Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

That was in the last Arab-Israeli war, the fourth after Yom Kippur, the second after the Bay of Sharks, the one that settled things forever. Growing up after it, Horny had been alternately full of resolve to return and build up Israel again (but Israel did fine without him) and determination to help his new country as a thermodynamic engineer, able to solve the problems of wiped-out oil reserves. It didn’t work out that way. It might have, if he hadn’t spent so much of his childhood in a wheelchair. But after two years of MIT he began to perceive that technology didn’t seem to deal with the kind of problems people came to him with: the invalid young man was a repository for all confidences, and he found he liked it He switched schools and objectives. The next step was the seminary, and he wound up a Unitarian minister.

He had not married. Not because he was in a wheelchair; oh, no, any number of young women had made it perfectly clear that that wouldn’t stop them. At the seminary he had paid a shrink for a dozen fifty-minute hours to find out, among other things, why that was. He was not sure he had had his money’s worth. It seemed to have something to do with pride. But why that much pride? He had learned that he was full of unresolved conflicts. He hated Arabs, who had killed his father, and ultimately his mother too. But the man who hid him out in the wheat and saved his life was also an Arab, whom he loved. He had been brought up as a Jew, a non-religious Jew, to be sure, but in an atmosphere saturated with dreidels and Chanukah candles. But both his parents had been born Protestants, one side Lutheran and the other Methodist, who had happened to admire the kibbutz lifestyle and been accepted as volunteers in the exciting years when all the second-generation kibbutzim were flocking to the cities and the agro-industrial settlements were desperate for warm bodies.

So he wound up a minister in a Unitarian church in Long Branch, New Jersey, between a pizzeria and a parking lot, and all in all he liked it well enough. At least until the last cardiac operation, two years before, that had changed things around.

Now he was not really sure what he liked. What he disliked was clear enough. He disliked crime, and filth, and poverty, and meanness; and most of all he disliked bigots like the woman beside him. He maintained silence all the way to Newark, where he got out while the bus driver stood in the doorway with his shotgun until all the passengers were safely inside the terminal, just in time to catch the Metroliner to Washington.

The Metroliner was a four-bus string, with a pilot, copilot, stewardess and conductor. From the outside it looked glittering and new. Inside, not quite so new. For one thing, in his coach section three of the windows were stuck open. For another the woman from the Long Branch bus followed him aboard, evidently anxious to renew the conversation.

For the first twenty miles Hake tried to feign sleep, but it was hard going. Not only was the window behind him open, but for some reason the air-conditioning was full on and icy drafts caught him in the temple every time he leaned back and closed his eyes.

At the rest stop at the Howard Johnson’s outside Philadelphia, he got out, went to the men’s room, came out and stood gloomily surveying the Philadelphia Slag Bank until the pilot tapped his horn impatiently. He leaped in at the last minute, followed closely by a girl in a denim zipper-suit, who gave him a surprisingly inviting smile. The smile collapsed when he sat down in the front seat, next to a large black woman counting rosary beads. The girl hesitated, then went back to the next vacant seat, and gratefully Hake fell asleep.

He woke up quite a long time later realizing that someone was talking to him in a penetrating whisper. “—to bother you, but it’s important. Would you please come back to the toilet with me?”

He sat up suddenly and looked around, feeling frowsty with sleep and somewhat irritable. His black neighbor was gone, replaced by a Puerto Rican woman holding a baby with one hand and a copy of El Diario in the other.

The voice came from behind him; he turned and met the eye of the girl in the zip-suit.

“Turn back!” she whispered tensely. “Don’t look at me!”

Confused, he followed orders. Her whisper reached him. “I think you’re being watched, and I don’t want any trouble. So what I’ll do is I’ll go back in the toilet. Nobody pays much attention to that. The one on the left; it’s got a broken seat so nobody uses it much. Will you?”

Hake started to ask what for, but swallowed it. He said instead, “Where are we?”

“About half an hour out of Washington. Come on, tiger, I won’t hurt you.”

“I have to get out pretty soon,” Hake said. “I mean, I’m not going all the way into Washington—”

“Will you please come back and quit arguing? Look, I’m going back to the toilet now. Wait one minute. Then you just get up and stroll back and come right in. I’ll leave the door unlatched. There’s plenty of room, I already checked it.”

“Lady,” said Hake, “I don’t know exactly what’s happening, but please leave me alone.”

“Oaf!”

“I’m sorry.”

She whispered angrily, “You don’t even know why I want you to come back there, do you?”

He paused, surprised. “I don’t? Well, then, I guess I don’t.”

“So come. It’s important.” And she got up, turned around in the aisle to scowl at him, and headed toward the back. None of the other passengers were watching, having reached the terminal phase of mass transit where they were asleep or engrossed in whatever they were doing or cataleptic.

For a moment Horny Hake seriously thought of following her, just on the chance that it would be interesting. She really was rather a nice-looking woman, years younger than he was but not so young as to be embarrassing. There was very little chance that she intended to cut his throat or infect him with a communicable disease. He didn’t have a lot to lose, he was sure; but just at that moment the bus slowed and the driver leaned over, eyes still on the road. “Here’s your stop,” he called.

Would have been interesting; should have taken a chance, thought Hake, but that’s the story of my life. As he got out of the Metroliner, at a private driveway marked Lo-Wate Bottling Co., Inc., he looked back and saw the girl emerging hurriedly from the toilet, staring at him with resentment and rage.

Hake opened his sealed instructions and read them again to make sure:

Debus at Lo-Wate Bottling Co. entrance. Proceed on foot V4 mi. to entrance marked Visitors. State name to receptionist and follow her instructions.

Clear enough. The building marked Visitors—Market Analysis—Sales & Promotion was two-story, ivy-covered, a veteran of the decentralization years of the ’60s and ’70s, but well maintained. The receptionist was a young man who listened as Hake gave his name, then asked, “May I see your travel orders?” He did not trouble to read them, but put them, backside up, under a hooded bulb that emitted a faint bluish glow. What the receptionist saw Horny could not see, but evidently it was satisfactory. “The gentleman with whom you have an appointment will see you in about ten minutes,” he said. “Please be seated.”

It was almost exactly ten minutes, by Hake’s watch. The receptionist had been nice enough to let him use the waiting-room john—he hadn’t dared, in the bus, although the girl’s talk had put the idea strongly in his mind. Then the receptionist beckoned to him. “The gentleman with whom you have an appointment will see you now. This lady will escort you there. Please follow the following instructions. Walk ten paces behind your escort Do not look into any offices. Check any camera, film, microphones or recording devices here. If you have any undeveloped film or magnetic tape on your person it will be damaged.”