“Seven,” he bleakly told the unshaved elevator man. Whatever was upstairs, it wasn’t a big, coast plane factory.
Room 712 stopped him dead in the corridor with the audacity of the lettering on its glass door. It claimed to house the Arlington National Cemetery Association, the Lakeside Realty Corporation, the Western Equitable Insurance Agency, the California Veterans League, Farm and Home Publications, and the Kut-Rite Metal Novelties Company in one small office.
But at Room 714 his heart sank like a stone. The lettering said modestly: American Society for Space Flight.
I might have known, he thought glumly. Southern California! He braced himself to enter. They would be crackpots, the lab would be somebody’s garage, they would try to meet their pay roll by selling building lots on Jupiter… but they were paying for his time this morning. He went in.
“Dr. Novak?” said a young man. Nod. “I’m Friml. This is Mr. MacIlheny, president of our organization.” MacIlheny was a rawboned middle-aged man with a determined look. Friml was sharp-faced, eye-glassed, very neat and cold.
“I’m afraid you might think you were brought here under false pretences, Doctor,” said MacIlheny, as if daring him to admit it.
Friml said: “Sit down.” And Novak did, and looked around. The place was clean and small with three good desks, a wall banked with good files—including big, shallow blue-print files—and no decorations.
“I asked for research and development work,” Novak said cautiously. “You were within your rights replying to my ad if you’ve got some for me.”
MacIlheny cracked his knuckles and said abruptly: “The anonymous offer was my idea. I was afraid you’d dismiss us as a joke. We don’t get a very good press.”
“Suppose you tell me what you’re all about.” It was their money he was here on.
“The A.S.F.S.F. is about twenty years old, if you count a predecessor society that was a little on the juvenile side. They ‘experimented’ with powder rockets and never got anywhere, of course. They just wanted to hear things go bang.
“An older element got in later—engineers from the aircraft plants, science students from Cal Tech and all the other schools—and reorganized the Society. We had a tremendous boom, of course, after the war—the V-2’s and the atom bomb. Membership shot up to five thousand around the country. It dropped in a couple of years to fifteen hundred or so, and that’s where we stand now.”
Friml consulted a card: “One thousand, four hundred, and seventy-eight.”
“Thanks. I’ve been president for ten years, even though I’m not a technical man, just an insurance agent. But they keep re-electing me so I guess everybody’s happy.
“What we’ve been doing is research on paper. Haven’t had the money for anything else until recently. Last January I went to Washington to see the A.E.C. about backing, but it was no dice. With the approval of the membership I went the rounds of the industrial firms looking for contributions. Some foresighted outfits came through very handsomely and we were able to go to work.
“There was a big debate about whether we should proceed on a ‘bits-and-pieces’ basis or whether we should shoot the works on a full-scale steel mock-up of a moon ship. The mock-up won, and we’ve made very satisfactory progress since. We’ve rented a few acres in the desert south of Barstow and put up shops and—” He couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice. He opened his desk drawer and passed Novak an eight-by-ten glossy print. “Here.”
He studied it carefully: a glamour photograph of a gleaming, massive, bomb-shaped thing standing on its tail in the desert with prefab huts in the background. It was six times taller than a man who stood beside it, leaning with a studied air against a delta-shaped fin. That was a lot of metal—a lot of metal, Novak thought with rising excitement. If the picture wasn’t a fake, they had money and the thing made a little more sense.
“Very impressive,” he said, returning the picture. “What would my job be?”
“Our engineer in charge, Mr. Clifton, is a remarkable man—you’ll like him—but he doesn’t know refractories. It seems to be all he doesn’t know! And our plans include a ceramic exhaust throat liner and an internal steering vane. We have the shapes, theoretically calculated, but the material has to be developed and the pieces fabricated.”
“Internal steering vane. Like the graphite vanes in the various German bombardment rockets?”
“Yes, with some refinements,” MacIlheny said. “It’s got to be that way, though I don’t envy you the job of developing a material that will take the heat and mechanical shock. Side-steering rockets would be much simpler, wouldn’t they? But the practical complications you run into—each separate steering jet means a separate electrical system, a separate fuel pump, perforating structural members and losing strength, adding weight without a corresponding thrust gain.”
“You said you weren’t a technical man?” asked Novak.
MacIlheny said impatiently: “Far from it. But I’ve been in this thing heart and soul for a long time and I’ve picked up some stuff.” He hesitated. “Dr. Novak, do you have a thick hide?”
“I suppose so.”
“You’ll need it if you go to work for us—crackpots.”
Novak didn’t say anything and MacIlheny handed him some press clippings:
LOCAL MEN SEE STARS;
BUILDING SPACE SHIP
and
BUCK ROGERS HEARTS BEAT
BENEATH BUSINESS SUITS
There were others.
“We never claimed,” said MacIlheny a little bitterly, “that the Prototype’s going to take off for the Moon next week or ever. We down-pedal sensationalism; there are perfectly valid military and scientific reasons for space-ship research. We’ve tried to make it perfectly clear that she’s a full-scale model for study purposes, but the damned papers don’t care. I know it’s scared some good men away from the society and I’d hate to tell you how much it’s cut into my business, but my lawyer tells me I’d be a fool to sue.” He looked at his watch. “I owed you that much information, Doctor. Now tell me frankly whether you’re available.”
Novak hesitated.
“Look,” said MacIlheny. “Why don’t you take a look at the field and the Prototype? I have to run, but Friml will be glad to drive you out. You’ve got to meet Clifton.”
When MacIlheny had left, Friml said: “Let’s eat first.” They went to a businessman’s restaurant. Friml had hardly a word to say for himself through the meal, and he kept silence through the drive west to Barstow as the irrigated, roadside land turned arid and then to desert.
“You aren’t an enthusiast?” Novak finally asked.
“I’m secretary-treasurer,” said Friml.
“Um. Was Mr. MacIlheny deliberately not mentioning the names of the firms that contribute to the A.S.F.S.F.? I thought I caught that.”
“You were correct. Contributions are private, by request of the donors. You saw those newspaper clippings.”
His tone was vinegar. Friml was a man who didn’t think the game was worth the kidding you took for playing it. Then why the devil was he the outfit’s secretary-treasurer?
They were driving down a secondary black-top road when the Prototype came into view. It had the only vertical lines in the landscape for as far as the eye could see, and looked sky-piercing. A quadrangle of well-built prefabs surrounded it, and the area was wire-fenced. Signs at intervals forbade trespassing.
There was a youngster reading at a sort of sentry box in the fencing. He glanced at Friml and waved him through. Friml crawled his car to a parking area, where late models were outnumbered by jalopies, and brought it alongside of a monstrous, antique, maroon Rolls Royce. “Mr. Clifton’s,” he said, vinegar again. “He should be in here.” He led Novak to the largest of the prefabs, a twelve-foot Quonset some thirty feet long and mounted on a concrete base.
It was a machine shop. S
erious-eyed kids were squinting as they filed at bits of bronze. A girl was running a surface grinder that gushed a plume of small, dull red, hot-looking sparks. High-carbon steel, Novak thought automatically. Piece that size costs plenty.
Clifton, Friml’s pointed finger said.
The man was in dungaree pants and a dirty undershirt—no, the top of an old-fashioned union suit with buttons. He was bending over a slow-turning engine lathe, boring out a cast-iron fitting. The boring bar chattered suddenly and he snarled at it: “A-a-ah, ya dirty dog ya!” and slapped off the power switch.
“Mr. Clifton,” Friml hailed him, “this is Dr. Michael Novak, the ceramics man I told you about yesterday.”
“Harya, Jay. Harya, Mike,” he said, giving Novak an oily grip. He needed a shave and he needed some dentistry. He didn’t look like any engineer in charge that Novak had ever seen before. He was a completely unimpressive Skid Row type, with a hoarse voice to match.
Clifton was staring at him appraisingly. “So ya wanna join the space hounds, hah? Where’s ya Buck Rogers pistol?”
There was a pause.
“Conversation-stopper,” said Friml with a meagre smile. “He’s got a million of them, Mr. Clifton, would you show Dr. Novak around if it doesn’t interrupt anything important?”
Clifton said: “Nah. Bar dug into the finish bore on the flange. I gotta scrap it now; I was crazy to try cast iron. That’ll learn me to try to save you guys money; next time I cut the fitting outta nice, expensive, mild steel bar stock. Come on, Mike. Mars or bust, hah?”
He led Novak out of the machine shop and wiped his oily hands on the union suit’s top. “You any good?” he asked. “I told the kids I don’t want no lid on my hands.”
“What’s a lid?” Novak demanded.
“Morse-man talk. Fighting word.”
“You were a telegrapher?” asked Novak. It seemed to be the only thing to say.
“I been everything! Farmer, seaman, gigolo in B.A., glass blower, tool maker, aero-engineer—bet ya don’t believe a goddam word I’m saying.”
Disgustedly Novak said: “You win.” The whole thing was out of the question—crackpot enthusiasts backing this loudmouthed phony.
“Ask me anything, Mike! Go ahead, ask me anything!” Clifton grinned at him like a terrier.
Novak shrugged and said: “Integral of u to the n, log u, d-u.”
Clifton fired back: “U to the n-plus-one, bracket, log u over n-plus-one, minus one over n-plus-one-square, un-bracket—plus C. Ask me a hard one, Mike!”
It was the right answer. Novak happened to remember it as an examination problem that had stuck in his head. Normally you’d look it up in a table of integrals. “Where’d you go to school?” he asked, baffled.
“School? School? What the hell would I go to school for?” Clifton grinned. “I’m a self-made man, Mike. Look at that rocket, space hound. Look at her.”
They had wandered to the Prototype’s base. Close up, the rocket was a structure of beautifully welded steel plates, with a sewerpipe opening at the rear and no visible means of propulsion.
“The kids love her,” Clifton said softly. “I love her. She’s my best girl, the round-heeled old bat.”
“What would you use for fuel?” Novak demanded.
He laughed. “How the hell should I know, pal? All I know is we need escape velocity, so I build her to take the mechanical shock of escape velocity. You worry about the fuel. The kids tell me it’s gotta be atomic so you gotta give ’em a throat-liner material that can really take it from here to Mars and back. Oh, you got a job on your hands when you join the space hounds, Mike!”
“This is the craziest thing I ever heard of,” said Novak.
Clifton was suddenly serious. “Maybe it ain’t so crazy. We work out everything except fuel and then we go to the A.E.C. and say give. Do they hold out on us or do they start work on an atomic fuel? The kids got it all figured out. We do our part, A.E.C. does theirs. Why not?”
Novak laughed shortly, remembering the spy mania he had lived in for two years. “They’ll do their part,” he said. “They’ll start by sending a hundred Security and Intelligence boys to kick you off the premises so they can run it themselves.”
Clifton slapped him on the back. “That’s the spirit!” he yelled. “You’ll win your Galactic Cross of Merit yet, pal! You’re hired!”
“Don’t rush me,” said Novak, half angrily. “Are they honestly going to deliver on a real lab for me if I sign up? Maybe they don’t realize I’ll need heavy stuff—rock crushers, ball mills, arc furnaces—maybe a solar furnace would be good out here on the desert. That kind of equipment costs real money.”
“They’ll deliver,” Clifton said solemnly. “Don’t low-rate the kids. I’m working from their blue-prints and they’re good. Sure, there’s bugs—the kids are human. I just had to chuck out their whole system for jettisoning Proto’s aerodynamic nose. Too gadgety. Now I’m testing a barometer to fire a powder charge that’ll blow away the nose when she’s out of the atmosphere—whole rig’s external, no holes in the hull, no gasket problem. And they design on the conservative side—inclined to underestimate strength of materials. But, by and large, a ver-ry, ver-ry realistic bunch.”
Novak was still finding it impossible to decide whether Clifton was a fake, an ignoramus, or a genius. “Where’ve you worked?” he asked.
“My last job was project engineer with Western Air. They fired me all right, no fear of that. I wear their letter next to my heart.” He hauled a bulging greasy wallet from the left hip pocket of the dungarees, rummaged through it, and came up with a wad of paper. Unfolded, it said restrainedly that the personnel manager of Western Aircraft regretted that the Company had no option but to terminate Mr. Clifton’s employment since Mr. Clifton had categorically declined to apologize to Dr. Holden.
An eighteen-year-old boy with a crew cut came up and demanded: “Cliff, on the nylon ropes the blue print says they have to test to one-fifty pounds apiece. Does that just mean parting strength of the ropes or the whole rig—ropes whipped to the D-rings and the D-rings anchored in the frame?”
“Be with ya in a minute, Sammy. Go and wait for me.” The boy left and Clifton asked: “Think it’s a forgery, Mike?”
“Of course not—” began Novak, and then he saw the engineer grinning. He handed back the letter and asked: “Have you been a forger too? Mr. Clifton—”
“Cliff!”
“—Cliff, how did you get hooked up with this? I’m damned if I know what to make of the setup.”
“Neither do I. But I don’t care. I got hooked up with them when Western canned me. I can’t get another aircraft job because of the industrial black list, and I can’t get a Government job because I’m a subversive agent or a spy or some goddamned thing like that.” Suddenly he sounded bitter.
“How’s that?”
“They don’t tell you—you know that; your ad said you was with the A.E.C.—but I guess it’s because I been around the world a couple of times. Maybe, they figure, just maybe, old Cliff sold out when we wasn’t watching him. Also my wife’s a foreigner, so better be safe than sorry, says Uncle Sam.”
“I know that game,” Novak said. “Doesn’t matter. You wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with A.E.C. even if they did hire you.”
“Well, well! So I didn’t miss a thing! Look, Mike. I gotta go show my kids how to wipe their noses, so I’ll let ya rassle with your conscience and I hope to see you around.” He gave Novak the oily grip again and walked cockily from the base of the rocket to the Quonsets.
Friml was at Novak’s side instantly, looking impatient.
Driving back to Los Angeles, Novak asked bluntly: “Are you people building a moon ship or aren’t you?”
“If the A.S.F.S.F. is building a moon ship,” said Friml, “I don’t want to hear about it. I should tell you that, whatever is being built, t
hey’ve got a well-kept set of books and a strictly controlled audit on the purchasing.” He gave Novak a little sidelong look. “One man they tried before Clifton made a very common mistake. He thought that because he knew technical matters and I didn’t, he could pad his purchases by arrangement with the vendors’ salesmen and I’d be none the wiser. It took exactly eight days for me to see through his plan.”
“I get the hint,” said Novak wearily. “But I still don’t know whether I want the job. Was Clifton really a project engineer with Western Air?”
“I really don’t know. I have absolutely no responsibility for procurement of personnel. I can tell you that he has no local or F.B.I. criminal record. I consider it a part of my job to check that far on employees whose duties include recommending expenditures.”
Friml left him at the Los Angeles Airport at his request. Novak said he’d get in touch with him in the morning and let him know one way or the other; then he picked up his bag and took a taxi to a downtown hotel. It was 4.30 when he checked in, and he placed a call at once to the personnel department of Western Aircraft.
“I’d like to enquire,” he said, “About the employment record of a Mr. Clifton. He says in his, uh, application to us that he was employed as a project engineer at Western Air last year.”
“Yes, sir. Mr. Clifton’s first name, sir?”
“Ah, I can’t make it out from his signature.” If he had been told Clifton’s first name, he couldn’t remember it.
“One moment, sir… we have a Mr. August Clifton, project engineer, employed two years and five months, separated January seventeenth last year—”
“What’s the reason for separation?”
“It says ‘incompatibility with supervisory personnel.’”
“That’s the one. Thanks very much, miss.”
“But don’t you want efficiency, health, and the rest of it, sir?”
The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth Page 5
