The Aluminum Man

by G. C. Edmondson

  Remembering the bugs Rudolf guessed a poor excuse was better than none. They locked the house and got into the camper with Lillith. At the gravel pit Rudolf opened the doors to their windowless building, then closed them when Lillith had backed inside.

  Flaherty began piling blocks of wax from the aluminum press in a corner of the sheet iron building. They piled the mortal remains atop the wax and buried it in more wax. Then Flaherty began building an igloo of loose bricks. Finally, they led a vent pipe from the top of their makeshift oven to where the forge normally vented out the side of the building. They strung hose from the forge blower to the bottom of the oven.

  He stuffed an oily rag inside and lit it. Within moments the bricks were glowing dull yellow at every crack. Rudolf wondered if the short-haired man had ever possessed a name, a mother, or any of the normal accoutrements of humanity.

  The wind was blowing down the valley, wafting a plume of oily smoke toward the village. Rudolf stepped outside to study it. The night was clear and the breeze imperceptible. He caught a momentary odor that made him decide never to eat roast pork again. Instead of rising, the smoke was curling down along the ground, rolling across the muck pit toward the swamp.

  “Everything all right?” Flaherty asked when he came back inside.

  Just as Rudolf was nodding they heard sirens approaching. Flaherty looked at Lillith. They both looked at Rudolf. “I didn’t even know this village had a fire department,” Rudolf said. “What do we do now?”

  “We go for the high jump if we can’t stall them another half hour till he’s cooked off,” Flaherty said.

  “How do you stall an amateur fireman when he’s finally got a chance to use his axe?” Rudolf asked. He asked himself how he had ever gotten mixed up in disposing of a body.

  Lillith smiled. “You need the proper equipment,” she said. “First, both of you take your shirts off.”

  “Why?”

  “So they won’t all wonder why I took mine off.” Lillith began removing her baggy sweater. Beneath it she wore the scantiest of bras. When she removed the bra there was no noticeable sag. Rudolf wondered if the firemen would be as distracted as he was. He looked determinedly away and began chinking gaps in the brick igloo, willing the fire to burn hotter, faster.

  Lillith tossed a jacket over her shoulders and went out to the gate where sirens were subsiding with wistful little moans.

  “What’re we supposed to be doing here when they come in?” Rudolf asked.

  Flaherty looked back from where the lissome, dark-haired Lillith had just exited on her delaying mission. “Play it by ear,” he said. “Don’t say anything till she gives us a clue.”

  They worried about the furnace, stuffing mud into the leaks and trying to help the flame along. Rudolf glanced at his watch. It had been fifteen minutes since they lit the pyre. The fire seemed to be growing hotter. He had been afraid the wax would melt and run out across the floor and set the whole building afire but the Flaherty had apparently known what he was doing. The forge blower hummed. The fire roared. Flaherty pulled the blower hose from one side and poked it through a hole he had jimmied into the loose bricks on the opposite side. Rudolf plugged the first opening. “Got to keep the heat even,” Flaherty said.

  “Of course we’re polluting,” Lillith said in a loud voice. “But it’s for a good cause. We’re conducting experiments with high temperature incineration. How’s the smoke now?”

  Lillith was back inside, surrounded by volunteer firemen. She wore skintight hot pants and an ornament in her hair. The firemen were paying no attention to Rudolf and Flaherty.

  “Smoke?” one finally asked. “Oh yeah. By the time we got here there wasn’t any. What was that stink?”

  “A week’s accumulation of garbage,” Lillith said. “We’re working on ways for the homeowner to put it all back in his own front lawn, bones and all. You know what a big thing organic farming is these days.”

  “Yeah,” a fireman said admiringly. “They really are big.”

  Rudolf didn’t think they were big at all. But he had to admit they were a nicely matched set. He turned and saw the Flaherty was also appreciating the view. In a weird way he supposed it made sense for the three of them to be stripped to the waist in this heat. Some of the firemen were becoming so inured to the sight of Lillith’s skijump protuberances that they began sneaking glances at what Rudolf and Flaherty were doing.

  Lillith put on a thoroughly professional performance of suddenly realizing she was half naked. “Oh!” she shrieked, and crossed hands over her firm young frontage. The firemen’s attention was once again riveted while she hunted frantically for something to put on. Finally she found Rudolfs jacket again and managed to put it on in a convealing fashion that Rudolf found more eye-catching than the blatant nakedness of a moment ago. So, apparently, did the visiting firemen.

  The fire was roaring less now. Rudolf guessed the wax was burning up. He looked at his watch. Forty minutes since they had lit it off. Sonofabitch, he thought, She’s stalled them almost half an hour.

  But the firemen were interested in the brick oven now. Crowding around, they began asking uncomfortable questions like, “If it’s a home incinerator, where’s the opening to load it?”

  “This’s just an experimental model,” Flaherty explained. “That’s why we did it at night. Didn’t want to bother you gintlemen with a lot of smoke. Did you see it clear in town?”

  “No. We got a phone call. Wasn’t it you?”

  Rudolf wished he could feel the heartiness Flaherty was giving to his laughter. “That’ll be old Riordan,” the Irishman said. “He’s an industrial spy from an outfit that’s tryin’ to steal our patents. Has a regular observatory set up over there in that swamp. Kind of dry right now. I don’t suppose I could encourage you boys to burn off that grass before it turns into a real hazard?” The Irishman wiped sweat from his beetling brow and turned innocent China-blue eyes toward the firemen. “Seems t’me it might be a good thing for a man to have a little run for it as long’s he goes around turnin’ in false alarms and makin’ foine decent family men with jobs and all get up and go chasin’ around in the middle of the night, losin’ their sleep, scarin’ their poor lovin’ wives half t’death. Sure and the dirty spalpeen that’d do a thing like that… Ah, if only I could leave this important experiment for a moment and git me hands on…”

  For a moment Rudolf thought it was going to work but the firemen were still too interested in Lillith’s chest expansion. “Still too wet to burn,” one said.

  The fire was nearly out by now. Rudolf wondered if the corpse would still be recognizable. The flame guttered out as the last of the wax was consumed. Rudolf turned off the blower and they stood regarding the glowing igloo expectantly. “Gonna look now and see if it burned up?” a fireman asked.

  Rudolf gave a guilty start, then realized the fireman was talking about a week’s collection of garbage. It would be natural for garbage to have bones in it. Rudolf prayed none of them would be instantly recognizable. The bricks were still glowing. “Have to wait till it cools completely to give it a fair chance,” Flaherty said, obviously hoping the firemen would lose patience and go home. Lillith cooperated by buttoning her jacket. It was no use. These men had been routed out of bed for the first time in months and they weren’t about to go home until they had poked and probed through that clump of glowing bricks. Rudolf mentally chanted the disaster-to-enemy curse for Riordan. He wondered if there was any patron saint for corpse burners.

  They stood about shuffling their feet like small boys at a weenie roast. Finally the bricks had cooled until Flaherty could wait no longer. Rudolf sneaked a look at his watch. It had been an hour and four minutes since they had lit it off. A Fireman poked tentatively at the loose brick igloo. Abruptly, it collapsed, sending up a cloud of dusty ash.

  Lillith caught Rudolf’s eye and pointed at her teeth. Flaherty saw the gesture and nodded imperceptibly. With a half dozen firemen poking through the mess Rudolf hoped they could
find and palm any teeth that had survived the holocaust.

  Finally, after ten nerve-twanging minutes the firemen were gone. There had been no teeth and only two calcined stumps of thigh bones that the Flaherty had stamped into unrecognizable powder before any fireman could develop notions of anatomy. They scooped up the sifted ashes and scattered them atop their crop of growing aluminum. Flaherty dragged out the hose and watered them down.

  Lillith picked up her bra and blouse and for one happy moment Rudolf thought she would take off the jacket to put them on but she didn’t. “What I need right now,” the dark-haired girl said, “is a drink.” Rudolf suddenly realized he could use one too.

  Riding home he knew he had involved the young victim in all this. His conscience should be burning holes in some dark and secret corner of his duodenum. Maybe tomorrow he would worry about it. At the moment all he felt was tired.

  “I wonder if he was English?” Flaherty said.

  “Why?”

  “Fee fie fo fum.”

  Rudolf tried to remember the next lines. “I smell the blood of an Englishman. Be he live or be he dead, I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.”

  It was almost daylight. They grumped about the house and talked about going to bed but nobody made the first move. “Business as usual, I’d think,” Flaherty finally said. Rudolf thought this over and agreed.

  Lillith still had her hair in curlers. She poked about the house looking for her instant femininity tool box and finally found it in a corner. “Either of you seen a cigarette case?” she asked. “I remember I put it in the kitchen for a minute.”

  “Was it valuable?”

  Lillith shrugged. “Might hock it for twenty dollars.”

  Rudolf frowned. “What was it like?”

  “Size of a cigarette pack. It was black with silver trim.”

  Rudolf bounded upstairs. Peering cautiously in the bathroom, he saw it in a corner behind the john. He stretched a broom through the doorway and hooked it. The cigarette case was covered with slime. He picked it up with a handkerchief and brought it back downstairs, uncomfortably aware of something the same size and shape in his pocket. “Now we know why it happened,” he said.

  Lillith grimaced as she touched slime.

  “That hippie steal it?” Flaherty asked.

  Rudolf nodded. “And Tuchi thought it was something else.”

  “Twenty dollars for his life,” Flaherty mused. “He should have quit while he was ahead.” Rudolf and Lillith put fingers to their lips.

  “I think,” Rudolf said after a long silence, “that you’d better forget about your high tolerance yeast and concentrate on a… Goddamn these bugs!” he flared, “This is no way to live!” He looked at Lillith. “You know anybody?”

  The dark-haired girl frowned a moment, then picked up the phone. She dialed eleven digits and a moment later said, “Sid, could you do some exterminating for some friends of mine?”

  There was a moment’s cryptic talk, then she said, “He’ll be here in four hours.”

  Flaherty was as sleepless as the rest of them. At dawn he gave up and drove out to his lab. “Somebody ought to be minding the store,” he said. Lillith combed out her curlers while Rudolf made more coffee. She wore tight hot pants and a loose baggy sweater. Between idle goatish fantasies Rudolf wondered what they were going to do about Tuchi.

  The incubator was in his pocket. But with private armies trooping through house and gravel pit, where else could he hide it? One thing Rudolf resolved never to do was carry the incubator into the bathroom. Remembering the way the would-be bandit had slipped, he wondered how safe the kitchen was. Tuchi could be literally anywhere! She traveled through streams, up sewer pipes. How about fresh water pipes?

  Lillith had wiped the slime from her cigarette case cum lighter. “Won’t work,” she said.

  “Checked the fluid?”

  Moments later she handed the open case to Rudolf. Its innards were shattered and congealed into strange new shapes as if everything had melted, flowed for a microsecond, and then frozen again.

  “It figures,” Rudolf said, “Whatever—” Abruptly, he remembered the bugs. He went to the typewriter and wrote, “Whatever cut him in 2 was heat ray, hot enough to cauterize. You noticed no bleeding?”

  Lillith nodded. Wondering what he could do with this information, Rudolf picked idly at the case-lighter. Its plastic shattered and he held the innards, a tiny metal frame smeared with bits of melted plastic components. He flexed the metal and they flaked away. For such a thin piece of metal it was surprisingly rigid. He tried again to bend it and odd bits about modules of elasticity and tensile strengths surfaced from his long forgotten engineering courses. This sheet of aluminum couldn’t be much thicker than — he got a razor blade and quickly learned which was the hardest.

  There was a knock on the door. A crewcut type in thick glasses asked, “Is Miss Lasky here?”

  Lillith appeared making shushing noises. The stranger began walking around the house with a frequency probe. It was about the size of a table cigarette lighter and had a selector switch on one side. A bulb lit up. He moved to where the bulb got brightest and pulled what looked like a golf tee from behind a door molding. He pulled a transistor radio from his pocket and started it playing softly on the kitchen table beside the spike mike.

  An hour later a dozen bugs were scattered across the table top, each listening to a different sound source. One cassette was emitting sighs, gasps, and grunts that caused Rudolf to look embarrassedly into space when Lillith caught him analyzing the faint line dividing the sacred from the profane inside her hot pants.

  Standing a dozen feet from the collection of mikes on the table the stranger said, “I think the house’s clean now. Want me to do anything else?”

  Lillith looked at Rudolf. “The gravel pit?” she asked.

  Rudolf nodded. “Lillith can watch the house and make sure they don’t plant any more here.”

  “No need as long as you keep them convinced these are working,” the crewcut man said.

  Rudolf guided the debugging expert out to the gravel pit. Flaherty was bumbling about growling happy blasphemies in his transit-mix basso as he fiddled with a microtome. “Think oime onto something,” he said, then suddenly he saw the crewcut stranger.

  Rudolf put his finger to his lips and Flaherty went back to his slicing. Crewcut waved his wand about and uncovered golf-tee shaped microphones. He repositioned them near the noisiest part of their machinery.

  Flaherty was bouncing about the lab with such cheerful abandon that for a moment Rudolf thought he had gotten into the sauce again. But there was a purpose to the wild Irishman’s bustle. “See these?” He waved what looked like tiny shavings in front of Rudolf.

  “What are they?”

  But the Flaherty suddenly remembered the crewcut stranger. Rudolf was also uncomfortably aware of proliferation. In less than twenty-four hours they had acquired Lillith Lasky. He wondered if Sid would become a permanent fixture too.

  “That clears up your problem for a while,” the crewcut Sid said. “But I should come back once a week just like any other bug exterminator. You want some alarms?”

  “Do you have any that’d keep all these people out?”

  “Nothing can stop a patient and determined pro. I’ll be back next week.”

  “What’m I into you for?”

  “Plenty. You’ll get my bill.” Sid shook hands and drove away.

  “What were you showing me?” Rudolf asked.

  “Bits of gelatin potted in epoxy resin,” Flaherty said.

  “Very interesting.”

  “It’s how you get an aluminophagic bacterium to hold still while you slice him thin enough to see through.”

  “What do they look like?”

  “Remarkably indistinct. Now that I’ve done everything that can be done with an optical microscope, I need a quick look through something better.”

  Rudolf tried to remember the term Flaherty had used. “A scanning micro
scope?” he asked.

  Flaherty shook his head. “They’re nice for three dimensional views and you can look at thicker specimens but they’ll only go up a thousand diameters or so — not much better than a good light microscope if you get a phase contrast — even a flying spot type for that matter.”

  “I’m sorry I asked.”

  Flaherty laughed. “The thing you’re talking about and the ones I’m talking about work the same way. They send a light beam or an electron beam zapping back and forth just like a TV camera. The image is built up out of millions of yes-no decisions as to whether this particular spot is light or dark. They’re fine for automatic blood counts or sizing paint pigments but I’ve got to see inside a chromosome.

  “A transmission electron microscope takes the whole picture all at once, like a camera or a human eye — no scanning. It can go up to a million diameters — actually see an atom in some cases. But the specimen has to be thin enough for an electron beam to shine through. And you run into other problems.”

  “Like what?”

  “Electrons aren’t that much smaller than what we’re looking at. It’s like throwing tomatoes at a man in front of a wall. You get a silhouette where they don’t hit the wall but it’s kind of fuzzy. And if you leave your specimen in too long or crank the voltage up too high you blow it to pieces.”

  “I can see another problem,” Rudolf said.

  “Oh?”

  “Where are we going to get a transmission electron microscope?”

  “All I need is about fifteen minutes with one to verify a few suspicions.”

  “You’re evading the question.”

  “Not really. Let’s go home now.”

  They turned off lights and machinery. Rudolf gave the aluminum bed a quick look and, satisfied it was growing on schedule, got into the dump truck with Flaherty.

  Lillith had a meal nearly ready when they returned. “Any problems?” Rudolf pointed upstairs.

  Lillith shook her head. “But if you think I’m going to use that bathroom again you’ve got another think coming.”

  Murmuring absent-minded blasphemies, Flaherty retired to his room with a bucket of warm water. Some time later he descended freshly shaven and bathed, wearing the suit he had last worn the day Rudolf turned down a million a month.