Frederik Pohl - The Cool War

The day they came for the Reverend H. Hornswell Hake was his thirty-ninth birthday, and his secretary, Jessie Tunman, had baked him a cake. Because she liked him, she had only put two candles on it. Because she was Jessie, she dumped it in front of him with a scowl. “That’s very kind of you, Jessie,” he said, eyeing the coconut frosting he couldn’t stand.

“Yeah. Better eat it fast, because your nine o’clock people are getting out of that kiddie-car of theirs right now. Aren’t you going to blow out the candles?” She watched him do it. “Well, happy birthday, Horny. I know you’d rather have chocolate, but it gives you blackheads.”

She did not wait for an answer, but closed the door behind her.

Naturally she had caught him stripped down to his shorts, doing his barbells in front of the mirror. Now that he had stopped exercising he was freezing; he quickly put the weights away, pulled on his pants, drew lined boots over his sweatsocks and began to button his shirt, covering the great network of scars that curved under his left nipple. By the time his first counseling people showed up he was sitting behind his desk, looking once more like a Unitarian minister instead of a jock.

Another marriage down the tube if he didn’t save it. It was a responsibility he had accepted long ago, when he took the vows at the seminary. But time didn’t make his job easier. He greeted the young people, offered them birthday cake and got ready to hear their complaints and accusations one more time.

Hake took all his ministerial duties seriously. Counseling he took more seriously than most. And of all the kinds of problem-solving and support his congregation asked of him, the kinds involving marriage were the hardest and the most demanding. They came to him for marriage counseling, bright-faced, with a youthful, sophisticated veneer covering their tender, terrified insides; and they came to him again later on, most of them did, with the frayed look of anger and indigestion that went with divorce counseling. He gave them all the best he had.

“I really love you, Alys!” Ted Brant yelled furiously.

Hake gazed politely at Alys. She was not responding. She was staring tight-lipped into the corner of the room. Hake repressed a sigh and kept his silence. That was half of counseling: keeping your mouth shut, waiting for the about-to-be-married or the considering-divorce to come out with what was on their minds, really. His feet were cold. He reached down inconspicuously and rearranged the afghan he had wrapped around them.

A knock on the door broke up the tableau, and Jessie Tunman peered around it. “Sorry,” she said urgently, “but this seemed important.” She left a note on the glove table and closed the door again, smiling at the young people to show that she was not really interrupting.

Horny shook his feet out of the afghan and padded over to look at the note:

A man from the Internal Revenue wants to talk to you right away.

“Oh, God,” he said. His conscience was as clear as most, which is to say not all that clear. Not that he expected to have any real problem. But he was used to having non-problems that turned out to be interminable annoyances. One of the good things about being a clergyman was that so much of what people spent money on was, for you, deductible: the house larger than a single man really needed, justified because so many rooms were used for church purposes, like counseling and wine-and-cheese parties; the occasional travel that he liked so much almost always to attend seminars, church conventions and professional courses. But the bad thing about that good thing was that, when you had so much deductible, you had to spend a lot of time proving it.

Ted Brant was looking at him now, with the expression of a man conscious of a grievance. “I thought this session was about the ruin of our marriage.”

“It is, Ted, it is. I’m sorry for the interruption. Still,” he said, “actually it comes at a good time. I want you to try talking to each other privately about some of the things we’ve discussed. So I’m going to leave the room for ten minutes. If you don’t know what to say, well, Alys, you might go on with what you think about sharing the cooking: that was a good point you made, about your feelings about a dirty kitchen. Don’t ever apologize for feelings.” He pointed to the wine decanter and the coffee maker. “Help yourselves. And have another piece of cake,”

In the anteroom Jessie was cranking the mimeograph machine, counting turns: Shhhlick, shhhlick, shhhlick. She paused to say, “He’s waiting for you in his car, Horny.”

“In his car?”

“He’s kind of a funny guy, Horny. I don’t like him. And, listen, the heat’s gone off again. I went down and switched over to methane, but there’s no pressure.”

“The coal man said he’d come today.”

“He never comes till late afternoon. We’ll be icicles by then. I’m going to have to use the electric heater.”

Hake groaned. The power rationing made life difficult when winter hung on to the end of March, as it was this year. The electric company had installed a sealed fuse on the main. It was not supposed to blow out short of thirty amps, but the fuses were not all that accurate. If one did blow out, they had to wait for a repairman to come from the company, shortly to be followed by a cop with a summons for power-piggery. Hake said, “If you have to, you have to. But turn off some lights. And go in and turn off the heater in the study. There’s enough animal heat in there anyway.”

She said virtuously, “I hate to disturb the young folks.”

“Sure you do.” What she said was the truth. She preferred to listen at the door.

He put a sweater on and went out to the porch. The winds were coming straight off the Atlantic, and either surf-spray or a drizzle was blowing in on him.

The rectory was a house a hundred and fifty years old, from the great days of Long Branch when presidents came up to take the summer ocean air (and died there, a couple of them). It was past those days now. The scrollwork on the wooden porch was soft with rot, and the Building Fund never seemed to keep up with replacing the storm windows and the tiles that flew off the roof every time the wind blew. At times it had been a summer home for a wealthy Philadelphia family, a whorehouse, a speakeasy, a dying place for old people, a headquarters for the local Ku Klux Klan, eight or ten different kinds of rooming house—and vacant. Lately, mostly vacant. The church bought it at one of those times because it was cheap.

Hake rested his hand on the rail for the chairlift, no longer used since his rebirth two years before, and clutched his scarf, looking for his visitor. Among the rubble of street excavation that seemed to be the chronic state of the roadway it was not easy to see all the cars— But then he saw it. No mistake. In a block sparsely lined with three-wheelers and mini-Volkses, it was the only Buick. And four-door at that. And gasoline driven. And it had the motor running.

Horny Hake had a temper, learned in the free and outspoken kibbutz where he had spent his childhood, where if you didn’t yell when you were sore no one knew you were around. He jumped down the steps, flung open the waste-fully heavy door, leaned in it and blazed, “Power pig! Turn off that God-damned motor!”

The man at the wheel threw away a cigarette and turned a startled face to him. “Ah, Reverend Hake?”

“Damn right I’m Reverend Hake, whoever the hell you are, and what’s this crap about my tax return?” He was shivering, partly from the wind and partly from fury. “And turn off that motor!”