Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  Haversford took his place at the head of the long table— linen cloth, linen napkins, crystal and silver at the place settings. On each plate there was a cup of fresh fruit— “From our own South Carolina orchards,” Haversford pointed out—but what was under the cup was what interested Hake. It was an envelope with his name on it, and it contained a check. When he peeked inside the amount sent an electric shock through him. They hadn’t been kidding.

  The lunch was cold meats and salads, and when it was over and the coffee was served Haversford rapped his water tumbler with his spoon. “I want to thank you all for coming today on such short notice,” he said. “There are only two items before this special meeting. The first is to welcome our new trustee, Reverend Hake, which I perceive you have all been doing already. The second is to take action on the proposal of our Public Relations Committee in regard to the marmosets. Ms. de la Padua?”

  The dark, athletic-looking woman at his left rose and went to a sideboard. She pulled the cloth away from a tall cage, reached in and lifted out a tiny woolly monkey. “As most of you remember,” said Haversford, “at our last meeting we talked of plans to increase our exports of some of our pet lines, including the marmosets, by selecting a group of young people to go abroad and present gift specimens to other children in several countries. Subject to your concurrence—” mysteriously, he twinkled toward Hake— “subject to all of your concurrence, a program has been prepared. The group of children will be students from local junior high and high schools, chosen on recommendation of their teachers. They will spend three weeks abroad, traveling in France, Germany and Denmark, during which time they will give away twenty-two pairs of marmosets to schools and youth groups in nine cities. Ms. de la Padua has a detailed itinerary plus the budget for the trip and will be glad to answer any questions. And in charge of the group—and I do hope you will accept?—will be our own Reverend Hake.”

  “What?”

  Haversford nodded, beaming. “Yes, indeed, indeed, Reverend,” he shrilled. “Of course, there is a suitable stipend included in the budget. I know it’s quite an imposition—”

  “But—but I can’t, Mr. Haversford. I mean, I have obligations to my church—”

  “Certainly you do. We all appreciate that. But if you’ll take the word of an old curmudgeon, I think you’ll find that the church can spare you for just this short time. May we vote, please?”

  The ‘ayes’ had it, unanimously, all but Hake, who did not collect himself in time to vote. “An old curmudgeon,” indeed! Did he have a choice? If it was the Lo-Wate Bottling Company’s old Curmudgeon, probably not.

  “I wasn’t supposed to go to Germany,” he said. But nobody was listening.

  IV

  There were thirty-one of the kids, and they filled the whole Yellow-Left section of the aircraft, two and four abreast. The Lufthansa stewardesses moved up and down the aisles, checking seat belts and making sure that air-sick bags were in every pouch, and Horny Hake and Alys Brant, his co-leader, followed.

  “You’re really good with children,” Alys said admiringly, as he patted two or three of the unfamiliar heads at random. “I wish I could relate to them the way you do.” Then she retreated to her seat at the front of the compartment, leaving Hake to wonder why a woman who didn’t think she could relate to children had maneuvered herself into being his co-leader. By the time he was in his own seat and the jet was airborne he had confronted the fact that this was going to be one sticky trip.

  He fell back on a resource of his childhood: counting off the hours till it was over. Nineteen days. That came to 456 hours. Including ground travel time from and to Long Branch, call it 470. He had left the rectory—he checked his watch—nearly five hours before, so now he was a little better than one one-hundredth of the way through the ordeal. In about half an hour it would be one ninetieth. By the time they reached their hotel in Frankfurt as much as a fortieth, maybe more, and by bedtime—

  “Father Hake?”

  He blinked and turned away from the window. “Mrs. Brant is waving to you, Father,” whispered the stew, her flaxen hair brushing his cheek. “It’s all right, you can get out of your seat for this.”

  At the head of the aisle Alys was already standing with one hand on the shoulder of a twelve-year-old, smiling sympathetically toward him. “It’s Jimmy Kenkel,” she said confidentially. “He reached back and punched Martin here in the nose. Probably if you ask the stew she’ll get you some ice.”

  Martin’s nose was streaming blood. The regular passengers who had been unlucky enough to be seated in Yellow-Left, dapper tall German businessmen and alert Japanese tourists, were whispering among themselves. Hake whipped out his handkerchief and held it to the boy’s face, bracing himself against the thirty-degree climb of the plane and trying to catch the stew’s eye. By the time he looked around Alys was gone. By the time the stewardess brought ice the bleeding had stopped, and by the time the seat belt sign was off Martin had already revenged himself by pouring the cup of melting ice over Jimmy’s head.

  Enough was enough. Hake turned his back on his charges and marched to the midships bar for a drink.

  “Two minds with but a single thought, Horny?” asked Alys cheerfully, turning from a conversation with a slim, uniformed man wearing waxed blonde mustaches.

  Hake looked at her with displeasure^ “The boy is all right, if you care. God knows what they’ll be doing now they can get up and move around, though.”

  “You see, our minds do work alike. I was just asking Heinrich here if they could keep the seat belt sign turned on in just our compartment.”

  “Ja, that would be good. But not possible.” The man stuck out his hand. “Heinrich Scholl, Father,” he said. “I am your purser.”

  “I’m not a priest, just a Unitarian minister,” Hake said testily, but he accepted a whiskey and water, compliments of the purser. The children had not yet realized they were free, and the stews were moving among them, passing out Cokes and orange juice and packets of in-flight games and puzzles. Hake began to relax. He had flown tens of thousands of miles before he was ten years old, and hardly at all since. It was all new to him, from the back-tapered wing outside the window with its peculiarly feathered tip to the topless bar-stew serving their drinks. The immensity of the aircraft astonished him. He had never fully comprehended the size of the big intercontinental jets, more than a thousand people inside one great steel sausage zapping across the sea. “But I don’t see why we have to have them,” he said. “These jets, I mean. What a waste of energy!”

  “Waste?” repeated the purser politely. “But that is not so, Mr. Hake. For the mails alone we must have them, so why not fill them up with passengers?”

  “But with energy so short—” he began, thinking of heat-less days in Long Branch and the tons of fossil fuel each of those huge engines on the wing was pouring out.

  The purser said kindly, “It is all carefully planned, I assure you, Mr. Hake. Air transport is a vital service. We carry valuable medical supplies, diplomatic pouches, all kinds of strategically vital materials. Why, this very aircraft carried measles vaccine from Koln to New Guinea just, let me see, just last year. Or possibly the year before.”

  And since then? Hake asked himself. But all he said was, “Granting that, but why so many of them? I mean, does every pipsqueak little company in the world have to have its own flag line?”

  “Pip? Squeak?” repeated the purser, mustache quivering.

  “Oh, I don’t mean Lufthansa, of course. I mean all of them. Little countries you never even heard of. I see them coming in to the traffic patterns off Long Branch, African airlines and Latin American airlines and God knows what airlines. Couldn’t America, for instance, use Air France or Aeroflot or whatever, instead of flying its own planes all the time?”

  Alys laughed and pushed her glass forward for a refill. “Oh, Horny! And let them do God knows what with our mail all the way across the Atlantic? You are so naive!”

  The purser nodded stiffly an
d said, “It has been most interesting speaking with you, Mr. Hake, but now I must attend to my duties. The flight attendants must now start serving dinner.”

  “And maybe you should too, Horny,” said Alys, looking past his shoulder. Ten of the kids were lined up for the toilets, and some of the boys were fighting again. “It’s hard on you,” she commiserated, “but boy-boy fights are a man’s job, aren’t they?”

  Boy-girl fights also turned out to be a man’s job, and so, Hake found out, were some of the seamier kinds of what he had always considered pure girl questions. Tiny Brenda came to him and whispered, “Reverend Hake, I’m having my personal hygiene.”

  He leaned closer to her, juggling the half-eaten dinner tray. “What?”

  “My friend is here,” she said, blushing.

  “What friend are you talking about?” he demanded, and then Alys drifted by to whisper in his ear.

  “The poor little thing wants a sanitary napkin,” she said. “Tell her they’re in the washrooms.”

  “They’re in the washrooms, Brenda,” he said.

  The girl nodded. “Some of the girls call it ‘my friend.’ I call it ‘my personal hygiene’ because that’s what it says on the bag in the bathroom in school.”

  “So go to the washroom,” said Hake, patting her cautiously on%the shoulder; and then to Alys, “Why me?”

  “Because you’re the father-surrogate, of course. I’m only a kind of elderly girl,” she said sympathetically. “Well. It’s going to be a long flight. I think I’ll see if I can catch some sleep.”

  “Me too,” said Hake hopefully, surrendering his tray to a no longer smiling stew.

  The hope never materialized. All through the five-hour flight Hake and the stews quelled insurrection. At least, Hake thought, toward the end of it, he was beginning to know some of them as individuals: Jimmy and Martin and Brenda; black Heidi and little blonde Tiffany; Michael, Mickey and Mike; the big, gentle, Buddha-like twelve-year- old, Sam-Wang; the three oldest girls, all from the little religious backwater of Ocean Grove. They all looked astonishingly alike, wedge-cut hairdos and disapproved lipstick and eye-shadow, but they were not related. One was named Grace, and one was named Pru, and the shortest and strongest and meanest of the three was named Demeter. Demeter was the one who swatted the youngest boys on the rear as they stretched across adult passengers to get at each other. Demeter and Grace finked to the Lufthansa stews when three of the junior-highs were smoking in the toilet. Demeter and Pru bribed the smaller ones to be quiet with the in-flight game kits. How splendid it all would have been, if only the Ocean Grovers had been doing it all to help Hake, instead of trying to soften him up for their own misdeeds: sharing drinks with the salesmen in the first-class lounge, making illicit dates with the male flight attendants. Through it all Alys slept like a baby, head on the shoulder of the Turkish Army officer in the seat next to her. But Hake didn’t sleep, and neither did the stews.

  Eleven hours down, four hundred and fifty-nine to go. It was going to be a long trip.

  They arrived at the immense, echoing Frankfurt-am-Main airport at two a.m., local time. Worst of all possible times: because of the time difference, the kids were not really quite ready for sleep; but they would have to be up and presenting marmosets to a Kinderhalle at nine that very morning. Hake kept the children whipped into line in the transit lounge while Alys, yawning prettily, sorted through the room assignments.

  Somehow Hake got them all through Customs and into the main departure hall. There were no chairs, of course; but somehow he kept them from killing each other through the hour-long wait for their chartered bus; until the driver arrived, furiously complaining in German, finally managing to explain that he had been waiting outside in the parking lot for the past two hours. Somehow he got them into their rooms at the shiny big hotel, with the baggage approximately in the right rooms, or close enough. “I’ve put you in with Mickey and Sam-Wang,” Alys said, handing him keys. “Sam snores. And Mickey’s mother says he wets the bed if he isn’t got up at least twice during the night, so— Anyway, I’ve finished your room assignments for you, Horny,” she said virtuously. “Now I think I’d better tuck in myself. It’s been a long day. Oh, I’ve had to take an extra room. It wouldn’t be fair to the children to put any of them in with me, I’m so restless. I’d keep them up all night.”

  He watched her sway gracefully into one of the exposed teardrop elevators, then sighed, finished signing the registration cards and counting the passports and followed to his own room.

  He found the bed so delightful that he allowed himself to lie with his arms crossed behind his head for a while, enjoying the prospect of sleep before letting himself experience it. Sam-Wang’s snoring blended with the mutter of the air-conditioner and the distant yammer of someone’s TV set across the hall. At least his virtue was spared—no, not his virtue so much as his sense of professional morality; bird-dogging around European hotels with Alys would have seemed pretty attractive if he hadn’t been her marriage counselor. But if she wasn’t after his body, why was she here? For that matter, why was he here? He had no doubt in the world that Lo-Wate Bottling Company, or whatever the spook factory chose to call itself, was behind it all.

  That was clear enough. But what was it, exactly, that they were behind? If they were sending a new agent on a mission to Western Europe, shouldn’t they tell him what the mission was? Were the marmosets secret intelligence couriers? Was Curmudgeon going to turn up in trenchcoat and fedora, out of some rain-shadowed doorway, to hand him The Papers? And if so, what would the papers say? It seemed a lousy way to run an intelligence agency.

  No doubt it would all be revealed to him in time. He uncrossed his arms, rolled over, buried his head in the pillow, closed his eyes—

  And opened them again.

  He had forgotten to put Mickey on the pot.

  It would have been easy enough to go on forgetting it, but a trust was a trust. Hake pushed himself out of bed, thrust his arms into his robe and coaxed the half-sleeping ten-year-old into the bathroom. With difficulty he steered him away from the bidet to the proper appliance, but then was rewarded for his efforts and got the still unawake boy back into bed… just as the phone rang stridently.

  Hake swore and grabbed it. A voice screeched in his ear, “Where the hell are my marmosets?”

  “Marmosets? Who is this?” Hake demanded in a hoarse whisper; Sam-Wang’s snoring had stopped and Mickey was rocking resentfully in his bed.

  “Jasper Medina. You better get down here, Hake, and start explaining where the monkeys are. I’ll be at the elevators.” And he hung up.

  Resentfully Hake carried his discarded clothes into the bathroom and put them back on. As he combed his hair he glowered at his reflection: that healthy outdoors face now had circles under its eyes, and this trip was just beginning! He let himself out as quietly as he could and waited for the glass elevator bubble to come for him.

  Waiting for him in the main lobby was a tall, lean man with bald head and white beard, chewing on a corncob pipe. “Hake? What’s your excuse for this foul-up? What do you mean, you don’t know what I’m talking about? There’s twenty-two pair of Golden Lion marmoset fancies coming in with you, and where are they? My boys’ve been all over Frankfurt tonight, trying to locate them!”

  “Who are you?”

  “Don’t you listen, sonny? I’m Medina, from the Paris office. IPF. These are my assistants—” he pointed to four men clustered around the wall telephones, two of them talking into instruments, the other two standing by. “Sven. Dieter. Carlos. Mario. We’re supposed to help out with your project.”

  “I sure can use a little of that,” said Hake feelingly, beginning to feel more friendly. “Those kids—”

  “Kids? Oh, no, Hake, we’ve got nothing to do with the kids. We’ll take care of the marmosets for you, if you’ll just tell us where they are. But not the kids. Now if you’ll just—wait a minute. What is it, Dieter?”

  One of the men was coming toward them
, beaming. “Jasper,” he said—he pronounced it “Yosper”—“these monkeys, we have found them. At the Zookontrolle, and all quite well.”

  “Ah.” Medina puffed on his pipe, and then smiled broadly. “Well, in that case, Hake,” he said, offering his hand, “there’s no need for us to waste time here, is there? Get a good night’s sleep. I’ll meet you for breakfast.”

  Get a good night’s sleep… By the time the glass elevator had him back at his floor he was almost asleep already, but he forced himself to put Mickey on the toilet one more time. Then he dropped his clothes on the floor and crawled into bed, clicking off the lamp beside his pillow.

  But even through closed eyes he perceived that the light hadn’t gone out. When he opened them he saw why. Outside the window it was broad daylight.

  Nineteen days in glamorous Europe! It was a good thing he hadn’t believed in that in the first place, Hake thought; at least he was spared disappointment. Cathedrals, museums, lovely river views, castles—they saw the Cologne cathedral out of the window of a bus; the Rhine was a streak of greenish-gray through tattered clouds. In Copenhagen a whole afternoon’s schedule had to be called off, because Tivoli was closed for repairs, having been bombed silly by some unreconciled Frisian nationalists—.good deal, or might have been, because they needed the rest; but in practice what it meant was an extra six hours of riding herd on the kids. In Oslo a teacher’s strike closed the schools and left Hake’s charges to present their marmosets to a red-eyed principal taking five minutes off from the all-night contract negotiations.

  After that first morning in Frankfurt, when he had gone to Alys’s room to knock her awake—and found in front of her door the neat brown boots of a Turkish major—Hake stopped expecting Alys to attempt to assault his virtue. She didn’t need to. There were plenty of other targets. If she hungered and thirsted for his flesh, she concealed it well. She spent more time with old, bald, half-blind Jasper Medina than with Hake. Although, to be fair, she spent more time with Hake than she did with anybody else. Especially the kids.