The girl stared at him, her eyes glittering with disbelief.
“And yet, according to that letter, the process is nothing Budgie couldn’t have told you. Jeremy, I don’t believe you. Who was Budgie?”
“So help me, the only Budgie I ever knew was that bird. He swore like a soybean farmer in a urea factory, he did. We called him Budgie because he was a budgerigar, or, to you, a Zebra Parakeet. A budgerigar is the talkingest bird that ever lived.”
“What?” she said in disgust. “A creature with memory and no brains could tell you what the process is?” Jeremy started, and she asked, “What’s the matter? Have a rush of brains to the head?”
While he fumbled for an answer, she leaned back with narrowed eyes. “I came awfully close to it that time, didn’t I? Come clean, Jeremy. You’ve known about the process ever since you were a kid, now, haven’t you?”
“You’ve got it,” he mumbled. She’s got it? Who’s got what? He clapped his hand to his head. “Memory without brains. That’s me.”
They stared at each other. “If only I knew a little more about plastics,” she breathed. “Or even about your brother. I’ll bet if I knew as much about the way Hal’s mind works as you do, I could sit right down and write that process out.”
Jeremy stared at her and knew she told the truth. His was a quick mind as well as an encyclopedic one, but she was his master at quick intuitive reasoning. A wild plan flitted through his mind—to leap up and rush out, to draw an attack from one of the Genex men who waited patiently for Phyllis to do her work; to prefer charges against the corporation, perhaps. But he rejected it instantly.
They were too clever for that. They would let him go. One of their plastics engineers would work with Phyllis until some hunch she had gotten made sense to him. Then what? Well, either he would figure it out in time or he wouldn’t. If not, he was sunk. If so, Genex would so radically underbid his pipe to drive him out that he would be sunk anyway.
“Hal!” The name slipped from his lips, so profound was his sudden wish for his brother. Hal could set him straight with a word, if only he could send the word.
“Me too,” whispered Phyllis. “If only I could see Hal once, only for a minute, I’ll bet I could—” Suddenly she dived into her handbag, clawing out a potpourri of feminine conglomerata. “Where is it? Where is—oh—here.” She held a rectangular piece of plastic in her hand. It was blue, smooth, heavy.
“What’s that?”
“Just a compact. A lighter. A torch. One of those things. But Hal gave it to me. And I’m just mystic enough to think it’ll help me think. He had his hands on it. Didn’t you know that all women—even modern women—are witches?” She closed her eyes, clutching the compact, frowning in concentration.
Staring at her, Jeremy frowned too, and thought harder than ever in his life before. Something about memory without brains. Something—and then a line in the letter swam before his mind’s eye.
I’d like you to meet her when the rocket-ship docks. She really has what it takes.
“Give me that,” he spat, and snatched it roughly out of her grasp. Instinctively, she reached for it. He batted her hand out of the way, hard. She sat on the edge of her chair, her nostrils dilated, rubbing her hand and watching him like a cat.
He turned it over and over, shook it, smelled it, felt it. He opened it, shook out the tinted powders, cracked the mirror retainer with his thumb and slid the glass out. There was nothing unusual about the compact. A little expensive, perhaps, but not unique at all. There was no trademark.
“Where did Hal get this?”
“He didn’t say. Bought it, perhaps. Maybe he made it. He has a little outfit. Give it back to me!”
“I will not.” Jeremy fell to studying it again.
“Jereee,” she said sweetly.
He looked up. She was her old self. She was erect and beautiful and the color was back in her cheeks. Somewhere in a side corner of his mind, he deeply regretted the fact that he admired her so much. She put out her hand. “Give.”
“Nope.”
She glanced around. “It’s evidence. I’ve been robbed. The property was forcibly taken from me by that man, officer,” she said, mimicking a sweet, wronged young thing. “There we were sitting peacefully over a drink and a snack, when he went berserk and took it away from me and began tearing it apart.” Her face went cold and direct again. “Would you tell the nice policeman exactly why you wanted to keep it, Jeremy?”
“Not while Genex and the police get along so nicely,” he said grudgingly. “Okay. I’m open to compromise. You don’t know the significance of this piece of plastic. You just might be wrong. If Genex’s plastics division can’t find out anything about it, you’re away out of luck.”
“Oh,” she said. She glanced around at the Genex watchdogs and shivered. “What’s your proposition?”
“I have to find out something more. Just what, I’m not sure. Now think carefully. Exactly what do you remember Hal’s saying about this compact?”
“Why, he never said anything, much. Just some philosophical quip about women, about me and plastics. I don’t remember it exactly.”
“Try.”
“It was—it was something like this.” She paused, and he knew she was running over and over it in her mind, poking and prodding at it for hidden meanings. Finally she shrugged, and quoted, “ ‘I like giving you plastics, Phyl. Plastics are an analogical approach to women, and some of ’em come pretty close. Some day maybe we’ll all be familiar with a plastic that will react differently under the same stimulus, the way you do. Laughter this time, tears the next, whichever seems to be expected.’ I didn’t think it was very flattering.”
Jeremy stared at her, comprehension sparking, flaming, coruscating in his brain. He said hoarsely:
“Give me the compact. I’ve got to get it to a lab.”
“No,” she said firmly. She took it out of his unwilling hands. “Frankly, I don’t know what you’ve figured out. But I will, if I kick it around long enough. If I can’t, I know those who can. Well,” she purred, arching her body, “I’d better run along, Jerry darling. Thank you so much for everything.”
The hand that closed on her wrist seemed to be made of beryl steel. “Don’t you move,” Jeremy said. He said it in a way which kept her from moving. “You can’t take that chance. You don’t know enough. If you take that away, I’ll never know either, and I’d see both of us dead first. I’ll make a bargain. Once more. I must make a test on that compact. I can do it right here. Let me do it. You can watch. Whatever happens, your description will be enough for a plastics engineer. It will give us both a break. And if there really is a secret there, you’ll have a chance of getting what you want. You’ll know. You don’t know now—you only guess.”
It was a long time before she nodded her head.
When she did, he took the compact and, with his knife, scraped off a shaving and dropped it into the ash tray. He took a platehandler from the warm rack and touched the shaving. Then he put his cigarette to it. Then he held it with the platehandler and held it in the flame of his cigarette lighter. Part of it burned. He sniffed the smoke, nodded, and set the temperature regulator on the induction heater.
He dropped the compact in and closed the drawer.
“No!” she shouted. “You’re burning it! You’ve got the process, and you’re destroying it so I won’t have a chance!” She lunged for the drawer. He caught her wrists, transferred them both to one of his powerful hands, and shook his head.
“Sit tight,” he snapped.
The centerpiece chimed, and the drawer popped open. Their heads cracked together painfully as they bent to look inside. Neither noticed the pain.
In the bottom of the pan lay a twisted piece of blue plastic. It spread almost all the way across the roomy drawer. It was flat, and followed a series of regular convolutions. It dawned on both of them at the same moment what it was.
Script.
As if the plastic itself were the track o
f a writing-brush, it spelled the two words:
I REMEMBER
“That’s for me,” breathed Phyllis. “And I’m a dope. The memory without brains—even I know about that phenomenon. Now that I see it done, I remember a demonstration in school, where a cube was compression-molded into a spool-shape. When it was heated again, it slumped together and formed the original cube. A little sloppy, but a cube nevertheless. With a little refinement, I don’t see why extruded pipe shouldn’t be compression-molded into rods, bricks, or bookends and still come out pipe when it’s heated. Beats sheet-stock welding a mile. Jeremy, my boy, you may have my melted-up old compact with my blessings. You may frame it and hang it over your lab bench when you come to work for Genex, as you must or starve. ‘I remember.’ I like that.”
“You don’t remember how badly you needed help, Phyllis,” he said hoarsely. “My help.”
“Plastics and women, my boy. Remember?” She rose like a queen, gathered up her belongings and drifted doorward, beckoning imperiously to the watchdogs. Ignoring Jeremy Jedd completely, they followed her out.
Abruptly Jeremy came to his senses with an inarticulate, animal noise and raced to the door. The lithe man with white hair at his temples stepped in front of him.
“Want something, chum?” he asked softly.
Jeremy raised a hand to sweep the man aside but his eye fell on what the man was holding in his hand. It was a rectangular leatherette needle case. Jeremy had seen them before. A touch of the case, a little pressure on a stud, and you were needled. And the variety of hypos used was peculiarly horrible.
They stood there, frozen, for a long instant. Then someone passed.
A spaceport guard.
“Guard!” Jeremy rapped, leaping backward. “This man’s threatening me. Needle!”
The guard bobbled a remarkable Adam’s apple at them and then strode toward the white-templed man.
“Give it here, bud.”
The man smiled, raised the case, snapped it open and extracted a cigarette. “A joke, guard. Perfectly harmless.”
“Ha-ha!” said the guard with his mouth only. He clicked his lips shut and looked at Jeremy with one eyebrow raised. “You sure are jumpy, Blondy,” he remarked, and strode off.
Jeremy controlled himself with a prodigious effort,. and swung on the older man. “Listen, you—”
The man blew smoke at Jeremy. “Better cool down, son,” he said kindly. “We joke often, but not always. Hold it!” he snapped, watching Jeremy’s darkening face. “You can butter me up and down these walls, but I’m only one of a couple of thousand that you’d have to whip afterward. Better go on back now and have another drink.” And before Jeremy could move so much as a lip, the man was striding up the corridor in that way which did not seem to be swift.
Balked, frustrated, furious, Jeremy stood for a while and then turned back into the restaurant. He slouched back to his table, kicked the chair out and dropped into it. He could use that plastic memory stunt to stow pipe. Sure. And when he thought of the low bid that Genex would put up against him, his stomach turned over.
He glowered into the heater drawer where the blue plastic script told him placidly what he would never forget:
I REMEMBER
And then he thought of Hal’s words to Phyllis.
The demonstrations supporting registered bids were made in a public hearing, in the vast offices of the Shipping Space Priority Board. The Space Commissioner, an oldster with a snowy lion’s mane and the eyes of an eight-year-old child, had his wattles in his palm and his elbows on his desk. He was flanked by the featureless protocolloids of his well-peopled bureau.
In the wide area before him were three groups of people each hovering over a tangle of apparatus. Behind them were the rows of seats, for the interested public, one third of the seats occupied. The second demonstration was in progress. The first demonstrator and his helpers were dismantling their bulky machine—part brake, part automatic welder, it had produced several hundred feet of inch-and-a-half pipe out of a long and compact bale of sheet stock.
The galleries had regarded the performance as quite impressive, whether or not they knew that Winfield and Shock, who presented the process, was a General Export affiliate, brought in to establish a figment of competition.
General Export’s management had shrewdly chosen a presentable demonstration by a more than presentable demonstrator. She was slender, poised, clear-eyed, clear-voiced, and her hair was green. She was saying:
“—and in spite of the question of simultaneous patent application, General Export will offer this pipe at a lower price per unit shipped than any competitor could conceivably meet, due to a secret treatment of the original plastic.”
“Due to the secret mistreatment of competition,” growled a man in the gallery, who had once owned a space-line.
The demonstrator walked gracefully to a stack of long, slender plastic rods beside her machine and lifted one. “Mr. Commissioner, this rod is twelve feet long and one sixteenth of an inch square. As you will observe, the rod is extremely flexible. Stowage of these rods will therefore be compact and economical, since rectangular holds are not necessary. Bundles of these rods will follow the curves, if any, of the retaining bulkheads, and therefore use every cubic inch of space economically. I shall now demonstrate the creation of usable seamless pipe from these rods.”
She stepped over to her machine, slid the rod in at one end, and threw a lever. “This is a very simple heater. On Earth or Mars, particularly on Mars, it may be adequately operated by sun-mirrors, thereby tapping no local power-source.”
There was a faint hiss. A small motor whined, and a twelve-foot length of pipe shot out with a dry clatter. She repeated the performance twice more and then bowed respectfully to the Commissioner, who said:
“Thank you very much, Miss Exeter. Next!”
A clerk sang, “Mr. Jeremy Jedd, of Jedd & Jedd! Process, pipe stowage, interplanetary!”
Jeremy stood up, ran off the customary courtesies of the applicant, and then said:
“I am deeply grateful to Miss Exeter for many things. One of these is her concise and well-presented description of the advantages of General Export’s plastic-memory process. She has saved me much explanation, for my process is precisely the same. The difference lies in the plastic treatment before and after the processing you see here. I will say at the start that as regards price of the rods I am demonstrating, they cost at least five times as much as those shown by Miss Exeter. I am, apparently, drastically underbid.”
Jeremy had to pause then to duck under the wave of comment that swept over the huge room. The Commissioner cleared his throat and raised a forefinger without moving his hand from his chin. A clerk raised a gavel without moving anything but his arm, and brought it down with a crash.
“Get on with it,” growled the Commissioner. His tone said, If you can’t compete with the other bids, you idiot, why waste my time, or even that of these thousand other people?
Jeremy stepped to his machine, which was almost a duplicate of the one Phyllis Exeter had used, and lifted an end of one of his rods. He did not attempt to lift it all at once; apparently it was quite heavy.
What followed was the same as the previous showing, with one noticeable exception; the pipe came out in a twenty-foot length. Again the room buzzed. This time Jeremy held up his hand. “The greater length of the pipe is an advantage over these other methods, but not the greatest,” he said calmly. He threw the heater-control over again—
Without loading in another rod!
A twenty-foot length of pipe joined its predecessor.
Again he pulled the control, and again. Each time a twenty-foot pipe was produced, until six of them lay side by side on the floor. The air above them shimmered very slightly. They were uniform and perfect.
“Mr. Commissioner, I ask that space for shipment of pipe to Mars be allotted to my company because the stowage is as compact as any product on the market, because I can ship approximately nine poi
nt three times as much pipe per cube unit as my nearest competitor, and because I can deliver pipe per unit length at eleven per cent cheaper than anyone else on earth! And that in spite of the apparently prohibitively low bid of Miss Exeter’s most altruistic firm. Thank you, gentlemen.”
“Just a minute, young man!” said the Commissioner. “You have a most remarkable process. I—ah—hear comments to the effect that the pipe was concealed in the machine. Can you give some layman’s explanation of this extraordinary effect?”
Jeremy smiled as he glanced at the machine in front of him.
“Certainly, sir. My company, you may remember, secured a portion of the space allotted to pipe shipments during your last session, by devising the present method of nesting the smaller diameters of pipe inside the larger ones—a method which was not patentable, which my competitors were slow to discover, but quick to copy.
“In the present case, I very much fear that they have repeated their lack of—if I may say it—logical thoroughness. You see, my pipe is still nested, one inside the other, six taking the space of one, and the whole compressed into the rods you see here.”
“You nest pipe of the same diameter?” said the Commissioner incredulously; and that odd, mad, detached part of Jeremy’s mind noticed hilariously that the oldster’s bright eyes blinked with repressed anger.
“Yes sir, I do, in effect. But it is a question of density. The inner pipe is a condensed plastic—a patented process, by the way. This plastic, while undergoing the “memorizing” phenomenon so beautifully explained by Miss Exeter, restores its original density as well as its original form. The inner pipe, then, is simply condensed more than the one which surrounds it, and so on until the six are nested. Then the whole is compressed, molded into rods of precisely the dimensions of those admirably compact ones produced by General Export.
“Now, when heat treated, the outer pipe returns to its original form and is automatically ejected from the machine. It has, of course, pre-heated the next pipe, which pre-heats the one after. It takes, actually, far less heat per unit length to restore my pipe than it does to restore the pipe of—ah—any of my competitors. A small advantage, however, and merely hair-splitting under the circumstances.”
Thunder and Roses Page 31
