich to take the children off their hands for the whole weekend, and so the grownups had the pension to themselves and forty-eight hours to enjoy it.

The enjoyment would have been more pronounced, Hake thought, if his gut had not felt as if someone had stuffed it past its load limit with chili peppers and moldy pickles. He did not quite feel like seeing the town. Still… three hundred and sixty hours down, and only a hundred and ten to go! And no kids till Monday morning.

The pension turned out to be the top floor of a grimy little office building, on a side street near the intersection of two big boulevards. From the outside it didn’t look like much. But it was clean and to Hake, who for fifteen days had been resentfully calculating the energy costs of jet fuel, high-speed elevators and hotel saunas, it was a welcome relief from power-pigging. He did not mind that the rooms clustered around an airshaft, or that there were no porters for the luggage. He didn’t even mind the fact that he had to carry Alys’s bags as well as his own—“I’m really sorry,

Horny, but I just don’t feel up to lugging it.” He didn’t mention that neither did he.

Dinner was potluck, cooked by the proprietor and served by his wife. To Hake’s surprise, Alys showed up for it. Evidently she had run out of Turkish majors, SAS copilots and Norwegian desk clerks. She spent the afternoon in her room but appeared, wan but gracious, at the head of the dinner table. As she picked up her spoon she was brought up short by Yosper rapping a fork against his glass.

“Yosper always says grace,” said Sven—or Dieter—with a scowl.

“Of course,” said Yosper, also scowling, and then bowing his head, “Our Lord, we humble servants thank You for Your bounty and for these foods we are about to eat. Bless them to Your own good ends, and make us truly grateful for what we receive. Amen.”

As the five scowls disappeared, Mario—or Carlos—said, “It is a good custom to have, is it not so? It is like Pascal’s wager. If God is listening, He is pleased. If not, no harm is done.”

“Don’t be irreverent,” said Yosper, but mildly. “Pascal was a con-man. You shouldn’t obey God’s commandments to save your skin. You should obey because you know God exists, and the daily miracle of life proves it to you.” Alys coughed and changed the subject.

“Horny, I haven’t been idle all day,” she said sweetly, handing him a couple of newspapers and a magazine. “These were in my room. I’ve gone through them all and marked the parts that interest you.”

Yosper peered at her over his uneaten soup. “How do you know what interests him?”

“Oh,” she said brightly, “it’s a sort of research project I’ve been doing for him. He has been very interested in what he calls the increasing degradation of life—you know, all the things that mess us up— Horny, is something wrong?”

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