The Company Man

by Robert Jackson Bennett

  Of the many essays that would come to be written about Mr. Kulahee, most of them would focus on his unspectacular appearance and lifestyle. To the average eye he must have seemed to be no more than a common fisherman, and the few photos taken of him showed a squat, dour-looking man with a head not unlike a potato and eyes both suspicious and shallow. The photos certainly didn’t suggest their subject to be anything close to “the Leonardo da Vinci of the nineteenth century,” as he would eventually be called. Later generations of phrenologists, denied the right to study Kulahee’s remains, eyeballed the photos and proclaimed his skull structure synonymous with brilliance, but most scholars admitted they saw nothing in those little brown eyes. No spark of genius, no glimmer of intellect. It just goes to show, they all agreed, how appearances can be wildly deceiving.

  After the storm ended William McNaughton found the road ahead was washed out, and while his companions chose to travel back he decided to remain with Kulahee and wait for the way ahead to become safer. Kulahee said it didn’t matter much to him, so long as McNaughton was willing to help him out with a few of his daily chores. At first McNaughton dreaded the idea of being dragged around by the little old man all day, but his curiosity grew when they went around back to draw water and stopped at a curious little device mounted in the ground.

  The machine immediately caught the eye. It was no more than two or three feet high, a strange creation of gears and pulleys set in a long, tight frame with a wide flat hat that kept the rain from entering its inner workings. On one end there was a crank with a small metal switch, and on the other was a short, slanted snout. Kulahee put the bucket before the snout, then began gently cranking the device, the little gears snapping and clacking like hail. McNaughton watched, curious, and then felt a slight vibration below his feet. Something shuddered and squalled and moaned down in the earth, just a few yards below the grass, and he stepped back, certain something would pierce the sodden ground and rise up. Kulahee paid no mind, still cranking away. The noises died to a low thrum and a small rope of steam grew from somewhere among the gears of the machine. It quivered slightly, as though in anticipation, and then it almost seemed to sigh as it produced the goal of all its exertion.

  A thin stream of water began to trickle from the snout and down into the bucket. Kulahee stopped cranking and then pressed the switch on the side of the device. The trickle grew to a steady flow, filling up the bucket in moments. Then he hit the switch again, let the flow of water die off, and picked the bucket up and began walking away.

  McNaughton stood and watched him leave, stunned. Then he struggled to catch up, asking, “What was that?”

  “What was what?” asked Kulahee.

  “That thing you used. What was that?”

  “Oh,” he said. “It’s just a pump I made. A little hand pump.”

  “I’ve never seen a pump like that,” McNaughton said.

  Kulahee nodded, not paying attention.

  “You say you made it?” McNaughton asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “It takes the creek water. Not from the creek. But below it. Took me a bit to figure out how. But I did it. I make a lot of things,” he added.

  “A lot of things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What sort of things?” asked McNaughton.

  “I don’t know. Things that do different things.”

  “Like what, though?”

  Kulahee turned and looked at him. Then he said, “All sorts of things. You… you want to see them?”

  “Yes,” said McNaughton. “Yes, I really would.”

  Once the day’s work was done Kulahee led McNaughton to his shed. There he showed him about a half-dozen other inventions of his, each staggeringly complex. There was one device that used a series of old lenses and mirrors to take the light from a candle and magnify it to illuminate an entire room with a clean, strong radiance. Another purified water, using a series of tiny rotating screens to filter out all manner of silts and then channel them into little concentric piles. And there was another that was just a fat, black egg, set in a glass dome with three small pipes running from its base.

  “What does that do?” asked McNaughton.

  “Gets hot,” said Kulahee.

  “Hot?”

  “Yeah. Gets hot whenever there’s a thunderstorm in, oh, say, three miles of here. Gets burning hot.” He scratched his nose and said, “I use it to boil water. Make coffee.”

  McNaughton stared at it, then reached out to feel its radiance.

  The future was born not in Paris or New York or Rome. It was born in a shed at five o’clock in the evening with two muddy men and a handful of mice as its only witnesses. Within a month McNaughton was sharing ten patent rights with Mr. Kulahee, who likely had no idea what he was signing away, and the McNaughton Western Foundry Corporation was scratched out on paper before Christmas.

  McNaughton’s venture began to pick up immediately, its first product being a streamlined version of Kulahee’s hand pump. It was lighter, able to pull water from the worst wells, and through Kulahee’s strange mechanical genius it did it all with a minimum of effort, amplifying force many times over. It seemed to pluck water from the very air, one journalist said. It was an enormous success, and the McNaughton Corporation skyrocketed. The company followed it up with a type of steam engine McNaughton himself suggested, taking Kulahee’s understanding of mechanics from the pump and applying it to locomotion. This new model took much more refining, as Kulahee had never planned for his designs to be implemented on such a large scale, but at the end of their work they produced an adapted, faster form of locomotive that needed a quarter of the coal to run. By the time they introduced the conduits, those strange steam generators that ran purely off the discharge from nearby electrical storms, McNaughton was one of the foremost industrial barons in the world.

  One thing struck McNaughton’s investors as strange, however: upon forming the company, McNaughton refused to move the base of business away from the small fishing settlement where Kulahee had built his home. It would have been an easy thing to take the creations and Mr. Kulahee’s valued mind back to San Francisco, where he could import resources, or even east to Seattle, which was a burgeoning city at the time, but McNaughton insisted that business come to him. Exactly why became a much-argued point. Some said Kulahee refused to move, forcing McNaughton to cater to the eccentric genius’s rudimentary needs. Others said McNaughton wanted to become a strong voice in forming Washington’s nascent statehood when it came to commerce, which he did. And still more claimed that Mr. Kulahee insisted he could do his work only when he was in a little cave far down in the valley, a place where he could go and meditate and allow himself to think. Perhaps it was there that Kulahee first dreamed up his famous airships, which would open up the skies to humanity at the turn of the century.

  But no one could verify this. Both Kulahee and his designs quickly became almost fanatically protected company secrets. As patents became established the workings of any McNaughton product would naturally become known, but as for where the ideas came from and the research methods and principles that Kulahee had almost absentmindedly developed, those became mysteries from the McNaughton Corporation’s inception. Many took issue with it, but McNaughton was well protected. Not only did it often buy out its most vocal critics, but Washington state laws defended the company on every side, and as the corporation grew to become the powerhouse of the American economy it became protected on the national level as well. Generous military grants helped secure friends in all branches of government, and later it was generally agreed that if America had not threatened to become involved in Europe with McNaughton weapons at the vanguard then the entire German Crisis might have never been averted.

  Evesden soon became an industrial city on a level never before witnessed. It sprawled out almost exponentially, with new neighborhoods and housing developments appearing overnight. Its growth was unaccountably messy, as blocks and streets and tangles of alleys were sporadically flung down and
paved over. In some of the newer sections a rare street grid was enforced almost as an afterthought, but beyond a few blocks it always devolved into the usual snarl of pathways, splitting and curling away like bursting fireworks. The city lacked a genuine downtown section as well, choosing instead to absorb nearby townships and integrate them into its sprawl, and so Newton and Westbank and Lynn and Infield became neighborhoods trapped in the depths of the city, each with its own identity and customs.

  But while the city planning left much to be desired, the city itself became a wonder of the world. Evesden was a place where the amazing became mundane, it was said. There towering cradles stood watch over the skyline, each a delicate, spider-spun array of cables and struts that embraced the shining gold airships that would come drifting down from the sky as though in a dream. Throughout the city, electric lamps bathed the streets in a soft white glow. Automobiles, a rarity in the rest of the world, choked the roads in places. On cold days the moisture from the shore would mix with the fumes from the plants, layering the thin, winding streets in a thick fog, and as you walked along one lane you would sometimes see a factory emerging from the curl of the clouds ahead, bejeweled with harsh blue lamps and covered in countless spires, like the deck of a ghost ship drifting mere yards away. And down below the city the underground trolley tunnels shuttled passengers from one end of Evesden to the other in minutes, sometimes even passing under the ocean itself.

  But it was said that the trolleys were just the beginning, and that like icebergs only the tip of Evesden could be seen and the rest was far below, somewhere deep in the earth, even below the trolley lines. While it was true that McNaughton facilities were mostly underground, some said there were passages and chambers far below that the public never knew of, places where enormous machines did strange things for secret purposes, working day and night. Many Evesdeners testified that in certain places in the city you could hear a slow, soft pounding echoing up storm drains and sewers like some distant heart. Some even claimed there were words in it, a low voice speaking in the darkness in an unknown tongue, and indeed some clans of the homeless would perch around the deep vents and try to interpret its sounds, though this was universally regarded as madness.

  Exactly when the city became the center of the New World was hard to say, but many agreed that the 1893 World’s Fair was when it undeniably marked its place in the future. The choice of Evesden as the site outraged the rest of the nation: New York could not believe this frontier dock city had outbid it, and Chicago, hungry after years of denial and condescension, hardly took it any better. And after the Paris World’s Fair and the Eiffel Tower, no one of sound mind could believe this ugly, improvised, industrial city could do anything half so graceful. Surely it would embarrass the country. But when the opening day came and journalists and sightseers gathered before the immense steel gates made just for the occasion, and then passed through and saw the Shifting Sky City and the Crystal Fountain and the Atrium of Arcs, the dissenters fell quiet. Many were moved to tears by the strange marvels silently displayed before them. “I just can’t believe men made such things,” one onlooker was famously quoted as saying, shaking his head. “I just can’t. I never seen such before.”

  Evesden defied words, the journalists said. It was beyond description. Many simply called it unworldly. An alien city somehow wedged up on the coastline, something so foreign the mind could barely grasp it.

  But the city had its problems as well. More and more laborers flocked to Evesden, hungry to work on the lines, and the city quickly found it could not keep pace. In 1884 it had a population just under nine hundred thousand, yet by 1900 it had six million. Smokestacks soon stretched down the coastline, McNaughton machines making yet more McNaughton products. Slums grew around the factories, disorganized and shabby, flung up in a matter of weeks. Shantytowns were built in the canals and on the pipelines and under bridges, swarming the docks and the train yards. City planners threw up squalid tenements, and after the shanty-dwellers stripped them of glass and plumbing they quickly grew overcrowded by the burgeoning populace, desperate for any place to stay. Corruption followed, feeding off the hunger. A miniature Chinatown sprang up by the piers that came to be known as Dockland, a place with its own laws and its own rules. And as McNaughton expanded, so did the crime rate, reaching first fifty murders a year, then a hundred and fifty, then three hundred, until finally at least four dozen people dropped a month.

  Yet even as the city grappled to control itself, McNaughton kept nudging it forward, ever expanding. Products needed to be perfected, redesigned, and put to market. McNaughton Electric and Transportation Division quickly became the forerunner of the corporation, developing several projects a year, from construction equipment to telecommunications to the automobile and the airship. And with each release, thinkers and rivals all over the world wondered about the little old fisherman whose ideas had birthed a company, then a city, and then a world. How machines of such fantastic beauty and awe-inspiring possibility came from such a primitive character became one of the great questions the public was fond of toying with. Kulahee died in 1904, still in the same bed he had always slept in, though with a few more creature comforts that his respectable allowance enabled him to purchase. He took whatever secrets he still had with him. McNaughton himself died in 1912 and left no hint either.

  Few gave it thought. The board of directors assumed control after they were both in the ground, nineteen shrewd men who were already worried about McNaughton’s future in the world. As America assumed its place in the twentieth century, it was McNaughton that carried the standard, yet with each passing year its designs became ever more sought after. Word came of foreign companies and even countries that were disassembling McNaughton products and attempting to bribe high-level employees. Designs were abandoned and lost after bitter disputes. Internal movements developed, pressuring the top to spill. When designs for a different make of rifle barrel were leaked in a station in Italy, the board decided enough was enough. How can an empire bring wealth to the world, the company’s leaders asked, if the world will not allow the empire to grow? They chose to answer the question themselves. McNaughton Western Foundry Corporation would arrange security to shepherd its strange little flock, and fight to keep its endless secrets at home and abroad.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  By the time Hayes got to the lobby of the McNaughton Tower his stomach was still rumbling but his mind was something close to steady. He swallowed, smoothed down his hair, and pushed open the doors and walked in.

  The silence of the place was crushing. The lobby of the Nail never felt as much like a business place as it did a tomb. Gray-black pillars marched away from the front doors, all of them smooth and shining in the ghostly light of the lamps, which hung from the columns’ sides like unearthly fruit. Suited figures paced in between the pillars, darting among the shadows to disappear down hidden halls. And high in the center of the lobby was the chandelier, a massive affair of dripping crystal and cruel, cold silver. It shone with a light so harsh and clean it was almost like starlight.

  Hayes crossed the forest of pillars to the elevators on the far side and waited before the small bronzed doors. When they slid open the old black elevator man inside favored him with a wary eye and wordlessly motioned him in. Inside it was a tiny, shining coffin with buttons forming a wall of faintly glowing numerals. The old man mashed the one for the forty-seventh floor and they slowly began to rise, gathering speed as they slid through some unknown vein in the building’s skeleton. When they arrived the doors slid open and Hayes stepped out into a small, high marble room, about the size of a very large closet. An orbed lamp hung several feet up, suspended in the shadows of the ceiling. On the far side was a tall metal door with a thick lock set in the frame, and a tin sign at the top of the door read, DENIED. PLEASE PRESENT YOUR KEY.

  Hayes turned around and said, “Goodbye.”

  The word seemed to die as soon as he said it. The little old man just nodded. Then the elevator doors slid
back together and he was gone.

  Hayes sighed and walked to the closed door, then reached into his pocket and took out his key. It was not like many other keys: this one was about five inches long and had only one long tooth running along one side. On its surface were about two dozen minuscule dots arranged in a staggeringly complex pattern. A closer look would reveal that they were actually tiny lenses, each no bigger than a grain of sand, and that the end of the key was filled with a thick, clear glass. Hayes had never really been sure how the keys worked. Something about light having to shine through the end and then out through the tiny lenses in exactly the right way. Someone had probably explained it to him once or twice, but it was all math and gearhead talk and he usually tuned out pretty quick.

  He walked up to the terminal and put the long key in the lock, fitting the single tooth into the provided slot. There was a whir from behind it and the door unlocked. The sign above flipped over to read, ACCEPTED!-47TH FLOOR and he pushed open the doors to reveal a much larger and grander hall, this one far more Old World than the lobby below, all floral carpeting and smooth dark wood. More suited emissaries paced from one office to another, slick and spotless, men of the moment. Hayes shambled out among them and some stared at him, curious as to why this shabby little man was here, but most of them looked away and went about their business.

  It was the quiet that got to him, really. It was like being in church. The Nail was almost a temple, a cathedral dedicated to the sole task of amassing wealth and power. Men passed one another like wandering ghosts, bearing their burdens of paper and numbers, moving from little room to little room and redirecting the fortunes of the greater world outside. And among them stalked Hayes, their keeper and reaper, protector and predator. He was not one of them, he knew that. He was an Ishmael atop Olympus, his hand against every man and every man’s hand against him.