The Cool War

III

The next morning the sermon went beautifully—“So fresh and enlightening,” said the president of the congregation, wringing his hand. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had heard him give the same sermon, word for word, two years before. He didn’t have the head for it, either, because the only head he had was throbbing violently. Whatever had been in the coffee had given him the finest hangover he had ever owned, and without even a night’s drinking to justify it. Had to have been truth drug, he decided. They wouldn’t have let him go until they were quite sure he had nothing worth telling to tell them. When you came down to it, he hadn’t.

The coffee hour after the service was pure pain, but there was no way out of it. He didn’t always hear what was said to him. But reflexes took over:

“You’ve given me a lot to think about, Horny.”

“So glad you liked it”

And meanwhile his mind, between thuds of pain, was considering the world about him in a new light. The game the Team was asking him to join—was it being played aft around him? That raft of water lilies that floated in every river: was that just a freak of nature, or were other nations playing that game against his own?

“Horny, the methane-burner’s acting up again.”

“I’m so pleased you liked it.”

He thought of all the power blackouts that had hit in the past few years. Defective switches, overstressed transformers? Or somebody helping the accidents along? He recalled the dozen petty pandemics of coughs and trots, the strikes, the walkouts. The incredibly detailed rumors of corruption in high places, and perverse orgies of the powerful, that had turned half the country off to its elected officials. All of them! How many were thrown up by chance? How many were calculated strategies devised in Moscow or Beijing, or even Ottawa?

“Horny, I want to thank you for all of us. We’ve decided to give the marriage another chance.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed—oh, Alys! Yes. What did you say?”

“I said you’ve made us want to try again, Horny.”

“That’s really fine. Yes.” As she started to move off he detained her; she was one of the brightest of the parishioners, with a doctoral degree, he remembered, in history. “Alys,” he said, “how would you go about researching some recent events?”

“What kind of recent events, Horny?”

“Well—I don’t know exactly how to describe them.” He pondered for a moment, and then offered: “It seems to me that everything has got kind of, you know, crappy over the last few years. Like the lilies that are clogging up the water intakes for all those cities in the north. Where did they come from?”

“I think they were first reported in Yugoslavia,” she said helpfully. “Or was it Ireland?”

“Well, that sort of thing. If I made up a list of say thirty things that are going on that, uh, that seem to damage the quality of life, how would I go about seeing where they started, and what sort of correlations there are, and so on?”

She pursed her lips, fending off a couple of other parishioners pressing toward them. “I suppose you’re researching a sermon?”

“Something like that,” he lied.

“I thought so.” She nodded. “Well, for openers, there’s the Readers’ Guide to Periodical Literature. And Current Topics. Then you might want to look at the New York Times microfilms, with the subject index. I’m afraid you’d have to go to New York for some of the stuff. Unless—” She looked carefully at his face. “Unless you’d like me to help you with it?”

“Would you? I’d really appreciate that.”

“Why, certainly, Horny,” she said, impulsively pressing his arm. “I’ll come around tomorrow to talk to you about it. You’ve been so good to all of us, why, I couldn’t deny you anything at all!” She leaned forward and kissed his cheek before she turned away.

It almost seemed that the headache was less, Hake thought gratefully. He did not think Curmudgeon would approve, but he decided to know what was going on. And with a trained researcher to help him, maybe he could find out.

On the steps of the church, a gray-haired man whose name he could not quite place stopped him and said: “Reverend Hake, may I have a word with you?”

“I’m so glad you enjoyed the sermon.”

“Well, uh, yes, I did. But that wasn’t what I was going to ask you. You see, I’m with International Pets and Flowers. We’re expanding our operations here in New Jersey. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of it, but we’ve acquired the old Fort Monmouth tract in Eatontown, and we like to have responsible local representation on our district Board of Directors in a thing like this. Could you accept a directorship?”

“Directorship? I’m sorry, Mr.—”

“Haversford, Reverend Hake. Allen T. Haversford.”

“Well, I appreciate the offer, Mr. Haversford. Did you say pets and flowers? I’m afraid I don’t know very much about pets and flowers. And my time—”

“No special knowledge is needed, Reverend Hake. It’s a question of community welfare. We want your inputs on the way we can help carry our share of the load.”

“Yes, I see that, but I’m very—”

“I know your time is at a premium, but it is quite a useful service you could do. And there’s a tiny honorarium, of course. Ten thousand dollars. But the important thing is that I’m sure you could be of great help to us, and we to your church. Please say yes.”

‘Ten thousand dollars a yearl”

“Oh, no. The honorarium is ten thousand dollars per meeting. There’s one regular meeting each quarter—sometimes special ones, of course, when some decision is needed quickly, but they are usually quite brief. You’ll do it? Thank you so much, Reverend. The other members of the Board will be very pleased.”

Horny stared after Haversford, his head forgetting to ache. Forty thousand dollars a year, plus. And a community service too! As he turned toward the rectory he was thinking of what he could do with an extra forty thousand dollars a year; and then he caught sight of the Brant-Sturgis family. Walter Sturgis was turning the crank of the compressor of their charcoal-burner van, while the two women sat stiffly inside, red-eyed or brightly and sadistically cheerful, according to their private ways of expressing stress. Ted Brant was standing at the curb, glowering at him.

That almost brought the headache back. For the moment Hake had forgotten how jealous Ted was.

Horny had made it Rule Number One to avoid sexual entanglements within his congregation, or with other people with whom he associated in his professional capacity.

Considering that Hake’s twenty-four-hour days allowed six hours of sleep and eighteen hours in contact with some member or another of his congregation—or some person who was off-limits for equally valid reasons, like the wife of another minister in the Regional Confraternity or his fellow members of the Right to Abort Committee—that meant he avoided sexual entanglements just about completely. It wasn’t that he wanted it that way. Sometimes he didn’t even think he could stand it that way. But he knew what happened to other ministers when they departed from that golden rule. He was the only bachelor in Monmouth County who never missed a meeting of the Interfaith Singles Club—and who never failed to go home alone from them, usually after everyone else had left because he stacked the chairs and emptied the ashtrays to ready the room for its next use. His vacation weeks gave him the only romantic interludes of his life. And there weren’t many of them. Weren’t nearly enough.

But the last thing he was willing to accept was any share in the probable collapse of the precarious Brant-Sturgis marriage. Before he went to sleep that night he had typed out a careful list of subjects for Alys to look up for him, and left the envelope on Jessie Tunman’s desk clipped to a scrap of paper that said only “Gv. to A.—DWS.” Jessie was not terribly smart or efficient, and she did talk a lot. But she knew what he meant by Give to Alys—Don’t Want to See, and would abide by it.

As it happened, in the morning he almost forgot that Alys Brant existed. He had gone to sleep with the power still off in the rectory, and what woke him was a sudden glare of light in his eyes and the creaking hum of his bedside electric heater going on. When he went down to the basement to investigate, the man from the electric company was working over the meter box. “Putting a new fuse in?” Hake asked.

The man looked up and grinned enviously. “Hell, no, Reverend—excuse me. I’m taking the fuse out. Didn’t you know?”

“Know what?”

“Why, you’re off fusing from now on. Seems you’ve got your own generator coming in, and we’ll be buying from you part of the time, so you’re no longer subject to rationing.”

“My what?” -

“Your new generator. It’s a wind generator, go on top of your house. Should be coming in today, I guess—anyway we got a priority-rush order this morning. So you can draw up to full capacity, which is rated at six hundred amps, according to your specs plate here.”

“I don’t know anything about a wind-power generator!” “Yeah, well, that’s the way it goes,” the man sympathized. “Your wife said she had some letter about it.”

Hake repressed the urge to explain that Jessie Tunman wasn’t his wife, and went to find the letter. It was on the stationery of something called The Fund for Clerical Fellowship, and it said:

Dear Reverend Hake:

We are pleased to inform you that our Board has granted your Church a beneficence for the purpose of installing generating facilities for your rectory.

Accordingly, we have ordered a Model (x)A-40 Win-Tility unit, with necessary mounts and electrical connections, and have secured the services of William S. Murfree & Co., Belmar, to effect the installation.

If there is any further way in which we can serve your Church, please advise us.

It was signed by a scribble, but Hake didn’t need the name to know who it came from. He was being well taken care of, just as promised.

A thought struck him. A generator. They wanted him to have dependable power. So he spent the next half hour snooping around his office and bedroom, looking for bugs. He didn’t find any.

That set him back in his thinking. It was a letdown, almost a disappointment, because if they were bugging him they were automatically providing him with a means of communication. He wanted one. That wasn’t the same as saying that he had made up his mind to use it. He was still thinking about that, but he wanted the option. The thought was nagging at him that he should somehow report his kidnapping. If he had been able to find a bug he could have just said it out loud; “Hey, Curmudgeon! I got kidnapped. Somebody’s broken my cover. Give me a call when you get a chance, why don’t you, and we’ll talk about it over lunch.”

But he hadn’t found a bug, and that was confusing. If the Team was not supplying him with power just so they could be sure of monitoring everything he did, then maybe his whole attitude was wrong. Maybe they were really kindly and protective, and simply providing fringe benefits for a new recruit. Maybe his negative feelings were not to be trusted.

Now that he had plenty of heat the weather had turned mild. When he took his morning run, a mile down the beach to the pier and a mile back, he was panting and pouring sweat, and as he came up over the boardwalk he saw Alys Brant’s three-wheeled van sitting crookedly outside the rectory. He skulked behind the rail for five minutes until she came out and drove away, and by then he was chilled and sodden.

Still—what was the use of having privileges if you didn’t use them? He stripped off the suit and flung it carelessly in the washer-dryer, hoping that it still remembered how to work, and treated himself to a long, hot shower. No doubt about it. Power-piggery could make you feel good. He hit the morning’s mail joyously, disposed of it in half an hour, got his expense account up to date, wrote a marriage ceremony for two young members of his congregation (“I, Arthur, take thee, James, as long as love shall endure—-“), telephoned every sick parishioner and promised to visit two of them, and even had time for twenty minutes with the barbells before his pre-lunch run. His sweatsuit was crisp and dry, but he didn’t need it; he pulled on shorts and a tee-shirt marked To Love Me Is to Love God and started off down the beach.

And on the way back, there was Alys’s van again, picking its way around the construction toward his house. “Hell,” said Hake. He didn’t think she had seen him, so he changed course and jogged up the wide streets to his church. On weekdays the trustees had established a nursery school to maximize use of the church facilities, and the parking lot, which doubled as a playground, was full of three-foot-high human beings and taller, tenser teachers, doing the Alley Cat to music from a battery-powered cassette recorder. “Hello, hello,” called Hake, dodging past them and into the building.

As he had expected, no one had set up the chairs for that evening’s MUSL-WUSL meeting. Most days that would have been an annoyance, but today it was a good way to use up twenty minutes or so while Alys made up her mind he wasn’t going to be at the rectory and went away.

He pushed the chairs into a circle meditatively. Counseling didn’t go as well as it used to. Or went in a different way. When he had been in the wheelchair the women who came to him told him all sorts of things—censused their orgasms, clinicked their preferences. They still did. But they sat straighter and smiled more often when they did. There was a kind of receptivity in the air that had not been there before with the women. And sometimes now the men seemed, well, fidgety. Like Ted Brant. Perhaps the ministry was a mistake. Perhaps the operation that had taken him out of the wheelchair had been a mistake, for that matter. It did seem to interfere with counseling. But he couldn’t undo the operation, and how could he undo the ministry? At thirty-nine you didn’t make a career change lightly—

Except that maybe he war making one. Clergyman to spy. It was not what he had ever intended. He had certainly not sought it. But he couldn’t deny that there was something about playing cloak-and-dagger games that seemed like fun…

The kids were coming back from their lunch recess, which meant the church would no longer be habitable for the next couple of hours. Hake straightened the last of the chairs and started out. On the way he paused at the suggestion box, trying to remember. Had he opened it after the service yesterday? Not that there was ever much in it. He took out his key and unlocked it; yes, there was something. A paper clip. A pledge envelope—why couldn’t people remember they were supposed to hand them in to the ushers? A note scribbled on the corner of the service program: “Can’t we have some guitar music any more?” And an envelope marked:

Rev. H. Hornswell Hake From his friends at the Maryland phone company.

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 shrimp, 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?

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.