Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

“Have there been a lot of, uh, accidents like this?”

“No. But it stands to reason.”

At his door, Hake thanked the policeman and headed for his bedroom. To his surprise, ‘Jessie Tunman was there before him. She was in his little private sitting room, not the one he used for counseling, studying the tool kit he had brought from Under the Wire. “Those are my personal possessions!”

She blinked up at him, startled but self-possessed. “What in the world happened to you?”

He said, “My car blew up. Total loss.”

“Well, I sent off your check for the insurance’, so I guess you’re covered. Those things aren’t safe, you know.”

J i IC V^UU I » V Ul IV/

He said, “Thank you but, Jessie, I’d prefer you didn’t touch my possessions.”

She nodded noncommittally. “Sure have been a lot of changes around here, Horny. Car blowing up. You getting yourself all beat up. All this new stuff—”

“And here’s another change. Please don’t come into my part of the house when I’m not here.”

She stood up, skinny legs unwinding. She was taller than he was, but she seemed to be looking up at him. “As a matter of fact,” she said, “that’s one of the changes. You wouldn’t have spoken to me that way six months ago.”

As the door closed behind her Hake debated getting up to lock it. It seemed too pointed, at least until she was well out of hearing. He didn’t need Jessie to tell him how he had changed. He was aware of all the many ways in which the present H. Hornswell Hake D.D. was utterly unlike the one she had come to work for, just a few years before.

He kicked off his shoes, pulled the shirt over his head and felt at least a little cooler. It occurred to him that he could easily be as cool as he chose. With the new dispensation, why not an air-conditioner? The Team would pay for one if he ordered it, and the overhead wind generator, whose constant ratchety whine was beginning to get noisy again, could power air-conditioning enough for ten houses like this. If he wanted it. If he were that much of a power-pig-

If he had changed that much.

He sighed and pushed the heap of burglar tools to the back of his dresser, and there were the Incredible Art’s neglected tapes and fiches.

Well, why not? He had nothing more pressing.

The difficulty was that there were so many of them. But they were all marked, and one, bearing the note “Short course on the basics,” looked like a good place to start. This one, Hake observed, was a video cassette. Easy enough. He slipped it into the tape deck of his bedside TV set, and leaned back on the pillow to watch.

It seemed to be a slide talk prepared for college freshmen, but held his interest as he watched all the way through.

If you jab a person with a pin, you expect him to hurt. If he doesn’t hurt, or says he doesn’t, his behavior is contrary to expectation. If you are of an inquiring turn of mind, you try to understand why he is behaving that way, and when you know the reasons the behavior is no longer contrary. It is now what you expect.

If Harry is walking across a room which he can plainly see contains an obstacle, we expect him to avoid stumbling over it.

If Jacqueline attempts to unclench her fist, we expect her to succeed.

If Wilma cannot remember the color of her kindergarten teacher’s hair, we expect the memory to stay lost; and if all of these expectations are defeated we ask why. Is Harry blind and Jacqueline paralyzed and has someone just shown Wilma a Kodachrome of her kindergarten class? Say, no. But say instead that we discover that someone has suggested to each of these people that they behave as described. Now we are on the track of a solution to these puzzles, and we learn that the solution has a name. It is called “hypnosis.” And there is a theory. In fact, Hake discovered, there were God’s own quantity of theories, all the way back to Franz Anton Mesmer’s own in the year 1775.

Mesmer was a doctor, and he thought he had found a way to cure some kinds of illnesses without nostrum or knife—considering the state of medicine at the time, a very good way to go about it. It rested on what he called “animal magnetism.” If he made certain mysterious passes with his hands near a subject’s head, and then commanded the subject to do certain things, the subject would do them. Even if they were quite strange. Even if what he was told to do was to get well. Even when, you would think, they would normally be impossible. He could command the subject to go rigid, and get him stiff as a board. He could command the subject to feel no pain. Then he could pinch him, poke him, even burn him.

All that was well reported, and seemed to be objectively true. The patients said it was true. Observers said it was true. Dr. Mesmer himself said it was tfue. He then went on to say he knew why it was true. He said there was a magnetic fluid—he even allowed it to be called a “mesmeric fluid”—which surrounds everyone, and the passage of the hands through the fluid rearranges it to change the state of animal magnetism in the subject, thus producing the effects described.

That’s where he made his mistake, because scientists then went looking for the fluid. There isn’t any. It doesn’t exist.

Denials and objections flew, and continued to fly for more than two centuries, but, whatever you called it, the thing did just what Mesmer had claimed for it. Even more. People had their teeth filled under hypnotic commands to feel no pain, and got up from the dentist’s chair smiling and grateful. Women had babies with no other anesthesia, and laughed and chattered through the delivery.

There were, to be sure, a few little anomalies.

As electronic technology began to invade medical, experimenters reported some puzzling results. If they measured the electrical potential of the nerves affected, no matter how comfortable the subject said he was, those nerves were twanging. And if they got the subject into automatic writing, his mouth might say, “Gee, no, that doesn’t hurt,” but his hand would be scribbling, “Liar.”

And all that was very interesting, Hake thought when he had finished, but what did it mean? If it had anything to do with his behavior, or Leota’s, or the Team’s, he could not detect the relationship.

He realized his feet were getting cold. He put his slippers on and padded into the bathroom to make himself a glass of instant coffee. While he was waiting for the water to run hot he peered at himself in the mirror, absently aware that the nose looked almost human and the bruises were beginning to fade, half listening to the whir of the ventilator and the diffident gurgle of the john, his mind full of hypnotism.

He now knew more than he had ever wanted to know about the subject, but not the thing that would clarify the world for him. Maybe he was looking in the wrong place? Maybe he should have been reading Trilby instead of listening to Art’s tapes?

And tardily he realized that the toilet was still running. Not only that, but splashing and gurgling louder than ever.

“Oh, cripes,” he said out loud. He had forgotten to check for messages.

He pressed his thumb onto the pattern-recognizing moire of the flush lever, and Curmudgeon’s voice snarled gloatingly, “Got yourself in the soup again, didn’t you, Hake? Maybe it’ll teach you a lesson. You’re fooling with some dangerous characters, and right now I can’t spare much Team cover for you. So lay low. Stick with that bunch of pagans you call your congregation. Talk about the whooping crane and the sanctity of interpersonal relationships and stay off the hard stuff, you hear me? That’s an order. Do you remember what you’re supposed to say when I give you an order?” There was a tiny beep, and then only the faint whisper of the running tape, waiting.