Frederick Pohl

by The Cool War

  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?”