Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

Interesting enough, but Hake was still freezing. His body warmth was not up to the demands imposed on it by the heat-sink of twelve hundred liters of cold water.

He was still exhausted, but he accepted the fact that there was no way for him to get back to sleep without Something Being Done. He got up and dressed. By and by he began to feel less chilled, but no less sleepy. And every time he lay down on that bed, even through clothes, spread and covers, he could feel the heat soak right out of him into the water.

It was no good.

He turned on the light and opened his bags. The little shoulder-carrier he had brought from Under the Wire had a sweater in it, but as neither it nor he had been washed for some time when he last wore it he was not anxious to put it on. The suitcase Curmudgeon’s minion had packed for him in Long Branch had nothing at all. Almost nothing he could wear, in fact. The Agency expediter had packed as full a Capri wardrobe as Hake’s closets permitted, but unfortunately had not known that his measurements had changed. No doubt it was Hake’s own fault for not throwing out what he could no longer wear. But the shorts, tank tops and sports jackets that had served him well enough as a 145-pound weakling in a wheelchair would no longer go around him, and the few newer garments were not warm.

Still, as long as he was up and moving about he was warm enough. And as long as he was awake he might as well be doing something.

Among the other things he had brought from Under the Wire were his microfiches—musty, dinged at the edges, but no doubt still serviceable if he could find something to read them with. Was there a fiche scanner on the television set?

There was. The instructions varnished to the top of the set were unfortunately in Italian, but the mechanism looked simple enough. What he also found was that the television set was a lot fancier than any he had seen in Long Branch. There was also something described as Solo per persone mature—film interattivo. It appeared to have a handset controlling it, but it did nothing at all until he realized that the coin slot next to it needed to be fed. It was just the right size for a cinquenta lire nuove piece, and immediately he had inserted the coin the broadcast channel disappeared and was replaced by an extremely good-looking Oriental girl reclining in the pose of the Naked Maja.

Technically the set was astonishing. Hake by trial and error found that the handset would let him view a whole catalogue of nude women, and men, too; that another control on the set allowed him to rotate the figure and zoom in and out on any desired part; and even that he could bring two figures together and manipulate them around each other. While he was trying to discover whether the picture showed them actually in contact or merely superimposed photographically his coin ran out and the screen went dark.

That had been interesting, also somewhat unsettling. Hake got up and explored the rest of the room’s facilities. Under the TV was something called Servizio, which turned out to be a little refrigerator and bar stocked with whiskey, wine, fruit juices and beer. He thought for a moment of getting drunk enough to supply French central heating and going back to sleep; but that way, he suspected, lay pneumonia. Still, one beer wasn’t a bad idea. Carrying it, he checked out the bathroom. The toilet seat vibrated on command, he found. The shower head pulsed, and so, he discovered, did the spray in the bidet. Behind a panel near the door was a coffee maker and a bun warmer, and when he sat on the edge of the still chill bed to drink a cup of hot coffee he kicked something and found that the bed, too, could be made to ripple rhythmically by pushing a switch. Quite an inventive room.

It was not, however, a room to be alone in. Everything urged company, and Hake didn’t have any.

What was worse, one of the girls on the television had reminded him of Mary Jean. He sat daydreaming of Mary Jean as a possible subject for film interattivo, and then of Alys, and of Leota, and realized he had a problem. It was a problem most men face, some of them very often, but Hake growing up in a wheelchair had learned to sublimate and to repress that problem, and the new Hake, the muscular Hake of the barbells and the two-mile runs, the action-oriented Hake from Under the Wire—that Hake was a different person. That Hake wanted a different solution, and there was none in sight.

He dumped the rest of the coffee, put his clothes on and ambled out of the room.

The long and silent hall was empty, the ceiling lights economically dimmed down. There was a dank, musty smell that he had not remembered, and a large, semicircular water stain by the Chinese couple’s door that he had not noticed before. Rather poor management, he thought; would there be anyone in the lobby? Maybe an all-night coffee shop to get something to eat?

The lobby was also dimmed-down and silent, but he managed to wake the desk clerk long enough to get change, and from the automatic vending machines he got candy bars, a Rome Daily American, and even an Arabic-language daily published in Naples. Then he returned to his room.

Reminding himself that he was not in Capri for pleasure, he pulled the covers off the bed and spent the next hour reading and eating candy bars, lying on the floor. After an hour or so he made the trip down to the lobby again for some fifty-lire change and ultimately fell asleep, with the light on, on the floor.

At ten the door buzzer woke him.

The room was now intolerably hot, and his bones ached from the floor, but he opened the door. It looked like the girl who had met him at the hoverport, but was not. It was male. “Mario?” he guessed.

The youth smirked. “Yes, of course Mario,” he said. “But you did not recognize me as a signorina, did you? We must not often be seen together, you see—Hake! What insanity have you been up to?”

“What? Oh, you mean why the room is this way. Well, we had a power failure. And I nearly froze to death on that bed.”

Mario’s eyebrows rose. He switched on the air-conditioner and said, “Why did you not use the bed heater? What heater? Oh, Hake, you are such an innocent 1 Here, this switch on the side. You set it to whatever temperature you would like. Thirty-five if you want it, or even more.”

“Oh, hell.” Now that it was explained, it was perfectly obvious. He dialed it to forty degrees, promising himself at least a nice warm nap. As he straightened up, Mario was approaching him with what looked like an elaborate silver-filigree bracelet. “Hey, what’s that for?”

Mario snapped it on his wrist. “So that you may enjoy that bed with the companion of your choice, or with none at all,” he said good-humoredly.

“It’s a sexual-preference thing? I’ve never seen it.”

“A local custom,” Mario explained. “If you wear this it indicates you do not wish anyone to inaugurate a sexual approach to you. See, I also wear one. Without it on, you would be kept quite busy and it would perhaps interfere with your duties. You will find that such bracelets are quite scarce on Capri, for after all why else would anyone come here?”

“Well—” said Hake.

“Oh, do not fear, when you are off duty you may remove it! Now, do you wish to shower, or at least dress?”

“I suppose so. Oh, and listen,” Hake said, “I haven’t been wasting my time. I managed to get a couple of papers last night, and checked all the stories about religion.”

“Very commendable, Hake,” Mario said, glancing at his watch.

“There wasn’t an awful lot, but there was one stroke of luck. I found an editorial in something called, what is it, Corriere Islamica di Napoli about an interesting youth cult. There’s this fellow in Taormina—”