Novak’s pulse pounded at the thought, while the matter-of-fact welder up there drew his hell-hot point of flame like an artist’s brush along the gleaming metal. The engineer couldn’t be matter-of-fact about it any more. He had plunged into the top-boss job at the Barstow field determined to give a realistic imitation of a space hound, and had become one.
There was no reason not to. In theory, he told himself, he was waiting for a break but one never came. There were no further irregularities beyond the four on which he had committed himself: money, secrecy, the “J. MacI.” drawings, and the death of Clifton.
MacIlheny never offered any surprises. He was an insurance man and a space-flight crank. He had cloudy industrial contributors in his pocket and he used them as a club to run the Society his way. His way was to get Proto built as a symbol and rallying point for those who demanded a frontal smash by the Government into the space-flight problem instead of the rudimentary, unco-ordinated, and unimaginative efforts that were all the United States could show, for whatever reason.
Friml continued to be—Friml. Bloodless, righteous, dollar-honest, hired-hand, party-of-the-second-partish Friml. A reader of the fine print, a dweller in the Y.M.C.A., a martyr to constipation, a wearer of small-figured neckties which he tied in small, hard knots.
The engineer members of the A.S.F.S.F. continued to be hobbyists, hard to tell one from the other, showing up on week-ends, often with the wife and kid, for an hour or so of good shop-talk and connoisseurs’ appreciation of Proto as the big, handsome jigsaw puzzle that she was—to them.
The A.S.F.S.F. youngsters continued to be hagridden kids escaping from humdrum jobs, unhappy families, or simply the private hell of adolescence by actually helping to pay for and work on and dream over Proto. Some day it would carry them on wings of flame to adventurous stars where they’d be all broad-shouldered males six feet tall or slim but luscious girls with naturally curly hair. They worked like dogs for the new engineer in charge and didn’t even ask for a dog’s pat on the head; all they wanted was to be near enough to Proto to dream. They fought ferociously with words on occasion over this detail or that, and Novak eventually realized that their quarrels symbolized a fiercer squabble they hoped was coming over the passenger list of man’s first moon ship.
Novak stood comfortably midway between the engineers and the kids—he hoped. Proto was big medicine. The dream of flight which has filled the night lives of countless neurotics since, probably, the Eolithic era, had been no dream since the balloons of Montgolfier. This new wish fulfillment of space flight had been for fifty years standard equipment on your brilliant but dreamy youngster. It soaked into you from earliest childhood that some day—not quite in your time, but some day—man would reach the planets and then the stars. Being around Proto, putting your hands on her, tinkering with her equipment, smelling her hot metal in the desert sun, hearing her plates sing as they contracted in the desert-night chill, did something to you, and to the “some day” reservation about space flight. Novak had become a true believer, and with each passing week wondered more feverishly what in hell’s name he was doing: building a moon ship for China? Running up dummy? Or just honest engineering? Each week he told himself more feverishly: one week more; just get the manhole licked, or the silicone gaskets, or the boron carbides.
The blue, hard twinkle of the welding torch twenty feet up snapped off; the welder shoved back his hood and waved genially. The platform of the gantry crane descended.
“That does it,” Novak said hazily to Amy. He lit a cigarette. “You want to push the button?”
“If it doesn’t work, don’t blame me,” she said. There was a six-volt line run from the machine shop into Proto’s sewerpipe stern and up through the king post to feed the electric systems. She snapped the control for the manhole motor to open, and they stared up again. The dark disk against the shiny steel plate developed a mirror-bright streak of microfinish bearing surface along one edge. Noiselessly and very slowly the wire-fine streak grew to a new moon; the manhole slowly stood out in profile and halted, a grotesque ear protruding from the ship.
“Okay, Amy. Close it.” She snapped the switch to Shut, and very slowly the disk swung back and made Proto an unbroken whole again. The welder stepped from the gantry platform and asked: “She all right, Mr. Novak?”
“Fine, Sam. Fine. Was there any trouble fitting the lug into the receptacle?”
“Nope. Only one way to do it, so I did it. It surely is a fine piece of machinery. I used to work at the Bullard Works in Hartford and they didn’t make their custom-built machine tools any prettier than your—thing. Confidentially, Mr. Novak, is—”
He held up his hand protestingly. “It’s a full-scale mock-up for structural study and publicity purposes. Does that answer the question, Sam?”
The welder grinned. “You people are really going to try it, aren’t you? Just don’t count on me for a passenger is all I ask. It’s pretty, but it won’t work.”
As they walked to Novak’s refractory lab, Amy said: “I worry about everything Cliff installed, like the manhole motor, until it’s tested. I know that verdict, ‘while of unsound mind’ and so on is just legal mumbo jumbo, but… why should the manhole have opened that slowly? It was like a movie, milking it for suspense.”
He glanced at her. “Perfectly good reasons. It runs on a worm gear—low speed, power to spare. The motor has to open it against the molecular cohesion of the biggest gauge-block seal ever machined. In space or on the Moon the motor would get an assist from atmospheric pressure in the storeroom, pushing against zero pressure outside.”
She laughed. “Of course. I suppose I was being jittery. And there’s sometimes melodramatic suspense in real life, too, I suppose.”
He cleared his throat. “I’ve got Lilly in there aging a new boron-carbide series. Want to watch? You can learn enough in a few hours to take some routine off my neck. The volunteer kids are fine and dandy, but they mostly have jobs and school hours. What I need is a few more people like you and Lilly that don’t have to watch the clock.”
“It must be very handy,” she agreed abstractedly. “But you’ll have to excuse me. I’m due back in town.”
Novak stared after her, wondering what was biting the girl. And he went on into his lab.
It was the dream layout he had sketched not too long ago, turned real by the funds of the A.S.F.S.F. Lilly was in the cooling department clocking temperature drops on six crucibles that contained boron carbides in various proportions. She was looking flushed and happy as she sidled down the bench on which the crucibles were ranged, jotting down the time from the lab clock and temperatures from the thermocouple pyrometers plugged into each sample. Her blonde hair was loose on her creamy neck and shoulders; she wore shorts and a blouse that were appropriate to the heat of the refractories lab but intensely distracting. She turned and smiled, and Novak was distracted to the point of wondering whether she was wearing a brassière. He rather doubted it.
“What are the temperatures now?” he asked.
She read off efficiently: “Seventy-two, seventy-four, seventy-eight, seventy eight point five, seventy eight point five, seventy-nine.”
The leveling was unexpected good news. “Interesting. Are you afraid to handle hot stuff?”
“Naw!” she said with a grin. “Yust not vit’ my bare hands.”
“Okay; we’ll let you use tongs. I want you to take the lid off each crucible as I indicate. I’ll slap the ingot in the hydraulic press, crush it, and give you the dial reading. Then I’ll put it in the furnace. After all the ingots are crushed and in the furnace I’ll turn on the heat and watch through the peephole. When they melt I’ll call out the number to you, and you note the temperature from the furnace thermocouple. Got it?”
“I t’ink so, Mike.”
It went smoothly. The ingots were transferred safely, they crushed under satisfactorily high pressure, and the fur
nace flashed red and then white in less than five minutes. Staring through the blue glass peephole at the six piles of glowing dust, waiting for them to shimmer, coalesce, and run into liquid, was hypnotically soothing—except that he could sense Lilly at his side, with her eyes on the thermocouple pyrometer and her full hips near him, giving him thoughts that he found alarming.
He stared at the cones of glowing dust and thought bitterly: I don’t want to get any more mixed up in this than I am now. One of the glowing piles shimmered and looked mirrorlike. Abruptly it shrank from a heap of dust into a cluster of little globes like an ornamental pile of Civil War cannon balls and an instant later slumped into a puddle.
“Number five!” he snapped.
“Got it, Mike,” she said, and her thigh touched him.
This thing’s been coming on for a couple of weeks. I’ll be damned if I don’t think she’s giving me the business. She ought to be ashamed. But what a shape on her. Amy wouldn’t pull a stunt like this. He felt a little regretful and hastily clamped down on that train of thought. “Number three!”
“Got it.”
Minutes later he was at his desk with the figures, and she was an interested spectator. He explained laboriously: “The trick is to reduce your unknowns to a manageable number. We have mixing point of the original solution, rate of cooling, final temperature, and melting point. You call them T1, dT/dt—that’s derivative of temperature with respect to time—T2 and T3. Do you follow it so far?”
She leaned over his shoulder and began: “I don’ see—”
“The hell with it,” he said, and kissed her. She responded electrically, and in her candid way indicated that she meant business. The faint voice of Novak’s conscience became inaudible at that point, and the business might have been transacted then and there if the lab door hadn’t opened.
Hastily she pulled away from him. “You go see what is, Mike,” she ordered breathlessly.
“Fine thing,” he growled, and slapped her almost viciously on the rump.
“I know how you feel, boy,” she grinned.
“Oh—no—you—don’t.” He cleared his throat and stalked out from the small private office into the lab. One of the machine-shop kids was waiting. The boy wanted to know whether he should use hot-roll or cold-roll steel for the threaded studs of the acceleration couches; the drawings just said “mild steel.” Novak said restrainedly that he didn’t think it made any difference, and stood waiting for him to leave.
When he got back to the private office Lilly was putting her face on. She said hastily: “No, Mike. Keep the hands off me for a minute while I tell you. This is no place. You wanna come to my house tonight, we do this t’ing right.”
“I’ll be there,” he said a little thoughtfully. Conscience was making a very slight comeback. He hadn’t been to the Clifton house since the day of the murder. But the lady was willing, the husband was six feet under, and it concerned nobody else.
“Good boy. You go back to work now.”
He watched her drive from the field in the big maroon Rolls and tried to buckle down. He got nothing done for the rest of the afternoon. He tried first to set up matrix equations to relate the characteristics of the six boron carbides and committed howler after howler. He decided he’d better lay off the math until he was feeling more placid. In the machine shop he took over from an uncertain volunteer who was having trouble threading the acceleration-couch studs. Novak, with a single twitch of the lathe’s cross-feed wheel, made scrap out of the job.
It wasn’t his day. Among the condolences of the machine-shop gang he declared work over and bummed a ride back to Los Angeles in one of the kids’ jalopies.
He bolted a meal in the hotel dining room and went upstairs to shower and shave. Not until he was dressed and down in the lobby did he realize that he didn’t remember the Clifton address—if he had ever heard it. Cahunga, Cahuenga Canyon, something like that, and he could probably find the house from a taxi window. He went to the phone book to look up Clifton, and found nothing under August. There were three A. Cliftons with middle initials, but none of them lived on anything that sounded like Cahunga, Cahuenga, or whatever it was. He tried Information and got the standard Los Angeles answer—unlisted number. A girl waiting outside the half-opened door of the phone booth turned red and walked away after overhearing part of his comments on that.
Now what the devil did you do? He recalled suddenly that Friml was good on addresses, just the way you’d expect his card-file type to be. He looked up the Downtown Y.M.C.A. and was connected with Friml’s room.
“This is Novak, Friml. I hate to bother you after hours, but I wonder if you can give me Clifton’s address. I, um, need it for some reports and he isn’t in the phone book.”
The secretary-treasurer’s precise voice said: “Just one moment, Mr. Novak. I have it in a memorandum book. Please hold the line.”
Novak held on for some time and then Friml gave him the address and—unsolicited—the phone number. He jotted them down and said: “Thanks. Sorry to be such a nuisance.”
Friml said with a martyred air: “Not at all. I’m not good at remembering numbers myself.” There was a plain implication of: “So why the hell don’t you keep a memorandum book like good little me?”
Mildly surprised at the admission, Novak thanked him again and hung up. Now for a taxi. Walking up the street to a stand where he could climb in without having to tip a doorman, he wondered how he’d got the notion that Friml kept his address book in his head. Probably just the type of guy he was made you think so. Probably he did nothing to discourage you from thinking so. Probably there was a lot of bluff behind any of these ice-water types…
And then he stopped still in the street, realizing what had made him think Friml was a walking address book. He’d asked once for the Wilson Stuart address, and the secretary-treasurer had rolled it out absently as if it were no great feat to recall offhand where a rank-and-filer of the Society lived. He started walking again, slower and slower.
There was something very wrong. Friml had memorized the Wilson Stuart address, presumably of negligible importance to him. All he could possibly have to do with the Wilson Stuart address was to send a bill for annual dues, meeting notices, the club bulletin—no not even that. All those items were addressographed. Friml had not memorized the August Clifton address or phone number, although presumably he’d be constantly dropping notes and making calls to him for engineering data. If he didn’t know the Clifton number and address offhand he was decidedly no good at numbers, as he admitted.
Novak walked slowly past the cab rank and crossed the street. Stepping up to the curb, his right heel caught in the unfamiliar sag of his trouser cuff, and he thought: damn that belt.
It was, clearly, the first break in the Clifton killing. Friml wasn’t what he seemed to be. Clearly there was a link of some sort between the secretary-treasurer and Amelia Earhart Stuart—or her father. Now how did you exploit a thing like this? Raid Friml’s Y.M.C.A. room looking for the Papers? Tell that fathead Anheier about it and have him laugh in your face? Confront Wilson Stuart with it and have him conk out with a heart attack—or throw you in jail for trespassing? Try to bluff the facts out of Amy?
Friml has even visited the Clifton bungalow—feller who broke the big mirror and my Svedish glass pitcher and your cat’ode-ray tube. That was Friml, Mike. He gets pretty bad. It had been a gag—maybe. Nothing strange about a Friml swilling his liquor like a pig and breaking things now and then. And talking…
He raised his arm for a passing taxi.
“Downtown Y.M.C.A.,” he told the driver.
XII.
He called up from the lobby. “Friml? Novak again. I’m downstairs. I’m at a loose end and I wonder whether you’d care to join me for a drink or two some place. Maybe we can have a general bull session about the Society. I’ve been working like a dog and I need some unstringing.”
> The voice said grudgingly: “Well… come on up, Dr. Novak. I had some work for this evening, but …”
Friml had a two-room suite, medium-sized and antiseptically clean. He seemed proud of his place. He showed Novak his desk: “Some people tell you it’s a sign of inefficiency to take your work home with you. I don’t believe that for a minute. You, for instance—I can tell that you don’t leave your job behind when you leave the field.”
“I don’t think any really conscientious person would,” Novak agreed with gravity, and Friml glowed dimly at the implied compliment.
“You’re right about—unstringing,” said the secretary-treasurer. “I’m not a drinker, of course. I’ll be with you in a minute.” He went into the bathroom and Novak heard the lock turn.
He stood undecided over the desk and then, feeling that it was a childish thing to do, tried its drawers. They opened. In the shallow centre drawer where pencils, rulers, paper clips, and blotters are kept, Friml kept pencils, rulers, paper clips, and blotters. In the top left drawer were letterheads, carbon paper, second sheets, and onionskin in a rack. In the second left-hand drawer were card-file boxes and a corduroy-bound ledger with red leather corners and spine. In the bottom drawer were books with brown wrapping-paper covers on them, the kind school children use on text books.
Friml appeared, looking almost cheerful. “There’s a quiet little place on Figueroa Street,” he said. “The pianist does request numbers. He’s pretty good.”
“Fine,” said the engineer, depressed.
The place on Figueroa Street wasn’t a fairy joint, as Novak had half expected it would be. They sat at a table and had a couple of drinks apiece while the pianist played blues. Novak knew vaguely that it was a big blues-revival year. The engineer made conversation about his membership report for the next meeting. “I don’t know just what the members expect, because Clifton spoke off the cuff and there aren’t any transcripts.”
The 34th Golden Age of Science Fiction: C.M. Kornbluth Page 14
