Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

“Ah, yes, sir. Of course.” The man switched off the ignition and began to roll up the window with one hand, trying to stretch to the open door on Horny’s side with the other. “Please come in, sir. I’m surely sorry about keeping the motor running, but this weather—”

Hake irritably slid in and shut the door. “All right. What about my taxes?”

The young man struggled to get a wallet out of his hip pocket and extracted a card. “My ID, sir.” It read:

T. Donal Corry

Administrative Assistant

Senator Nicholson Bainbridge Watson

“I thought you were from Internal Revenue,” said Hake suspiciously, turning the card over in his hand. It was handsomely engraved and apparently made from virgin linen stock: another kind of piggery!

“No, sir. That statement is, ah, inoperative at this point in time.”

“Meaning you lied?”

“Meaning, sir, that this is a matter of national security. I did not wish to risk exposing a sensitive matter to your associate, Ms. Tunman, or your counselees.”

Horny twisted around in the padded leather seat and stared at Corry. He began mildly enough, but his voice was rising as he finished: “You mean you came up here, stinking up the air in your big-assed Buick, got me out of a counseling session, shook up my secretary whom I can’t pay enough to afford to antagonize, scared me half to death that I was being audited on my tax return, and all you wanted was to tell me some Senator wanted to come up and see me?”

Corry winced. “Yes, sir. I mean, that’s about the size of it, Reverend Hake, except that the, ah, Senator is not really involved either. That too is inoperative. And he isn’t coming here anyway. You’re going there.”

“I can’t just take off and—”

“Yes, you can, Reverend,” the man said firmly. “I’ve got your travel papers here. Eight fifteen to Newark, Metroliner to Washington, get off in Maryland, as indicated— you’ll be at your destination at a quarter of one and briefing will be completed by two at the latest. Good-by, Reverend Hake.” And before Horny knew it, he was outside the car again, and that pestilential eight-cylinder motor had started up, and the car roared into an illegal U-turn and away.

“Are we in trouble, Horny?” Jessie Tunman asked anxiously.

“I don’t think so. I mean, I guess it’s only routine,” he said, roused from abstraction.

“Well, that’s good, because we’ve got enough trouble already. I was just listening to the radio. There’s a riot in Asbury Park, and the garbage men just went on strike, so there’s going to be methane rationing if they don’t get it settled by tomorrow.”

“Oh, lord.”

“And I still can’t get any heat in here, and you’d better get back inside because I heard them yelling at each other a minute ago.”

Hake shook his head mournfully; he had almost forgotten about the marital problems of his parishioners. But they were far more rewarding than his own, and less perplexing.

He perked up as he went back through the door. “Well,” he said. “What have you decided?”

Ted Brant looked around the room and said, “I guess I’ll be the one to tell you. Alys definitely wants a divorce.”

That was a body blow; Horny had hoped he’d got them reconciled. His voice was angry as he said, “I’m sorry to hear that, Alys. Are you sure? I don’t hold marriage as an inviolable sacrament, of course, but my observation is that people who divorce almost always repeat the same sort of marriage with new partners. No better, no worse.”

“I’m sure that’s what I want, Horny,” said Alys. The reddening of the eyes and the streaks of her makeup showed she had been weeping, but she was composed now.

“Is it Ted?”

“Oh, no.”

“Walter?”

“No. It isn’t Sue-Ellen, either. They’re all just as fine as they can be. But not for me. They’ll be happier with somebody else, Horny.”

Walter Sturgis gazed at her with eyes leaking slow tears. He was breathing heavily. “Oh, Horny,” he moaned. “I never thought it would end like this. I remember the day I first met Alys. Ted introduced us. They were recently married, just the two of them. I’d always liked Ted, but I just never thought of a plural marriage with him until I met Alys, so pretty, so different. And then when Sue-Ellen came along, we all fitted together. We proposed the day after we met.”

“Actually it was about two weeks after we met, dear,” said Sue-Ellen with some difficulty. She had been crying too.

“No, honey, that was after you and I met; I mean after the two of us met Ted and Alys. Horny,” he said despondently, “if Alys won’t change her mind I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ll never find another girl like her. And I’m sure I speak for Ted and Sue-Ellen too.”

Long after they had gone Horny sat in the gathering darkness, wondering where he had failed. But had it been his failure? Wasn’t there something in the essential grinding, grim grittiness of the world that was destroying social fabrics of more kinds than marriage? The strikes and the muggings, the unemployment and the inflation, the jolting disappearance of fresh fruits from the stores in summer and of Christmas trees in December, the puzzling and permanently infuriating dislocations that had become the central fact of everyone’s life—wasn’t that where the cause was, and not in his failure?

But the failure felt like his own. And that was almost a pleasing thought. At least it was a useful one. He had been a minister long enough to recognize that any insight into guilt was a possible starting place for a sermon theme. He picked up the microphone, thumbed the switch and started to dictate before he realized the red operation light hadn’t gone on.

At the same moment Jessie Tunman opened the door without knocking. “Horny! Did you turn on your heater?”

He looked guiltily down, and there it was. Not glowing. But warm and clicking to itself from thermal strain.

“I guess I must have.”

“Well, you did it that time. We’ve blown the input fuse.”

“I’m sorry, Jessie. Well, the coal man will be here pretty soon—”

“But then the blower won’t work, because there’s no power for it, will it? You’ll be lucky if the pipes don’t freeze, Horny, and as for me, I’m getting a cold. I’ve got to go home.”

“But the church newsletter—”

“I’ll run it off tomorrow, Horny.”

“My sermon! I haven’t even started dictating it!”

“You can dictate it tomorrow, Horny. I’ll type it up.”

“I can’t, I have to go— I have to do something else tomorrow.”

She looked at him curiously. “Well,” she said, puffing her gray cheeks, “when you get up there Sunday morning maybe you can do a couple of card tricks. I have to go now, or I’ll be sick, and then I won’t be in tomorrow either.”

He watched her zip up her quilted jacket and transfer her spiral silver safe brooch from blouse to coat. As she was leaving there was someone at the door, and for a moment Horny’s hopes ran high—the man from the electric company? Maybe the coal man, maybe both of them together? But it was only the policeman with the summons for power-piggery.

“That’s your fifth offense, Reverend,” he smirked, blowing into his reddened hands. “Maybe I should just leave a couple of blank ones for you to fill out, save me a trip next time?”

Horny stared at him, a big, beefy man with a gay knot on the shoulder of his uniform jacket, leather bracelet at his wrist, American flag in between. He was not the kind of person Horny Hake looked to argue with. A hundred rejoinders rose to his lips, but what came out was, “Thank you, Sergeant. Sure is lousy weather, isn’t it?”