Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

It was only his own thumb that would do it. He proved that with accommodating—but faintly uneasy—Jennie Tunman the next morning, when he lured her into the new bathroom on a ruse: “Flush that for me, will you? I want to see if I can hear it out here.”

And she did, grinning skeptically and a little nervously, and he couldn’t—neither the sound of the water nor Curmudgeon’s recorded voice. Only Jessie herself. “We’ve sure come up in the world, Horny. And now—” fleeing—“I’d better get back to the correspondence.”

It was not quite true, Hake saw, that his life was turning funny, because funny was what it had been for some time. He would not have lasted through those flabby decades in a wheelchair if he hadn’t seen the humor of it. Raunchy young male lovingly tended by the sweet-limbed girls the jocks envied him, football coach who could not totter the length of the field alone, religious leader who had never for one moment considered the possibility of the existence of a supernatural god—or any other kind, either. Spiritual counselor who eased three hundred parishioners’ sins and temptations, that he had never had the chance to experience himself. Oh, yes! Funny. Funny as that thing must be at which you must laugh, so that you won’t cry. Exactly as funny as, and funny in exactly the same way as, what was happening in his life now. Being talked to by a toilet was ludicrous, but so was most of the life story of Horny Hake.

What his toilet had said to him was:

“Horny! If you are not alone, flush the toilet again at once!”

There was a short pause, presumably while the toilet satisfied itself it was not immediately to be reflushed, and then Curmudgeon’s voice said more amiably, “After all, old boy, you could have been into some peculiar customs we didn’t know about. If you are, practice them in some other john. In this one, when you press the lever down you will get any messages from me that have accumulated. Do it at least three times a day—when you get up, around mid-afternoon, just before you go to sleep. If there aren’t any messages, or when the messages are over, you’ll hear a four-forty A beep. That means you can reply, or leave a message for me if you have one.”

There was a pause, but as Hake did not hear a 440-hertz tone he assumed that Curmudgeon was marshalling his thoughts. When the toilet spoke again it was crisp and clear:

“So here are your instructions, Hake. First, keep on building up your strength. Second, report to IPF tomorrow afternoon for a physical—just go over there, they’ll know what to do. Third, flush three times a day. Whether you need to or not. And, oh, yes, that sermon was a smart move, but don’t overdo it. It’s all right for your congregation to think you’re a woolly-headed liberal, but don’t go so far you talk yourself into it. We’re pretty pleased with you right now, Hake. There’s a nice little report in your promotion package. Don’t spoil it.”

The toilet beeped, and then returned to being only a toilet again.

Riding over to Eatontown the next day, Hake investigated the inside of his mind and found only a vacuum where his moral sense should be. Curmudgeon was so sure that his orders would be obeyed and his cause was just. Was it possible that it was? But surely it couldn’t be right to make people sick who had done one no harm! But surely a man like Curmudgeon could not be so self-assured and still be as wholly wrong as he appeared. But surely— There were too many sureties, and Hake didn’t really feel any of them. How was it possible that everybody in the world seemed absolutely sure they were in the right, when they all disagreed with each other, and when Hake felt nothing of the sort? Maybe the thing was to go with self-interest? Hake’s self-interest seemed to lie with Curmudgeon, exempter from laws, provider of new bathrooms, balancer of the budget. If he stayed with Curmudgeon, he had no doubt, he would find some pretty nice fringe benefits. He might not have to ride around in this sort of smelly, choking charcoal-burning cab when he went out. Electrocar, inertial-drive, even a gasoline Buick like that of the person who had first summoned him to this exercise, they were all within his reach.

At IPF he didn’t see Allen Haversford, only a pretty young nurse who took his vital signs, turned her back while he undressed and got into a cotton smock, X-rayed him through and through, slipped him three painless spray-injections (for what? what plague would he be spreading now, and where?), pronounced him fit with her eyes as well as with the signed report she Xeroxed for him to keep, and turned him loose. After he shook her hand and was already on his way to the gate, Hake came to a sudden realization. Old Horny was horny! And he had been given an invitation, and had let it slide.

With so many of the women he encountered a protected species, not to be touched, and with so much of his adult life spent under circumstances in which sex was only an abstraction, Hake knew he was pitifully unworldly. No other man in New Jersey would have left that office without trying it on, especially with the kind of encouragement he had no doubt he had observed. This needed to be thought out. He dropped the afternoon’s meeting with the school administration from his thoughts, crossed Highway 35 and ordered himself a beer in the lounge of an air-conditioned motel.

It was all part and parcel of the same thing, he told himself. Who the hell did he think he was, some kind of saint? Why shouldn’t he have a few vices? Why was he running away from Alys Brant, and why shouldn’t he let Curmudgeon make his life easier? He had another beer, and then another. Because he was in the best of health, three beers didn’t make him drunk; but they did make him lose sense of time. When he made up his mind that he would go back and see if that clean-featured young nurse was as interested as he thought, he discovered that it was past seven, the gates were closed. He had not only missed the meeting with the school but he had not even had time to get back home for his afternoon flush before getting over to the Midsummer Magic Show. Too bad, thought Horny, striding out into the highway and commandeering a cab, but tomorrow was another day, and she’d still be there then!

The Midsummer Magic Show was the church’s big fundraiser. It took place in an old movie theater at a traffic circle near Long Branch. In high-energy days the theater had sucked audiences away from the downtown houses, kids with their dates, young marrieds with their kids, senior citizens destroying one more day. Now the flow was seeping back to the cities, and the highway audiences had drained away. The theater kept going with classic movie revivals at a dollar a head, and now and then a concert. Nothing else would draw enough to pay the costs of keeping the theater alive. Mostly those didn’t, either, so that the manager was thrilled to rent it for one night each year to the Unitarian Church. Hake got there just as the magician, The Incredible Art, was setting up his effects.

Alys Brant saw Hake walking down the aisle and waved the fingers of one hand. That was all she could wave; she was strapped into one of Art’s illusions, rehearsing to be The Woman Sawed in Half, and her hands were crossed tightly on her breast to stay as far as possible away from the screeching, spinning buzz saw that seemed to be slicing through her belly. When The Incredible Art saw whom she was greeting he stopped the saw, levered it up and away from her and began to extract her. “Hi, Horny,” he called. “Help me get this thing back of the curtain.”

Art was built to be a magician, or to look like one: six foot three and weighing a fast hundred and forty-five pounds, narrow face, piercing eyes. He wore his blond hair in General Custer flowing waves, beard and mustache the same; he looked like a skinny Scandinavian devil and had cultivated a voice an octave below Mephistopheles’. Wraith-thin, he was astonishingly strong. The prop weighed as much as a piano, and although it was on rollers Hake was puffing by the time they had it out of sight, while The Incredible Art was incredibly not even sweating. “Hate to have to do that by myself, Horny,” he observed, wrapping his long arms around one end of it and tugging it a few more inches out of the way. “Guess I’m ready for ‘em now.”