by The Cool War
Personal.
The door to the main meeting room opened, and Hake turned, the envelope in his hands, ready to repel an unauthorized invasion of four-year-olds. But it wasn’t the kids from the nursery school, it was Alys Brant. She strode toward him with a flounce of green skirts and said, “Thought I’d find you here, Horny. Here you are. Is this what you wanted?”
Hake jammed the envelope in his pocket and took from her a sheaf of photocopies of CRT prints. It took him a moment to redirect his thoughts from his friends at the Maryland phone company to the curiosity that he had hoped Alys might satisfy. The stories seemed to be about oil tankers running aground and grain silos blowing up. They were not at all what he had wanted, but his ministerial training led him to express that thought by saying, “They’re just fine, Alys.”
“You don’t look pleased.”
“Oh, no! I’m very pleased. But actually—well, I can’t make much sense of these things. I was hoping for, more like books.”
“Books!”
He nodded, then hesitated. “I don’t know if I explained what I wanted to you very well. Doesn’t it seem to you that the quality of life has got worse in the last few years? Of course, I’m older than you are—”
Silvery laugh. “You’re not old, Horny, not with that bod!”
“Well, I am, Alys, but you must have noticed it too. So many things go wrong—not just tankers fouling beaches. Everything. And I thought somebody else must have noticed that and written a book about it.”
“A book!”
“Or maybe a TV special?” He paused, feeling his way. It did not seem wise to say anything that Curmudgeon might construe as breaching security, so he couldn’t come up and tell her that he wanted to know how long nations had been playing trip-up games with each other. “The way nothing seems to work,” he said at last. “Drug abuse and juvenile delinquency. Never having enough energy, and never doing anything about it. More mosquitoes than there ever used to be. All that.”
She said thoughtfully, “Well, yes, I suppose there’s something. But books! You know, Horny, you’re almost obsolete! Still—what you want is to browse, right? And for that we’ll have to take you to a decent library.” She pulled a date book out of her shoulder bag and thumbed through it. “Wednesday,” she decided. “I’ve been thinking about going in to New York then anyway—maybe see a matinee, have a nice lunch somewhere—”
“Really, Alys, I don’t want to put you to all that trouble.” “Nonsense! I’ll take the car. Pick you up at the rectory around—what? Eight? It’ll be fun! We’ll have the whole morning to do your library thing—and then, who knows?” She pressed his hand warmly and left him standing there.
Warning bells were going off in Hake’s brain. She was a very attractive woman, but under the rules a protected species. Not to mention Ted.
Belatedly he remembered the letter from his Maryland telephone friends. It said:
Dear Rev. Hake:
There are two questions I would like to put to you.
Why didn’t you report what we did?
Why did you agree to hurt people you don’t even know?
Please see if you can figure out the answers. Some day I will ask you for them.
There was no signature. He folded the letter up and then, reconsidering, tore it into tiny pieces, went into the men’s room and flushed it down the toilet, ignoring the stares of two small boys from the nursery school. They were good questions. He didn’t need to be told to think them over. They were what he had been asking himself for some time.
In the next thirty-six hours, the power-piggery summons was withdrawn because of a technical defect, and Hake woke to find that traffic had been rerouted along the ocean-front while the road before the rectory was repaired—after six years of potholes and detours! He could no longer entertain the hypothesis of coincidence. Somebody was looking out for him, and doing a good job.
The questions from his whilom kidnapper were nowhere near an answer, any more than the hundred other questions that whined around his mind like Jersey mosquitoes circling for the attack. He had no answers. He could hear them droning away nearby in every thought, while he was counseling, while he was dictating to Jessie, while he was munching a quick, and already cold, slab of pizza in his church study between another long talk with the cleaning lady about scrubbing the ladies’ room and his weekly meeting with the Social Action chairman. Every once in a while the mosquitoes lunged in and stung, and then that spot itched annoyingly for a while. The rest of the time he put them out of his head.
For a wonder, Social Action finished its business in five minutes and Hake had a whole unbudgeted hour. Back correspondence? Next week’s sermon? He reviewed the options and settled on parish calls. Two of his flock were in Monmouth Medical Center, one in geriatrics and one in maternity, and he was overdue for seeing both of them.
Next to counseling, Hake considered visiting the sick about the most useful thing he did, especially the old and lonely sick who had no one else to call on them. It was a whole other exercise than problem-solving, as in counseling, or in moral leadership, as in his weekly sermon. The sick and old didn’t need any more leadership. They had nowhere left to go. And they had passed the point of problem-solving, since the only problem they had left was beyond anyone’s solution, ever.
Rachel Neidlinger, his maternity case, was getting ready to nurse newborn Rocco and needed no comforting. Two floors higher, old Gertrude Mengel was delighted to have company. She showed it, of course, by spilling out on him her week’s burden of complaints against the floor nurse and boasting about the tininess of her veins, so hard for the doctor to get a hypodermic into. Hake gave her the appropriate twenty minutes to discuss her symptoms and her hopes, most of both imaginary. As he rose to go she said, “Reverend? I’ve had a postcard from Sylvia.”
“That’s marvelous, Gertrude. How is she?”
“She says she’s got a job making hydrogen.” The scant old eyelashes fluttered to announce tears nearby. “But I think she’s with those bums again.”
Internally Hake groaned. Seventy-year-old Gertrude had been trying to mother her fifty-five-year-old sister ever since their parents died. It was like trying to mother a china egg in a nest, and Sylvia would not even stay in the nest. “I’m sure she’ll be all right. She’s not, ah, using anything again, is she?”
“Who can tell?” Gertrude said bitterly. “Look where she is! What kind of place is A1 Halwani?”
Hake studied the card, a gold-domed mosque overshadowed by a hundred-meter television tower, with blue water behind them. Sylvia had done her own Hegira or Stations of the Cross all her life, tracing the passion of the counterculture from the East Village and Amsterdam through Corfu and Nepal. She had begun late and never caught up. And never would. “It’s not a bad place, Gertrude,” Hake was able to reassure her.
“An Arab country? For a Jewish girl?”
“She’s not a girl any more, Gertrude. Anyway, there’s a lot of people there who aren’t Arabs. It was almost a ghost town for years, after the oil was gone, and then all sorts of people moved in.”
Gertrude nodded positively. “I know what sorts of people, bums,” she said.
It was no use arguing, although all the way through his bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich in the coffee shop downstairs Hake was thinking of reassuring things that he could have said. But hadn’t, because there was no point in it; she didn’t want to hear. The final pay-out for being a caring minister, aad giving your flock the benefit of your insights, was that more than fifty percent of the time they didn’t want to receive them.
Nevertheless he had made the effort, and with that half of his mind not preoccupied with the buzzing questions he was conscious of virtue. A new question added itself to the swarm, but this one rather welcome: it was only intellectually interesting, not a worry. What had Gertrude meant about her sister getting a job making hydrogen? Hake knew vaguely where the hydrogen came from, and this A1 Halwani seemed to be in the right part
of the world. But he was far from sure of details. His own experience with power generation had been a long way from the theoretical level.
When the Israelis destroyed the Near East’s petroleum reserve with their shaped nuclear charges, they had not burned all the oil. But what was left unpumped was highly radioactive. If the hippies in Kuwait or wherever were now generating hydrogen by burning that oil, they were releasing radioactive isotopes into the world’s air. No one had said that publicly that Hake had ever heard, but Hake was now quite ready to believe that there was a lot that was never said publicly. If there was a creditable reason, that had to be it. There would be no other reason to turn down fuel that did not in any way damage the environment, when you only had to look out of your window to see how badly the environment had been damaged. And it was not as if the United States were not importing fuel already. The Mexican and Chinese wells were still pouring ten million barrels a day into American refineries, even if their prices were becoming exorbitant. Especially because their prices were becoming exorbitant.
Anyway, was that how the hippies were doing it? He had heard something, somewhere, about solar power. The trick was to catch the energy of the sun in mirrors or lenses, boil sea-water pure, split the H20 into its parts, chill the hydrogen into liquid and pack it into tanks. Of course, the trick was more complicated than it seemed. To direct the sunlight to a boiler or still meant putting motors on the mirrors to follow the sun across the sky; meant keeping them clean;
meant finding a place where there was plenty of sun and plenty of water and plenty of cheap land—and a deep-water port or a pipeline to move the LH, to where it was useful. A1 Halwani sounded like the right kind of place.
By the time he had turned all that over in his mind he had jogged back to the parsonage where Jessie was waiting for him with news. “A Mr. Haversford called,” she announced, eyes flashing with curiosity. “He asked you to come to a special meeting of the Board of International Pets and Flowers.”
“Thank you, Jessie,” he said, but she followed him to his own quarters. She stood in the doorway, watching him take off his jacket and pull his sweatshirt over his head. It was one of the habits in her that he most disliked.
“I didn’t know you were on the Board of IPF,” she said.
“It just happened.” He was excusing himself to her again, of course; what he should be saying was telling her not to come into his private rooms. But he couldn’t even do that because technically she wasn’t; the tips of her sensible shoes were just at the sill of the door. Inspiration struck. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Call Alys Brant for me and tell her that I won’t be able to make the library trip because I’ve got to go to this meeting.”
“She’d like it better if you called her yourself,” she observed.
“I know she would, but please, Jessie.”
“Huh.” Grudgingly she disappeared, but a moment later she was back in the doorway. “She says all right, shell make it next Wednesday instead, same time.”
Well. “All right,” he said. Next Wednesday would have to take care of itself. Meanwhile he had his barbells out and began the regular series of exercises, wishing Jessie would go away and take Alys Brant with her.
Jessie didn’t. She watched him bend and stretch in silence for a moment, then sighed. “You’re a pretty lucky man, Horny,” she observed.
“I know,” he panted, turning away from her as he bent from side to side. Just having her watch him made him uncomfortable enough. When she ventured personal remarks it was worse. Personal matters seemed so out of character for a woman with all the personality traits of a retired Civil Service employee, which of course was what she was. “I’m especially lucky to have you for a secretary,” he thought to say at last, but she was already gone.
Was he all that lucky? Well, sure, he thought to himself, shrugging all the pectoral muscles forward as he watched himself in the mirror. For someone who had been at death’s door a couple of years earlier, whose best hope had seemed to be an uneventful and probably rather short life in a wheelchair, he had a lot of interesting things opening up.
Not that he hadn’t been lucky enough before. He had survived the wars of his infancy, after all, and even in a wheelchair good things had happened. There were plenty of helping hands stretched out to a kid who was an orphan and a displaced person and handicapped: Scholarships. Grants. Medical services. Counseling. There were plenty of girls, too, who were willing to stretch out to him. The skinny tall youth in the wheelchair was appealing. More than that. Nonthreatening. “I’ll ride with you in the elevator, Horny, here, let me take your books.” “Horny, let me help you into the car.” “Why don’t you come over tonight, Horny, and we’ll quiz each other for the Psych test?” Hake remained a virgin until he was twenty, at least technically he did, but not because of any lack of attractive and friendly persons willing to meet him well over halfway. What kept him a virgin, or, well, pretty much so, was something within himself. He did not want pity. And he detected it in every overture offered.
He could not remember a time when he was not sick. When he began turning blue every time he got tired, he was only four. The first open-heart operation was when he was seven, and it was a disaster; it led almost immediately to the second one, which saved his life but did not strengthen it. By the time he was in his teens the prognosis for another operation was no longer as risky, but young Hake simply did not want to go through that again. Not just the risk. The pain. Pain that anesthesia hadn’t removed, hypnosis hadn’t removed, even both together had made barely survivable. No. No more operations. So in his wheelchair he rolled up to receive his B.A. in psychology, and his master’s in social science. At the seminary he got his doctorate after two years of being carried to some of the classes—it was an old seminary, and a poor one, and they had not been able to afford compliance with the regulations for the handicapped. But he got it. And got a ministry after it, and held it to everybody’s satisfaction until, in his mid-thirties, he began turning blue again—and the third operation not only worked, it took him out of the wheelchair for good. Oh, he was lucky, all right! A whole new life when he had least expected it.
But, all the same, it was confusing.
Allen T. Haversford met him in person at the gate to old Fort Monmouth, all smiles and welcome. Haversford had a face like a toy bulldog’s. It seemed small for the size of his head, and the reedy Franklin D. Roosevelt tenor voice that came out through the wattles of flesh around the mouth made him seem like a bulldog breathing helium. “So nice of you to come, Reverend Hake,” he shrilled. “We’ve arranged a little luncheon for our trustees, but that’s not for half an hour. Let me show you around.”
The Fort had been mothballed decades earlier, but it was springing to life. Hake had heard rumors of building, but this was his first chance to see what was going on. Plenty was. Backhoes and bulldozers were scouring out a complicated pattern of trenches, and a pre-mix truck was lining them with concrete as fast as they were dug. “You’re really making progress,” he said.
“Indeed, indeed! These are going to be our fish tanks,” sang Haversford jovially. “Salt-water, fresh-water. Big and small. We’ll have the largest fish-fancier operation on the East Coast here. Ornamentals, tropicals, even food-fish for those who want to put in their own pools. And those will be the kennels, and over there the breeding pens. This is almost a closed-ecology system, Reverend Hake. We’ll bring in livestock on the hoof; then we’ll have our own abattoir, you can’t see it because we haven’t started construction yet, and we’ll dress food for almost all the pets. Nothing will go to waste, I assure you. Meat and cereal mix for the dogs. Tilapia for the cats—we’ll raise most of them ourselves.
Entrails dried and pulverized for the fish.” He winked. “We’ll even use the, ah, sewage, Reverend. Yes, dung has plenty of nutritive value! Some gets dried and processed and fed to the stock. Some—and that includes sewage from visitors and the staff—gets settled and filtered and we grow algae on it; algae feed shri
mp, shrimp feed fish. And the effluent goes into our hydroponics system.”
“It really sounds efficient, Mr. Haversford.”
“Indeed, indeed! And so it is. Over here—” He led Hake to a sturdy plastic bubble. “Our first greenhouse. Step inside this chamber, yes, thank you, and let me close the outer door, here we are. We don’t want to waste heat, after all.”
It was uncomfortably warm in the bubble. Hake loosened his collar as he looked around. Rows of elevated trays of seedlings, some of them already a foot tall and in leaf, some even in blossom. He did not recognize any of the flowers; surely those could not be morning glories, nor those sunflowers. Haversford was proudly nipping the end off a cigar as he watched Hake looking around. “No power-piggery here,” he boasted. “All this is solar energy! Not a calorie of fossil fuel burned, except a little bit for the lighting. And even that we hope to generate ourselves in time, if we can get priorities for a photovoltaic installation on the road surfaces.”
“You’re doing a fine job,” said Hake, watching the man light up. Curiously, some of the nearer flowers seemed to turn toward his lighter.
“No, no, no! Not ‘you,’ Reverend Hake, please! ‘We!’ You are very much a part of this, you know. Now, this section will be orchids, plus a few tropical ornamentals that like the damp and heat. And some experimental varieties— we will do quite a lot of hybridizing and development here.”
“I suppose you’ll feed the ones that don’t work out to rabbits or something, and then feed those to the animals?”
“What? Rabbits? Why, what an excellent idea, Reverend Hake! I’ll get our technical people to look into that right away. You see, I knew you’d be a great asset! And now, I think, it’s about time for us to join the others for our luncheon meeting…”
The “others” were seven persons, two department heads from IPF and the other five directors like Hake himself. He did not catch most of the names, and he had not seen most of the others before. One he recognized. The black man with the nearly bald head was a member of the Board of Chosen Freeholders. But who was the other, younger black with the cutoffs and worry beads? Or the very young girl with long, blonde hair? And how many of them were on the board because the Team was paying them off?