The next person was a plump and rather pretty woman, who said at once, “How much history do you know?”
“Well—”
“I don’t mean Romans and the Dukes of Burgundy, I mean over the last couple of decades. For instance. Why hasn’t there been a shooting war in the last twenty years?”
Well, he knew the answer to that. No one had the heart for a shooting war any more, not since the brief violent bloodbaths that had splashed up and smeared twenty small countries in a couple of decades. For one thing, they were bad for business. Oil roared with pain when the Israelis demolished the Arab fields. Steel screamed under the squeeze of price-fixing. Banking wept under currency controls.
“I would say,” he began judiciously, “that it’s because—”
“It’s because it’s too dangerous,” she said. “Nobody wins a war any more—if the enemy knows a war is going on.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“There are two ways to win a race, Hake. One is to beat your opponent by sheer force. The other is to trip him up. They’re playing trip-him-up with us. Why do you think we’re so short of energy in this country?”
“Well, because the world is running out of—”
“Because they manipulate our balance of payments, Hake. The mark is up to three dollars, did you know that? And what about crime?”
“Crime?”
“You’ve heard of crime, haven’t you? It’s not safe to walk the streets of any city in America today. Even our highways aren’t safe, there are bus robbers in every state. Do you know why you can’t get an avocado for love or money? Because somebody—some body!—deliberately brought in insect pests that wiped out the crop.”
Horny said, “I think you jumped over something about crime. I didn’t quite get that part.”
“It’s plain, Hake! Somebody’s encouraging this lawlessness. Cheap Spanish and Algerian porno flicks that show muggers and highwaymen doing it to all the girls. They look crude. But, oh, how carefully engineered! War is not all bombs and missiles, my boy. It’s hurting the other fellow any way you can. And if you can hurt him so he can’t prove it’s happening, why, that’s one for your side. And that’s what they’re doing to us, Hake. Here, have a look at this tape.” And she threaded a cassette into a viewer.
Horny stared at it, bemused. It started way back, back before the Big Wars entirely. The peace-loving British had pioneered in this immoral equivalent for war as far back as the nineteenth century: they found a good way to discourage resistance in subject populations by encouraging them to trip out on opium. America itself had exported cigarettes and Coca-Cola around the world. Now, according to the tape, it was becoming state policy, and William James was turning in his grave. China flooded the Soviet Union with Comecon vodka at half the market price. It was not a weapon. No one died. But twenty percent of the steel-workers in Magnitogorsk were absent with hangovers on an average working day. Tokyo flooded the Marianas with cheap, high-quality sukiyaki noodles, reminding the voters of their ancestry just before the referendum that rejoined the islands to Japan. During the London water shortage just before the completion of the Rape of Scotland waterworks, Irish nationalists went around turning on hydrants and covert sympathizers left their taps running. It worked so well that Palestinian refugees, circumcized and trained for the occasion, repeated the process in Haifa to such an extent that two hundred thousand acres of orange groves died for lack of irrigation.
By now such tactics had become well institutionalized, and wholly secret. Everybody did it. Nobody talked about it.
Horny Hake was horrified. As soon as he began to understand the thrust of what he was being shown he burst out, “But that’s animal. Wars are supposed to be all over!”
The woman replaced the cover over her projector and sighed, “Go through that door, there’s somebody who wants to study you.”
The somebody turned out to be a sandy-haired young man with spectacles, who looked a little like Hake. “Jim Jackson,” he said, standing up. “I’m your replacement.”
“Replacement for what?” Hake demanded.
“You’re going on a sabbatical,” said Jackson, watching Hake’s expression thoughtfully. “Right word?”
“Sabbatical? It’s a minister’s vacation. I thought I was supposed to be sick.”
“Oh, shit,” said Jackson crossly, “have they changed the plans again? Well, anyway, I’m going to take over for you while you’re on active duty.”
Hake looked at him jealously. “Are you a minister?”
“I’m whatever they tell me to be,” Jackson shrugged. “They say ‘You’re an account executive’ or ‘You’re a TV producer,’ and I do it. You’d be surprised how easy it is when you’re a boss. When somebody else is the boss it’s harder, but I manage. Sometimes I screw up but usually nobody notices.”
Hake was horrified. “A minister has a tough job! How can you possibly take over a congregation?”
“Oh, I think it’ll work out,” said Jackson. “They told me this assignment might be coming up so I went to a church last Sunday. Doesn’t look so hard. I picked up a batch of mimeographed sermons on my way out that ought to keep me going for the first few weeks anyway. Of course,” he said, “that was a Baptist church and I understand you’re Congregational. Or something like that. I suppose there are doctrinal differences, but I’ll manage. I already checked out some books from the library: oldies but goodies like On Being a Woman and stuff by Janov and Perls. What else do you do?”
“Counseling,” said Hake immediately. “The sermon’s nothing by comparison. All the people in the church can come to me with their problems, any time.”
“And you solve them?”
“Well,” said Hake, “no, I don’t always solve them. That’s a sort of structured old-fashioned kind of way to look at it. You can’t force solutions on people. They have to generate their own solutions.”
“How do you get them to do that?”
“I listen,” Hake said promptly. “I let them talk, and when they come to the place where the pain is I ask them what they think they could do about it. Of course there are some failures, but mostly they perceive what they have to do.”
Jackson nodded, unsurprised. “That’s how I handled it when I was a judge, too,” he remarked. “Get the two lawyers into chambers and ask them not to waste my time, tell me what they really think I should do. They’d almost always tell me. I hated to give that job up, to tell you the truth.”
By the time the little old lady returned to conduct Hake out into the real world he was reconciled to the fact that this fantasy had forced itself into reality. Incredibly, he was about to become a spy in a war that he had not even known was going on. Mad\ he thought, following the lady’s leper cry down the hall, while the offices around him slammed doors and bustled with the hiding of secrets from his eyes-front gaze. Mad\
He waited by the side of the road for his bus to pick him up. It was wholly mad, but interesting; Hake found himself accepting it as a sort of lunacy high. At least for some time he would not have to worry about blowing his overload fuse or dealing with Jessie Tunman’s temper. And the extra money would be welcome enough. Hake was not overpaid. Like most preachers, he had moonlighted at a number of occupations over the years—hustling magazine subscriptions and ghosting masters’ theses in school, when he was still chair-ridden; later, when he became a jock, he was counselor at a camp for delinquent boys one summer, and the year following had even driven the little hydrogen-propelled truck that squirted detergent on the heliostats for the local solar power facility. There were important requirements for a minister’s sideline job. It should be either dignified or inconspicuous. No parishioner wanted to see the shepherd of his soul checking out soup cans at the supermarket.