The Aluminum Man

by G. C. Edmondson

  “Isn’t that what you were planning to do to me?”

  “Not exactly,” St. Audrey said. “We financed Dr. Flaherty. Don’t you think we’re entitled to a return on our money?”

  “You didn’t finance me.”

  “And you didn’t tell us this discovery was yours.”

  Suddenly Rudolf realized these pirates had a point. “Suppose I go along.”

  “Full partnership, a full share of the profits.”

  “Who runs the show?”

  “A majority vote, naturally.”

  “Seven against one?”

  St. Audrey shifted uncomfortably. “You might put it that way.”

  “I’d like to put it another way. How about a corporation instead of a partnership? Say, fifty-one percent of the voting stock to the man whose process made the whole thing possible?”

  “I told you he was smart!” St. Audrey didn’t sound so happy this time.

  The door opened and Flaherty stood blinking owlishly, trying to focus.

  “This is a private meeting!” the man with the Baruch pince nez snapped, and tried to close the door.

  “Not that private!” Flaherty said belligerently, and charged into the room. “Dear boy, what’re these gombeen men doin’ you out of? Maybe if you took your trousers off right now you wouldn’t feel the draft so bad on the way home.”

  “I’m not sure,” Rudolf said. “But they seem to think I’m responsible for your past liabilities.”

  For a drunk the Flaherty was surprisingly quick on the uptake. “When I walked out, dear boy, I left my laboratory and my notes intact. Since they misrepresented, I see no legal or moral impediments…”

  “Enough,” St. Audrey said. “Let the dead bury the dead. One or both of you has a valuable discovery. Neither of you has capital. Draw up your own agreement. If it’s not too outrageous, we’ll sign.”

  Rudolf looked at Flaherty. “You’ve dealt with these people,” he said. “Where’s the hook in that?”

  Flaherty grinned drunkenly. “Git a flit gun full o’ holy water and see how many of them turn to cinders.”

  Rudolf guessed he’d have to do without the wild Irishman’s help. What was wrong with an offer like that? Surely it was as ironclad as — as any treaty made with an Indian. But the Flaherty was off and running.

  “Just phwhat is it your riverences are buyin’ for all those golden promises?” he asked.

  The pince nez type who’d tried to close the door huffed mightily. Rudolf cleared his throat and shot pince nez a glance that stopped him in mid-huff. There was a moment’s gabble then St. Audrey took over again.

  “You have a process. We want to buy it.”

  “Oh, aye,” the Flaherty said. “You want to buy it.”

  “Supplies of clean, hydroelectric power are limited.” Flaherty was speaking clearly now, with no trace of drunkenness. “With every available river dammed more thoroughly than your riverences’ souls, future needs must be met with nuclear or fossil fuels, both of which pollute.”

  He paused and peered from beneath shaggy brows. Rudolf wondered why none of St. Audrey’s golden horde seemed anxious to meet the wild Irishman’s gaze.

  “Now as civilization shifts from steel to aluminum, a process to extract that latter without electricity, and without belching noxious fumes into the air, would benefit mankind immeasurably, wouldn’t it?”

  The drunken fog seemed to descend on Flaherty again. He paused after his rhetorical question, staring at St. Audrey’s men until he had extracted a grudging “yes” from each.

  “Now,” he continued, “we’re all noble minded gintlemen, working selflessly for the good of humanity and the future of the planet. Sure and there’s nothing wrong with making a profit on the way. Shan’t muzzle the ox, eh?”

  There was a flurry of happy noises. Rudolf grew more puzzled by the minute.

  “Now,” Flaherty resumed, “whin we write up this agreement, we’ll have the usual delay clauses and penalties just in case the process isn’t working full steam within, say ninety days?” He gazed about the room with such soulfully trusting eyes that Rudolf could not understand why nobody would look at the Irishman.

  Rudolf felt to see if he still had his pants.

  “What kind of penalty clause did you have in mind?” St. Audrey asked.

  Flaherty thought a moment. “What would you say the process could make us — me and this dear boy — over the next twenty years?”

  St. Audrey was remarkably sick looking for a man discussing potential profits. “Hard to say,” he fenced. “Inflation, so many factors.”

  “In round Figures,” Flaherty insisted.

  “Maybe a billion.”

  Rudolf thought he had heard wrong. Then he thought he was going to faint. If a million was a thousand thousand and a billion was a thousand million — did anybody aside from governments actually have this kind of money? He wanted to take it and run but the Flaherty… Was the wild Irishman crazy? Maybe all that booze over the years… As if in a dream Rudolf heard Flaherty continue:

  “Now it’s just a formality, of course, since we’re going to rush into production as soon as we can. But just assuming something goes wrong and this dear boy is denied the fruits of his honest toil… Shall we put in a penalty clause specifying delivery of five hundred million in cash or negotiable securities if our new corporation is not producing aluminum and paying this dear boy a million a month within ninety days?”

  The silence was glacial. St. Audrey studied his associates’ faces and they exchanged silent messages.

  “It would take longer than that just to design the plant,” St. Audrey complained.

  “Oime a reasonable man,” Flaherty said. “Make it six months.”

  The silence continued.

  Looking at Rudolf, the wild Irishman said, “Well, since we’re all honorable, well-intentioned gintlemen, let’s make it a year.”

  “Wouldn’t you be just as happy with a guarantee of a million a month minimum as of now?” ‘St. Audrey asked.

  Every fiber of Rudolf’s being wanted to scream Yes! I’ll take it! Gimme the paper to sign! But Flaherty’s look warned him. Rudolf struggled for possession of his soul. Flaherty was a drunk. Flaherty was crazy. But Flaherty had something on his mind that Rudolf couldn’t even guess at. Rudolf looked at the golden horde. Not a red nose or blotched vein among them. Would one of them, he wondered, sell a pint of his blood to raise capital for Rudolf? As if in a bad dream Rudolf heard himself saying, “I rely implicitly on Dr. Flaherty’s judgment.”

  The silence had been glacial. Now it approached absolute zero. After a moment St. Audrey shifted and cleared his throat. “Then I guess there’s nothing more to say.”

  Suddenly Flaherty looked very drunk again. Rudolf got his arm around him and they exited, leaving glaring, frustrated money-makers behind them.

  “Rudy, darling!” Pamela had been lying in wait. “What did Daddy say?”

  “Good-bye.”

  “What?” Pamela’s shock was unfeigned. “But Rudy, I worked so hard to bring you together—”

  “Sorry about that,” Rudolf said. “Dr. Flaherty isn’t feeling well. Could you call us a taxi?”

  “But I — oh! Why don’t you take the Lamborghini?”

  “It’s too rich for my blood,” Rudolf said. “I’d only have to bring it back.”

  “I’ll come with you. I’ll get one of the limousines so we can all…”

  Rudolf felt that sullen reservation mentality descending on him again. He remembered Pamela’s hollowed-out lipstick and the sample of muck. “I’m sorry, Miss Capulet,” he said, “us Montagues got no business in these hallowed halls.” It was going to be painful excising Pamela St. Audrey from his life but Rudolf guessed he’d have to. “Just show me the phone,” he snapped. “I’ll call my own taxi. And if Daddy plans sending any more spies, tell him trespassers will be violated — just like the last one.”

  All the way to the station Rudolf remembered how Pamela’s fac
e had slowly changed from puzzlement to outrage.

  CHAPTER 7

  Flaherty was really out of it. Rudolf tried to feed him coffee while they waited in the bus station. Finally he let the Irishman doze on a waiting room bench. The bus began loading and he had to half carry his somnolent partner aboard. Halfway home and at some ungodly hour of the after-dark Flaherty revived enough to ask for whiskey.

  “No way,” Rudolf said. “First you tell me why I’m not collecting a million a month as of this afternoon!”

  “You could have accepted. I didn’t tell you not to.”

  “But you… oh, horseshit! Will somebody please tell me what’s going on?”

  “Standard Oil.”

  “What?”

  “Haven’t you ever heard the story about the guy who invented something that makes a car run on water?”

  “You mean that tired old bull about suppressed inventions?”

  “If they actually intended to go into production, why did they balk at a delay clause?”

  “But why?” Rudolf wailed. “We could all make money and better the world while we were at it!”

  “They,” Flaherty said pointedly, “are already making money.”

  “But…”

  “They’re already overextended. They’ve contracted for aluminum at the going rate and you expect them to introduce a new process and undercut themselves?”

  “Overextended? How do you know these things?”

  “It’s in the paper.”

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “It’s on that pageful of fine print. Like anything else in the white man’s world, you have to learn how to read a stock quotation.”

  Mentally Rudolf recited the disaster-to-enemy curse upon the professor who had talked him into an English major. Why couldn’t he have learned something that would let him make a living?

  They transferred to another bus. What the hell am I riding buses for? Rudolf wondered. I’ve got a pocketful of money. But he realized buses would be as quick as anything he could arrange this time of night. Finally they were in a decrepit, hick town taxi for the last twenty miles home. The Flaherty was feeling better now, tired from the long ride but not as bedeviled by thirst.

  “There’s another thing about million-dollar-a-month salaries,” he said.

  “Taxes?”

  “I was thinking of the other inevitability.”

  “Death? You don’t think they’d kill us!”

  “Not as long as we have the magic and they don’t,” Flaherty murmured with a glance toward the driver behind his plate glass.

  “But they’re businessmen. They’re not gangsters.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  There was an astonishingly loud noise and the window on Flaherty’s side of the cab shattered inward. The Irishman was facing Rudolf so the particles didn’t get in his eyes as the bullet passed through the cab and pushed out the window on Rudolf’s side. The driver laid a streak down the road. “Goddamn city hunters!” he yelled. “Ain’t got a brain in their heads.”

  Rudolf brushed glass from his chest. He had never been shot at before. He decided he didn’t like it. “Hunters?” he said. “I thought it was against the law to hunt after dark.”

  “Is,” the driver said through the grille. “They’re jumpin’ the gun. Be daylight in another ten minutes.”

  Rudolf looked at Falherty who shrugged. Rudolf suddenly realized he might go through the rest of his life without ever knowing whether it had been careless hunters or…

  The house had been ransacked so neatly that Rudolf had trouble believing it but finally the sum total of things put away not quite where they usually were convinced him. “Got to get out to the gravel pit,” he said.

  “We’ll fry some prawties and bacon first.”

  “But they might have gotten away with something important!”

  “Only one thing’s important. Considering how we depend on that one little gadget, I think it’s time I got back to work.”

  “On what?”

  “Suppose it gets stolen — or quits working?”

  “What do you need?”

  “A transmission microscope.”

  “We’ve got money now. Go ahead and buy one.”

  Flaherty laughed. “Dear boy, a transmission electron microscope fills a fair-sized room and costs one third of the national debt.”

  Rudolf began peeling potatoes. “So what do we do?”

  Flaherty put bacon in the skillet. “I’ve some suspicions about the nature of the problem,” he said. “I can bungle a bit with an optical microscope but sooner or later I’ll have to get inside a chromosome.”

  They breakfasted glumly, trying to counteract a night on buses with overdoses of coffee. “Who do you think shot at us?” Rudolf asked.

  Flaherty shrugged. “Have to see if it happens again.”

  Rudolf found this unappealing. “Were they trying to kill us or scare us?”

  Flaherty shrugged again. “Like every Irishman, I’m only descended from kings. You’re from the mighty hunters. What could you hit from a distance, moving fast, and in the dark? You know,” he added, “we’ve all kinds of loose money around this house. Whoever searched the place didn’t touch it but now somebody knows…”

  “But a bank—”

  “St. Audrey’s golden horde could tie us up so many ways…”

  Rudolf thought a moment. “Traveler’s checks?”

  The Flaherty smiled. They went about the house gathering up bills. While they had been gone the rest of the manila envelopes had been delivered. “Have to go out to the gravel pit,” Rudolf said. “I mailed some there.”

  “Aye,” Flaherty agreed. “Time to get back to work anyway.”

  They went out to the dump truck and Rudolf wrenched open a door. There was a man stretched out on the seat with a pistol in his hand. At first Rudolf thought he was dead. Then the muzzle moved to point straight at them.

  The man straightened and got out. Walking casually with one hand in his pocket, he herded them back inside the kitchen. “The money was here all the time,” Rudolf groused. “Why didn’t you just take it and clear out?” There was something vaguely familiar about this gunman. Rudolf tried to remember where he’d seen him before.

  “Around here you have to get in line,” the bandit said. “And I wanted to see you anyway.”

  Suddenly Rudolf recognized him. “You’re one of those longhairs I gave the car to!”

  “It isn’t long any more.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some apple-knocking sheriff held us for a week while a bunch of out-of-town heat kept pumping.”

  The sink was running over again and water was puddling all over the floor. “Now what the hell—?” Rudolf began.

  The bandit waved them to one side and closed the door. While Rudolf stared, he stepped into the puddle and went skidding. His gun hand waved wildly. The gun went off. It clattered across the floor and went off again. Rudolf suspected he would be permanently deaf. The bandit sat in the middle of the floor looking shocked and sick. “Jesus!” he said. “Somebody could get hurt!”

  Flaherty scooped up the pistol and did something to the safety. Absently, Rudolf noticed the wet was already retreating as the linoleum dried. He checked the kitchen faucet. No water was dripping.

  Flaherty found a chair and sat, still aiming the pistol at the deflated bandit. “Shall I kill him now or do you want to torture him?” he asked.

  Rudolf wondered if the Flaherty was in any condition to hold a gun. “Only if he doesn’t talk,” he said.

  “I’m talking,” the hippie insisted. “I’m telling you everything just like I told them.”

  “What’s everything?”

  “Nothing except that you cats are onto something big and there’s a half dozen different dudes out to burn you.”

  “Different?”

  “While I was out there waitin’ for you, two guys pass-keyed the back door and spent a half hour inside. As soon’s t
hey were gone two more did the same. They hurried out the front just as another guy was going in the rear.”

  “What’d they look like?”

  “Like a million other plainclothesmen. Now that last guy—” He went on to describe Riordan.

  Rudolf looked at Flaherty for inspiration and found none. “What happened to your two friends I gave the car to?” he finally asked.

  “They split as soon’s we got out.”

  “How’d you find me?”

  “One of those out-of-town dudes let something slip.”

  “What’d they want to know?”

  “How long I’d known you, where we met, how many others in on it?”

  “In on what?”

  “Near’s I read it you guys hit an armored car and they’re tryin’ to buy it back without a lot of noise.”

  Flaherty laughed. “Didn’t it strike you as just a trifle foolhardy to get mixed up in something like that?”

  Looking at his pistol in the Irishman’s hand, the would-be bandit soberly agreed.

  “Where’d you get the gun?” Flaherty asked.

  “I was goin’ through the car t’see if maybe they left a little stash — just a couple of joints — and I found it between the cushions. Is it yours?”

  “Did it never occur to you that somebody else might know it was there — maybe the man who ‘let slip’ where my young friend is?”

  The short-haired man was looking sicker by the minute.

  “Offhand,” Flaherty continued, “I’d say you’re set up for the high hurdle once the gintlemen who’re shooting at us finish the job. You have a weapon, a motive, and an opportunity.”

  “Jesus!” the hippie moaned.

  Rudolf looked admiringly at the Flaherty, wishing he had a mind that could see things like that. But it was scant comfort to know people — prospective inlaws — were shooting at him. Maybe he should have accepted the golden horde’s offer…

  “Why did you come here?” Flaherty asked.

  The young man squirmed. “I was heading for the coast, broke and happy, until this Indian cat came into my life. The least he could do is lay some bread on me.”

  “How much?”

  More squirming and soul searching.