The Cool War

V

Every priest has someone to confess to—a rabbi has another rabbi, even a Protestant minister has some ecclesiastical superior. H. Hornswell Hake had no one like that. He was a Unitarian, as alone in command as any ship’s captain on the high seas. The idea of laying his problems on Beacon Street would have struck him as ludicrous if it had entered his mind at all. And so, without a wife or steady lover, without parents, not actively in psychoanalytic therapy and even (he realized with some concern) lacking in really close friends, he had nobody to talk to.

And he wanted to talk; God, how he wanted to talk! It is not an easy thing for a man to discover that he has infected half a continent. It clawed at his mind. Hake’s life agenda was not clear to him, but parts of it were certain. Most certain of all, that his goal was not to make people sick but to make them well. Jogging, stretching-and-bending, working out with the weights, he kept thinking about Germans and Danes red-eyed and sneezing. Flat on his back, he saw himself as a Typhoid Mary on a continental scale. He was flat on his back a lot, too. The disease Hake had spread through Western Europe was what the Team called a Three-X strain, which meant only that it had so high a relapsing rate that the average sufferer could count on three recurrences of fever, trots and miseries. Hake received the best medical care and achieved five. Weeks passed before he was ready for duty again.

Not that he was either idle or alone. When he was relapsing, Alys Brant, Jessie Tunman and half a dozen others rallied round with soup and solicitude; when he was up and about, Jessie was there with concerns about the Carpet Caper and the next budget meeting, his LRY director with plans for the Midsummer Magic Show benefit and worries about which teenagers were into what drugs, Alys Brant with her own inevitable self. Alys had had only the lightest touch of the sickness, but it was enough to give her strong sympathy with Hake’s bouts, and that was more sympathy than Hake felt able to deal with. He kept her at bay by sending her off on library-research jobs for him, and by the time he was well enough to get back to church for a Sunday morning sermon he had decided what he wanted to do. Like many a minister before him, he was going to work out his problems on the congregation.

The weather had turned hot. Hake walked slowly over to the church before the service, pacing himself to keep from working up a sweat or increasing his respiration—he did not want to breathe in any more of the smoggy air than he had to, especially with the special tinctures of the pizzeria next to the church. In this kind of weather he either ran at daybreak, when it was still cool, or gave up running entirely. He unlocked the church door and propped it wide.

It was an old church and a small one, but it was Hake’s own. His heart lightened as he went inside, studying the worn carpet, neatening the racks of name badges waiting for the congregation. The paint was chipping on the ceiling again. Hake frowned. The Team had been spendthrift in providing luxuries for his own use—the wind generator, new office furniture, beautifully functioning fittings in the bathroom, even a redone kitchen when bachelor Hake almost never cooked a meal. It was time they put a little of that money into the church. Perhaps new floor coverings so that they could give up the fundraising Carpet Capers. Next time he talked to Curmudgeon— But when would that be? And maybe—maybe, after this morning’s sermon, there would be no handouts from Curmudgeon ever again. That would be a pity, perhaps. But it would be better than living with guilt.

“As most of you know,” he began, “I spent several weeks in Europe last month, and it has made me think about the world. Some of what I’m thinking I don’t like. I look at the world, and I see a crazy kind of race where the way to win isn’t to run faster than the other guy but to trip him up. It isn’t war. But it isn’t peace, either, and it is degrading the quality of life for everybody, for ourselves as well as for the rest of the world.” Because of the warm spring weather, there were only about thirty-five people in the church, cross-legged on the floor, slouched on beanbag pillows or sitting properly erect at the benches along the sides of the room. They were all listening attentively—or, if not attentively, with that polite expression of passive acceptance that he had seen most Sunday mornings of his life from this pulpit. “Some of it is economic,” he said, “so that we play games with each others’ currencies, raiding the pound and speculating on the mark; dumping gold on the market when the dollar softens, and buying it up to hoard when the Russians or the South Africans or the Indians start to sell. Some of it is mercantile. We sell wheat for less than it costs to raise, to countries that ship us TV sets for less than they cost to make. And some of it—” he hesitated, looking at the words he had written down, looking for the courage to go beyond them—“some of it is psychological. We censure the Spaniards for not giving freedom to the Basques, and we snub the rest of the world for interfering with our own dealings with the Navajos.”

The eyes were glazing now, as he had known they would be, but doggedly he went on reciting statistics and explaining policies. Even Ted Brant, lying back against the beanbag, knees up, one arm possessively around Alys’s shoulder, the other hand resting on Sue-Ellen’s knee, was no longer looking hostile, only bored, while Alys was nodding at every point. It wasn’t agreement, really. She was just acknowledging the use Hake was making of the information she had supplied him. Hake went on with his catalogue: aid to defectors, support to dissidents, jamming of broadcasts, dumping of pollution—“those thousand-meter stacks get rid of our own pollution,” he said, “but only by throwing it up high enough so that it comes down on London and Copenhagen.” Allen Haversford was no longer glassy-eyed. The director of International Pets and ” Flowers was listening with full, if noncommittal, attention, and so, surprisingly, was Jessie Tunman.

Hake rounded into his moral. “What I have come to believe,” he said, “is that it is not enough not to be at war. We need more. We need tolerance and caring. We need to give credit to those who disagree with us for being perhaps wrong, but not villains. We need to accept diversity and encourage individuality. We need to abandon suspicion as a way of life, and turn away from either preemption or revenge. And we need to find within ourselves the solutions to the problems we make, instead of trying to make our own condition relatively better by making someone else’s relatively worse. And now,” he said, “Ellie Fratkin and Bill Meecham will entertain us with one of their lovely cello and piano duets.”

To the strains of Schubert—or maybe it was Kabalevsky, he had misplaced his notes and when Bill and Ellie played, all the selections sounded about the same—he sat on the platform and looked out over his congregation. To the extent that Hake had family, they were it. He knew them from the inside out—inside best, as he knew his adopted Uncle Phil not as the steely-eyed IRS examiner but as the hiccoughing and amiable drunk who showed up at one of his hospital stays with a wetting, weeping baby doll as a get-well present, having forgotten what sex his sister-in-law’s stepchild happened to be. Bland Teddy Cantrell, squatting like a Buddha and nodding to the music, would always be the tearful suicide-attempter who had set fire to Hake’s study with a starter’s pistol when his wife left him. One of the times his wife left him. The two gay Tonys, the stablest and most dignified couple in the church as they leaned shoulder-to-shoulder against the wall, had blubbered their hearts out to him while deciding to come out of the closet. How many of them had he reached with what he had had to say? And as the coffee came out and the parishioners drifted around, he listened to the comments. “Really elevating,” said the tall Tony, and the plumper, younger one said, “You always make me feel good, Horny.” Jessie Tunman: “I only wish you were that open-minded about other things, Horny.” Elinor Fratkin, hissing into his ear the moment she caught him alone: “I’m simply ashamed, Horny! How can I face William when you didn’t say that what we were playing was his own transcription of the Bach partita?” Frail old Gertrude Mengel, tottering to him on a cane: “Oh, Reverend Hake, if only my sister could be hearing you! It might have kept her off drugs.” Alys Brant, lingering next to him while Ted clutched her hand and stared resolutely away, “I loved the way you put it all together. When are we going to New York to finish the research?” Teddy Cantrell: “You’ve given us a lot to think about.” And just behind him, Allen Haversford, eyes hooded, stiffly shaking Hake’s hand: “You certainly have, and I want to talk to you about it at some length, Reverend Hake, but not just now.”

Did that sound like a threat? At least a warning? For better or worse, it was about the only sign he had that anyone had really listened to him. He went back to his home, spent the day fiddling with filing sermons and putting together reports for the Monday Board meeting, watched television for a while and decided to go to bed early; and when he flushed his toilet that night it spoke to him in Curmudgeon’s voice.

The essence of comedy is the incongruous thwarting of expectations. Hake saw his life as taking a comic turn. Kidnapped by a girl who had tried to lure him into a toilet. Funny! The real guns didn’t make it less funny, they only turned the humor black. Sneezing western Europe into an economic tremor, what could be funnier than that? And now being given cloak-and-dagger orders by another toilet, that was hilarious—after it had stopped being startling, anyway.

When you looked at the appliance itself there was nothing particularly funny about it. Squat, solid and almost majestic in heather-blue ceramic, it looked like a superbly engineered device for exporting a person’s excretory byproducts as decently and as rapidly away from the person himself as anyone could wish. And nothing more. And in fact it was all of that, but something more. The bottom of the flush tank was four inches thick. Whatever was inside was concealed by the seamlessly molded ceramic, but from a palm-sized metal grille underneath the tank the voice came. The flushing lever was resilient black plastic, attractively scored with a moire surface. It did not look as if it could recognize Hake’s thumbprint. But it could. Hake experimented in fascination. Flush with his “finger, flush with his fist, nothing happened—except that the water in the bowl quietly scoured and drained itself away. Flush with his thumb, as the design invited one to do, and he had established contact with Curmudgeon himself.

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.”

Alys returned, slinky in diaphanous harem top and pants. “That saw always makes me have to pee,” she confided. She was braless under the filmy bolero, Hake saw— and, he was pretty sure, pantyless below, too, although the way the gauze draped around her it was hard to be sure. He found the illusion both exciting and uncomfortable. His glands had not yet resigned themselves to missing out on the nurse, and when Alys began admiringly to trace his pectorals with one hand and his latissimus dorsi with the other they stirred with new hope. The woman’s signals were maddeningly contradictory! Hake formed phrases in his mind, like, If you’re so horny for Horny, honey, where were you in Europe? But, fairly, he admitted to himself that his signals to her had to be equally contrary and obscure, because his drives and prohibitions baffled them. He escaped when the theater began to fill, helped by the fact that among the earliest arrivals were the other three from Alys’s family, Ted Brant looking annoyed, Walter Sturgis worried, Sue-Ellen reproachful. Hake took a seat as far from them at the opposite end of the first row as he could manage. It would have been better to sit naturally and suspicion-allayingly next to them. But he didn’t feel up to it.

The Incredible Art’s performance included all the standards Hake remembered from every other magic show he had ever seen, from vanishing billiard balls to producing live pigeons from Alys’s bodice, after he had finished sawing her in half. The audience was half children—and the other half grownups volunteering to be childish again for one night—and they ate it all up. As they always had. Six thousand dollars in admissions had funneled into the church treasury, the people were having a ball, and Hake allowed himself to feel good.

And therefore unwary; and when The Incredible Art began calling volunteers up from the audience for his last and greatest feat, Hake allowed himself to be swept with the flow.

“And now,” the magician boomed compellingly, “for a final demonstration of The Incredible Art of The Incredible Art, I am going to try an experiment in hypnotism. I have here thirty volunteers, selected at random. I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to tell the audience: Have any of you been rehearsed, coached or instructed in any way as to what you are supposed to do up here?”

All thirty heads waggled “no,” Hake’s among them.

‘Then I want all of you to let your heads hang forward, chins on your chests. Close your eyes. You are growing sleepy. Your eyes are closed, and you feel sleepy. I am going to count backwards from five, and when I say ‘zero* you will be asleep: Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Zero.”

Hake was not sure he felt sleepy, but he did seem to be comfortable enough as he was. He heard sounds of movement on the stage, and peered through a slitted eye to observe Art quietly shepherding half a dozen of the volunteers back into the audience; evidently they had looked up and shown they were awake. “Now the rest of you,” Art rumbled. “Keep your eyes closed, but raise your heads. Do not open your eyes until I say ‘open.’ At that time you will be fully aware of what is going on, but you will not remember any of it after you leave this stage. Now, open!”

Hypnosis, Hake thought, was not all that different from the rest of life. He didn’t feel changed, but he found himself compliantly raising an arm, then squatting on the floor, then performing a little dance. It was as easy to do what he was told as to break the pattern of obedience. So why not do it? Still, it was strange. He tried to remember what being hypnotized had felt like, back in the hospital when his whole chest and torso were flaming with pain after surgery. Not much. Not anything, really, except that after the anesthesiologist had made her passes the pain had seemed a little less important. It „was… strange. So he went on doing what The Incredible Art told him to do, along with the other survivors on the stage, his mind and senses open to taste this new experience, until Art began pairing them off into waltzing couples. That Hake perceived as somehow threatening. He broke stride, and Art waved him off the stage. Of the original thirty, only six people stayed there through the end. Somehow, Hake was not surprised that one of them was Alys.

At the party afterward, The Incredible Art was riffling cards in a series of buck-eye shuffles for some of the kids. Hake, drink in hand, drifted over to him. “I was never hypnotized that way before,” he offered, still trying to analyze his feelings about it.

“You weren’t then either,” said Art, tapping the deck and popping all four aces into the hands of a ten-year-old girl.

“I wasn’t? But— But I found myself doing things without any real control.”

“Did you?” Art fanned the deck, displaying fifty-two cards neatly ordered into suits and denominations, and then put it away. “I don’t know what you did do,” he admitted. “I’ve done that show a hundred times. If I get enough people up on the stage, a few of them will do everything I tell them to. The rest I lose.”

From behind Hake, Jessie Tunman said triumphantly, “Then it’s just a trick!”

“If you say so, Jessie.” The Incredible Art grinned like a tiger behind the blond mask of hair. “But I think what you mean is when I do it it’s a trick, when somebody else does it it’s science, right?”

“The phenomenon of hypnotism is well established in psychological literature,” she said stiffly. “There’s a point at which being a skeptic betrays simply an unwillingness to accept the evidence, Mr. Art.”

“Now you’re talking about flying saucers,” he said. They had had this argument before. “You’re going to tell me that with all the recorded sightings only a prejudiced bigot would say they don’t exist, right?”

“No. I wasn’t going to tell you anything, Mr. Art. It’s no concern of mine what you believe in or don’t believe in. But there are things your much vaunted rationalism just can’t explain. UFOlogy went through all this in the Sixties. One guy said the UFOs were weather balloons, another said meteorites. People said any crazy thing that came into their heads, rather than accept the reality of visitors from some other place in the universe. Dust devils, the planet Venus, even swamp gas! Nobody could face up to the simple facts.”

“What are the facts, Jessie dear?” Art inquired softly.

She scowled. “You exasperate me!”

“No, really. I want to know.”

She said, “I don’t think you do. But it’s simple. It’s the law according to Sherlock Holmes. ‘After you eliminate the impossible, the explanation that is left, however improbable, must be right.’ You might choose to believe that fifty thousand responsible observers are all crazy or liars. To me, that is impossible.”

Hake put down his glass. “Nice talking to you,” he said, and made his escape. He didn’t want to be in that argument, and the party showed signs of breaking up anyway. A family who lived in Elberon offered him a lift back to the rectory, and he squeezed into the back seat of their inertial two-door, with a sleeping three-year-old in his lap and the whining flywheel tickling the soles of his feet through the floorboards underneath, and when he entered his bedroom he heard a sound from the bath. The toilet was making a little whining sound as it leaked water.

Guessing correctly that it was demanding attention, he flushed it at once. An instant voice barked, “Stay right there, Hake!” A moment passed, then the same voice, Curmudgeon’s voice, with a tiny difference in quality that made him realize it was not a recording but the man himself direct, snarled, “What the hell, Hake! You didn’t report in for your afternoon message.”

“I’m sorry, Curmudgeon. I got busy.”

“You don’t ever get that busy, Hake! Remember that. Now, I want you in New York tomorrow, two P.M., in the flesh.”

“But—I’ve got appointments—”

“Not any more, you don’t. Call them off. Take down this address and be there.” Curmudgeon spelled out the name of what sounded like a theatrical casting agency in the West Forties and signed off.

Thoughtfully, Hake used the toilet for its alternative purpose, and then shrugged. As with The Incredible Art, it seemed as easy to obey the command as to rebel against it. He put on his pajamas and a robe and walked out into the office to get Alys’s phone number.

To his surprise, the light was on. Jessie Tunman was there, writing rapidly in her shorthand notebook. “Oh, hello, Horny. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“You didn’t. That’s all right.” He looked up the Brant-Sturgis number and touched the number-buttons. It was answered at once, and by Alys. “Hello, Alys. Horny Hake here. I just realized that I have tomorrow free. I know it’s short notice, but would you like to do that library bit with me? You would? That’s great, Alys. All right, I’ll be ready at nine, and thanks.” He hung up, pleased with his cleverness. Using Alys as a front, no one would think that he was going to the city for some hidden reason; at most, they would think his hidden reason not hidden at all. He said benevolently to Jessie, “Working late, are you?”

“I just wanted to remind myself of some things I have to do tomorrow, Horny. And, to tell the truth, since we’ve got the air-conditioning and all—well, I like to be here. It’s pretty hot in my room.” Jessie lived in what had once been a beach motel, now more or less remodeled into one-room apartments. Its one significant advantage was that it was cheap. “Horny? I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but are you going to the library in New York tomorrow?”

“Yes. I’ve been promising myself that I would for a couple of months, and I just decided to do it.”

“Can I go along? There’s—” She hesitated. “I know you don’t believe in it, Horny, but there’s some new material on UFOs out, and I’d like to look into it. I won’t be in your way.”

Hake said, “Well, I’d certainly be glad to have you,

Jessie, but it’s not my car.”

“Oh, I’m sure Alys won’t mind. Matter of fact,” she said archly, “I bet she’ll be glad for a chaperone, you know, so Ted and Walter won’t be worried. That’s wonderful, Horny! I’m going home right this minute, so I can get in early and take care of everything before we go.”

As it turned out, Alys didn’t mind at all, or said she didn’t, and all the way into New York Jessie Tunman primly rode the motherin-law seat in the back of the little charcoal-generator. It was a two-hour ride, the three-wheeler barely crawling as it climbed the long bridge ascents and the occasional hills; but on the level it chugged along at the double-nickels, and downhill it took off at terrifying speed. As they whined down the ramp into the Lincoln Tunnel, Alys slipping wildly between the sectional buses and the fat tractor-trailer trucks that were inching along, Hake was glad they were almost there, prayerful that their luck would hold out a few minutes more.

It had been smuggy-hot all the way in, and the tunnel itself was a gas chamber. “Roll up your windows,” Alys gagged. It didn’t help. By the time they broke into open air, even the open air of midtown Manhattan, Hake’s head was pounding and Alys’s driving had become even more capricious. They drove down to the Village, parked the three-wheeler in the three-deck parking garage that surrounded the arch in Washington Square and walked over to the library. It was bloody hot.

A drama was being enacted in New York City that day; dressing while watching his TV news program, Hake had seen shots of a tank-trucker from Great Kills, perched over the discharge hose of his gasoline truck with a lighted Davy lamp in his hand, holding Rockefeller Center hostage in the cause of returning Staten Island to the state of New Jersey. Ringed by police sharpshooters who dared not fire, giddy in the fumes of the gas that vented up past the wire-screen around his candle, the man had been haranguing twenty terrified captives, as well as the millions beyond who listened safely through the networks’ parabolic microphones. Breathing shallowly of the hot, carbonized air, feeling the asphalt suck at his shoes, stepping around dog-turds and less identifiable gobbets of filth, Hake understood how the man had gone mad, how a thousand city-dwellers a year raped, crucified, leaped from windows or set fire to themselves. It was an environment to madden anyone, especially in weather like this.

And when they walked in through the double revolving doors of the library, it was into dry, sweet spring. A room five stories high, and air-conditioned to perfection! “Power-pigs,” snarled Hake, but Alys laid her hand on his arm.

“It isn’t just for people, Horny, dear, it’s for all the computers here which would break down if they didn’t keep the air just right. Come on, we sign in here, and then they’ll give us a terminal.”

The library gave them more than that. They gave them a room-to themselves, glass-walled on three sides, looking out into the five-floor atrium on the fourth, with comfortable chairs, a desk, ashtrays, a thermos flask of ice-water… and the one thing that made it all real: a computer terminal. Alys escorted Jessie Tunman to her own cubicle, a few doors down the corridor, then came back and closed the door. “Now I’ve got you, Horny,” she said, touching her palm to his cheek. And passed by him, and sat down before the terminal. Expertly she ptinched in her signature number, taken from the card issued at the desk, and a series of codes. “I’ve ordered a citation index search for starters, Horny, keyed to any three of six or more subject phrases. You’ll have to tell me what the phrases are. Did you know you’re a very sexy man, Horny?”

Starting to ask what she meant by the first part of what she had said, Hake jumped the tracks as he tried to switch to the second. “Alys,” he said, “please remember that I’m your marriage counselor, as well as, I hope, your friend.”

“Oh, I do, Horny, I do. Now, the kind of phrases we give the computer are whatever subjects interest you. For instance,” she tapped the keys, “some of the things you were talking about in your sermon, like so.” The screen on the terminal typed out the words:

1. Major strikes.

2. Exotic plant and animal pests.

3. Currency manipulations.

“Got it?” she asked. “What else?”

“I could answer that better if I knew what you were doing.”

“Sorry, Horny, I thought I explained all that. You were real cute at the magic show.”

“Please, Alys.”

“Well, you were. It’s a real kind of turn-on, being hypnotized, isn’t it? Back at college we all took the psych courses just for kickiness. My goodness, Horny, the fun we had hypnotizing each other!… Oh, you want to get on with this, don’t you? Well, it’s simple. Once we program searches for six or eight subjects, the computer selects some basic sources in each of them—say, a newspaper story about the bus strike in London, or the police in New York, and one on those water-lilies you were talking about, and so on. Then it starts searching for works that cite sources from any three of those subjects. If you find somebody’s written a book that includes material on three of the things you’re interested in, then the chances are pretty good you’ll be interested in the book, right? Funny thing. When we were in Europe, the way you were being Big Daddy to those kids, it turned me right off. Did you know that?”

Half laughing, and half of the laughing from embarrassment, Hake said, “Let’s stick to one thing at a time, okay? I’m also interested in fads that keep people from working. How do you say that?” He was thinking of the hula-hoops, of course; and when they found a generic term for that, and for terrorism, and for filthy cities, and for dumping commodities and despoiling natural resources and two or three other things, Alys punched an “execute” code and they watched the screen generate titles, quick as a zipper, laying them line by line across the tube:

AAF Studies World Events, monograph, U.S. Govt. Prntg. Offc.

AAAS Symposium on Social Change, Am. Acdy. Adv. Sci. proceedings.

Aar und das schrecklichkeit von Erde, Der, 8vo, von E.T. Griindemeister, Koln.

Aback and Abeam, A Memoir, by C. Franklin Monscut-ter, N.Y.

Abandonment of Reason, by William Reichsleder, N.Y. Times Sun. Mag., XCIV, 22, 83-88.

Abasing the Environment—

“No good,” said Alys, leaning forward and hitting the switch that stopped the quick-time march of titles up the screen. “At that rate we’ll be here till winter and still in the As. I like manly men, Horny, that’s why I sometimes get just smothered with Walter and Ted, they’re so kind.”

“Alys, damn it!”

“Well, I just want you to know. So here’s what we’ll do. First, I’ll kill all the foreign-language entries; should have thought of that in the first place. Then I’ll set it to look for citations in five categories instead of three, how’s that?”

“You’re the expert,” Hake said. “What would happen if you programmed it for all, what is it, all nine?”

“Why not?” She tapped quickly and sat back. Nothing happened.

“Shouldn’t you start it?” he asked after a moment.

“I did start it, Horny. It’s sorting through maybe a thousand works a second, looking for one that has all the things you want. There can’t be very many, you know. You’re a lot different now than you were in Europe.”

“Oh, God, Alys,” he said, not looking away from the screen. But that was not very rewarding. They sat for a full moment, and there was no flicker at all.

“I have a friend,” said Alys thoughtfully, “who has an apartment not far from here. I have a key. There’s always something in the refrigerator, or I could pick up some kind of salad stuff and maybe a bottle of wine—”

“I’m not hungry. Listen, suppose we do find something. What do I do then, read the whole book here?”

“If you want to, Horny. Or if you want hard copy to take home, there’s a selector switch on that black thing over there, it’ll make microfiche copies for you. Or you can order the book itself on inter-library. Usually takes about a week to get them. I’m really disappointed.”

“Well,” he said, “it isn’t that I don’t like you, Alys, but—”

She laughed affectionately. “Oh, Horny! I meant the way we’re not getting anything. Let me cut back to six items, and see if we come out with a manageable number.”

And in fact they did. Eight books, about fifteen magazine and journal pieces—and real pay-dirt. A dissertation by a political-science Ph.D. candidate called The Mechanisms of Covert Power. A Johns Hopkins conference on “External Forces in National Development.” And three or four theses and monographs, all right on Hake’s target. “What I really need,” he said, surveying the mounting stack of microfiche cards, “is one of these computers for myself. I’ll be a year reading all this.”

Alys leaned back, stretched and yawned prettily, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. Hake averted his eyes from the deep-necked peasant blouse with its white lacing, and remembered to look at his watch. He was due at Curmudgeon’s in forty-five minutes, and how was he going to get rid of Alys? It was a convenience to have the question posed to him in that way, because it spared him the necessity of considering whether he really wanted to get rid of her. Wine, salad and a friendly apartment sounded actually pretty nice.

“Oh, hell,” said Alys crossly, bringing her arms down. “There’s Jessie.”

Hake leaped to his feet. “Come in, come in,” he said, astonishing Jessie with his cordiality. “Alys has been showing me how to work this thing and, I must say, she’s really been marvelous about it. How are you doing, Jessie? Need any help? I’m sure Alys will give you some pointers. As for me, I’ve got a couple of errands to run. Suppose I meet you back here at, let’s see, say three-thirty? That way we can miss most of the rush hour…”

The building was fifty stories tall in a block of smaller ones; the elevator was high-speed and did not rattle, and the name on the door of the suite of offices was Seskyn-Porterous Theatrical Agency, “Through These Doors Walk Tomorrow’s Stars”

The waiting room had seats for twenty people. All were full. A dozen other prospective stars of tomorrow were standing around, pretty dancers and bearded folk singers, nervous comedians and a lot of other people who did not look like performers at all. Hake didn’t have to wait. He was shown at once into a corner office with immense plate-glass windows, and Curmudgeon was sitting at a tiny, bare, glass-topped desk, his hands folded before him.

He got up and shook hands silently, shaking his hairy head as Hake said hello. “Just a minute,” he said, walking to the windows and turning on a strange little buzzer device that rattled irregularly against each of them, and then switching on a radio behind his desk. Just loudly enough to be heard over the classical-rock music, he said, “You’re punctual, and that’s a good way to be. Your physical came through, four-oh; you’re in as good shape as you’ve ever been in your life. What do you say? Are you about ready for an assignment?”

“Well,” said Hake, “I don’t know—”

“Course you don’t know. I haven’t told you yet Let me read you something.”

He unlocked one of the desk drawers and took out a single sheet of paper in a sealed folder. “Subject, H. Hornswell Hake,” he read. “Blah, blah, blah, physical status excellent, blah, here we are. ‘Subject has displayed commendable initiative and resourcefulness. He is rated superior in the performance of his duties, and will be recommended for promotion at the first opportunity.’” He dropped the sheet into a metal wastebasket, and watched as it abruptly sprang into flame and consumed itself. Stirring the ashes, he said, “What do you say to that, Hake?”

“I guess I say thank you. What does that mean about a promotion?”

“What it says. You do good work, we reward you. Simple’s that. Is there anything you want?”

“Well— New carpets for the church,” Hake said, remembering. “Maybe a little car. And, yes, I’d like a computer terminal of my own, if that’s not too—”

“Forget the computer,” said Curmudgeon. “For now, anyway. Car, all right. Carpets, sure.” He made a note for himself on the palm of his hand. Craning to see, Hake observed that the whole left palm was covered with cryptic scribbles. “Anyway,” he said, “you won’t be needing any of that right away. The church is going to close down for the summer in a couple of weeks.” He didn’t put it as a question; he knew it as a fact. “I’ll see that the carpets are ready before Labor Day. About a car, get it yourself. Whenever you want to. I’ll arrange for financing. But right now you’re going on a vacation to a dude ranch.”

“I am? Why am I?”

“Because you’ve been given it as a ministerial perquisite,” Curmudgeon explained. “Actually, you won’t be lounging around the swimming pool and making out with the divorcees. It’s basic training for future missions. You’ll like it; you’re a health nut anyway. You report to Fort Stockton, Texas, a week from Monday for three weeks. Bring jeans, shorts, hiking clothes; bring whatever you like to make it look good, but you won’t have much need for neckties or dancing shoes. Any questions?”

“Well—”

Curmudgeon stood up. “It’s good you don’t have any questions,” he said, “because I’ve got another appointment in two minutes. Watch your mail for tickets and travel information—and when you find out you’ve won the trip, be sure you act surprised. Meanwhile— What the hell?”

There was a muffled thunder-roll outside the windows, which rattled in a more somber rhythm than that of the buzzers at their bases. Curmudgeon sprang to look out, Hake right behind him. East and north, a dozen blocks away, tiny black things were sailing through the sky, followed by a ropy cloud of black smoke shot through with flame.

“Christ,” said Hake. Some of those black things looked like bodies!

Curmudgeon stared at him narrowly, then relaxed. He took his hand away from the .45 at his hip, where it had flown at once, and said, “See what we’re up against? That was the guy with the gas truck, I bet. He was one of the New Dorp Irredentists. And that was Madrid money that got them going, you know. We’ll fix the sons of bitches when that Dutch-elm beetle Haversford’s got gets into their— Well, never mind that. Just remember what you just saw. It’ll do more for your morale than fifty lectures Under the Wire.”

New Dorp Irredenists? Dutch-elm beetle in Spain? “Under the Wire”? But before Hake could ask about any of these confusing things he was out in the anteroom again, threading his way through the starlets and tap dancers, with all the questions unasked; especially including that central question that went, What made the gas-truck driver do it?