“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 he 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. Serious-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—crack-pot 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 M-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 sewer-pipe 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 bar
ometer 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, they’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?”
“Thanks, no.” He didn’t need them. Anybody who hung on for two years and five months at Western as a projects man and only got fired after a fight was efficient and healthy and the rest of it; otherwise he wouldn’t have lasted two hours and five minutes. It wasn’t like the A.E.C.; at Western, you produced.
No, he thought, stretching out in his clothes on the bed; it wasn’t like the A.E.C., and neither was the A.S.F.S.F. He felt a moment of panic at the thought, and knew why he felt it.
Spend enough time in Government and it unmanned you. Each pay check drawn on the Treasury took that much more of yourself away from yourself. Each one of the stiff, blue-green paper oblongs punched with I.B.M. code slots made you that much more willing to forget you might be running a pointless repeat of a research that had been done and done, and done, with nobody the wiser, in scattered and classified labs across the country.
Each swig from the public teat had more and more poppy juice in it. Gradually you forgot you had been another kind of person, holding ideas, fighting for them, working until dawn on coffee, falling for women, getting drunk sometimes. You turned grey after enough of the poppy juice—nice grey.
You said: “Well, now, I wouldn’t put it that way,” and “There’s something to be said on both sides, of course,” and “It doesn’t pay to go overboard; the big thing is to keep your objectivity.”
The nice grey people married early and had a child or two right away to demonstrate that they were normal family men. They had hobbies and talked about them to demonstrate that they weren’t one-sided cranks. They drank a little, to demonstrate that they weren’t puritans, but not much, to demonstrate that they weren’t drunks.
Novak wondered if they tasted bile, as he was tasting it now, thinking of what he had almost become.
IV.
In the morning he phoned the A.S.F.S.F. office that he wanted the job. Friml’s cold voice said: “That’s fine, Dr. Novak. Mr. MacIlheny will be here for the next half-hour, and I have a contract ready. If you can make it right over——”
The contract hog-tied Novak for one year with options to conduct refractory research and development under the direction of the Society. The salary was the one he had specified in his ad. Novak raised his eyebrows at one clause: it released the employer from liability claims arising out of radiation damage to the employee.
“You really think the Government’s going to let you play with hot stuff?” he asked.
He shouldn’t have said “play”. MacIlheny was hurt and annoyed. “We expect,” he said testily, “that the A.E.C. will co-operate with us as a serious research group when we enter the propulsion stage of the programme. They’ll be fools if they don’t, and we intend to let the country know about it.”
Novak shrugged and signed. So did the two Society officers, with the elevator man and the building porter as witnesses. MacIlheny shook Novak’s hand ceremoniously after the witnesses were shooed out. “The first thing we want,” he said, “is a list of what you’ll need and a lab layout. Provisional, of course. There should be some changes after you study the problem in detail?”
“I think not,” No
vak told him. “A lab’s a lab’. It’s what you do with it that counts. How high can I go?”
Friml looked alarmed. MacIlheny said: “I won’t tell you that the sky’s the limit. But get what you need, and if you see a chance to save us money without handicapping yourself, take it. Give us the maximum estimated cost and the people you think are the best suppliers for each item.”
“Reputable firms,” said Friml. “The kind of people who’d be prepared to send me a notarized invoice on each purchase.”
Navak found the public library and gave himself a big morning in the technical reading room, playing with catalogues and trade-magazine ads. After lunch he came back with quadrille paper and a three-cornered scale. The afternoon went like lightning; he spent it drawing up equipment and supplies lists and making dream layouts for a refractories lab. What he wound up with was an oblong floor plan with a straight-through flow; storage to grinding-and-grading to compounding to firing to cooling to testing. Drunk with power, he threw in a small private office for himself.
Construction costs he knew nothing about, but by combing the used-machinery classifieds he kept equipment and supplies down, to thirty-two thousand dollars. He had dinner and returned to the library to read about solar furnaces until they put him out at the ten-o’clock closing.
The next day Friml was up to his neck in page proofs of the A.S.F.S.F. organ Starward. Looking mad enough to spit, the secretary-treasurer said: “There’s a publications committee, but believe it or not all five of them say they’re too rushed right now and will I please do their work for them. Some of the rank and file resent my drawing a salary. I hope you’ll bear that in mind when you hear them ripping me up the back—as you surely will.”
Collected Short Fiction Page 196