It was not just his room. The liquid-crystal illuminated hotel sign over the reflecting pool was out, too; so was the golden glow-panel over his balcony that recklessly had been going even in the middle of the day. There had been a power failure.
Since power interruptions were so familiar a part of Hake’s everyday life he began at once to catalogue what problems it might bring. Lack of heat, not a problem. Lack of reading lights—well, apart from the fact that it was broad daylight outside the window, he was starved for sleep anyhow. Lack of air-conditioning? Maybe that would be a problem. He opened the French doors to the balcony, just in case. Elevators, TV, telephones were no immediate concern of his.
So there was, really, no problem. It seemed a heavensent injunction to catch up on his rest. He threw his clothes off, stripped back the velvet spread and summer-thin blanket and in a moment was wholly unconscious on the delightfully cool and quivering bed.
He woke up with the sound of an angry Italian voice bellowing at him, and discovered at once that the cool was no longer delightful.
It was the middle of the night. The lights were on, in his room and outside. The voice was from the television set, which had come on along with the lights and air-conditioner. The breeze outside had turned cool, and the air-conditioner was making it cooler still. In fact, he was freezing. He fumbled the sound of the TV down, and the voice of the Italian man in the commercial, who appeared to be enraged because his wife had put the wrong brand of cheese on his pasta, dwindled to a furious whimper.
Hake puzzled over his watch—the bedside clock was of course useless—and decided that he had slept the clock around. It seemed to be about two in the morning, local time. He did not feel rested, but he was awake and, worse, shivering cold. He managed to get the air-conditioner turned off and the window closed, then climbed back on the bed with thin blanket and stiff spread pulled around him. It was not enough. The water under him sucked the heat away, and there was no heat in the room. Not surprising. Who would have expected to need central heating in Capri in the summer? He told himself that his body warmth would soon enough make the bed comfortable, and to distract himself he tried to decipher what was happening on the television set. It seemed to be showing straight commercials: cheese, wine, then a sports car, then the national lottery; a deodorant, an aphrodisiac (or perhaps just a perfume; but the bulge in the trunks of the handsome male model was pretty explicit), and then what appeared to be an institutional propaganda piece. It showed a young Italian youth, clearly stoned out of his mind. A sad baritone voice-over sighed, “Ecco, guaio perche fare cost?” The youth shrugged and giggled. The scene dissolved to the great cellar of a winery. In the vaulted room plastic kegs of wine were tumbling majestically off a conveyor belt, while at the far end of the chamber was a loading dock with a waiting and empty truck. The camera’s eye narrowed down on an abandoned forklift truck, alone in the middle of the room. Hake could not understand the sorrowful Italian-language voice-over, but the message was clear enough. The forklift operator was away from his post. The wine was not getting-onto the truck. The deduction that the missing operator was the blind-stoned kid was confirmed at once, as the scene changed to the following morning. The young man, no longer stoned, now repentant, stood humbly beside a white-haired man carrying a clipboard. Hake recognized the man at once, him or his double. He had seen him a hundred times on American television, tapping his glasses on a desk as he sold everything from stomach-acid neutralizes to hemorrhoid salve. By the end of the commercial the prodigal forklift operator had cleared away the backlog, the trucks were loaded and rumbling away, and the conveyor belt once more brought in its endless chain of kegs. Marijuana si—PCP no, said the fatherly baritone, as the same legend appeared on the screen.
Interesting enough, but Hake was still freezing. His body warmth was not up to the demands imposed on it by the heat-sink of twelve hundred liters of cold water.
He was still exhausted, but he accepted the fact that there was no way for him to get back to sleep without Something Being Done. He got up and dressed. By and by he began to feel less chilled, but no less sleepy. And every time he lay down on that bed, even through clothes, spread and covers, he could feel the heat soak right out of him into the water.
It was no good.
He turned on the light and opened his bags. The little shoulder-carrier he had brought from Under the Wire had a sweater in it, but as neither it nor he had been washed for some time when he last wore it he was not anxious to put it on. The suitcase Curmudgeon’s minion had packed for him in Long Branch had nothing at all. Almost nothing he could wear, in fact. The Agency expediter had packed as full a Capri wardrobe as Hake’s closets permitted, but unfortunately had not known that his measurements had changed. No doubt it was Hake’s own fault for not throwing out what he could no longer wear. But the shorts, tank tops and sports jackets that had served him well enough as a 145-pound weakling in a wheelchair would no longer go around him, and the few newer garments were not warm.
Still, as long as he was up and moving about he was warm enough. And as long as he was awake he might as well be doing something.
Among the other things he had brought from Under the Wire were his microfiches—musty, dinged at the edges, but no doubt still serviceable if he could find something to read them with. Was there a fiche scanner on the television set?
There was. The instructions varnished to the top of the set were unfortunately in Italian, but the mechanism looked simple enough. What he also found was that the television set was a lot fancier than any he had seen in Long Branch. There was also something described as Solo per persone mature—film interattivo. It appeared to have a handset controlling it, but it did nothing at all until he realized that the coin slot next to it needed to be fed. It was just the right size for a cinquenta lire nuove piece, and immediately he had inserted the coin the broadcast channel disappeared and was replaced by an extremely good-looking Oriental girl reclining in the pose of the Naked Maja.
Technically the set was astonishing. Hake by trial and error found that the handset would let him view a whole catalogue of nude women, and men, too; that another control on the set allowed him to rotate the figure and zoom in and out on any desired part; and even that he could bring two figures together and manipulate them around each other. While he was trying to discover whether the picture showed them actually in contact or merely superimposed photographically his coin ran out and the screen went dark.
That had been interesting, also somewhat unsettling. Hake got up and explored the rest of the room’s facilities. Under the TV was something called Servizio, which turned out to be a little refrigerator and bar stocked with whiskey, wine, fruit juices and beer. He thought for a moment of getting drunk enough to supply French central heating and going back to sleep; but that way, he suspected, lay pneumonia. Still, one beer wasn’t a bad idea. Carrying it, he checked out the bathroom. The toilet seat vibrated on command, he found. The shower head pulsed, and so, he discovered, did the spray in the bidet. Behind a panel near the door was a coffee maker and a bun warmer, and when he sat on the edge of the still chill bed to drink a cup of hot coffee he kicked something and found that the bed, too, could be made to ripple rhythmically by pushing a switch. Quite an inventive room.
It was not, however, a room to be alone in. Everything urged company, and Hake didn’t have any.
What was worse, one of the girls on the television had reminded him of Mary Jean. He sat daydreaming of Mary Jean as a possible subject for film interattivo, and then of Alys, and of Leota, and realized he had a problem. It was a problem most men face, some of them very often, but Hake growing up in a wheelchair had learned to sublimate and to repress that problem, and the new Hake, the muscular Hake of the barbells and the two-mile runs, the action-oriented Hake from Under the Wire—that Hake was a different person. That Hake wanted a different solution, and there was none in sight.