The Aluminum Man

by G. C. Edmondson

  “You didn’t sleep at all last night,” Rudolf said. “You’re not going out now are you?”

  “I had a nap in the lab.”

  Rudolf ate absently, wishing he could afford a house where he dared use the bathroom. “How much per day is a million a month?” he asked.

  “Thirty-two thousand, two hundred fifty-eight dollars, six and four-tenths cents,” Flaherty said promptly.

  Rudolf gasped. “You’re a human computer too?”

  “No, dear boy. I’ve been waitin’ for you to ask that question.”

  “Where’re you going?” Rudolf asked.

  “Off to see a nearsighted friend,” Flaherty said gaily. “If I’m right our worries are over.”

  “We’ll be independent of the—” Habit inhibited Rudolf from mentioning the incubator. His hand in his pocket suddenly remembered the piece of scorched metal from Lillith’s cigarette case. “See what you can make of this while you’re at it,” he said, and explained what had happened.

  Flaherty shrugged and put it in his pocket. “No doubt you two young people will find ways to amuse yourselves,” he leered, and departed, leaving Rudolf squirming in such an agony of embarrassment that he firmly resolved the only thing ever to develop would be Lillith Lasky’s pictures.

  “Mail,” she said when they were alone.

  Rudolf sorted the handful of junk, trying not to look at Miss Lasky’s trim terminus as she washed dishes. Was there anything she didn’t know how to do? One letter had a postmark from the tiny reservation town where Rudolf had gone to school. “Dear Alumnus—” It was a begging letter.

  “Christ!” he mumbled.

  “You say something?” Lillith asked from the kitchen.

  “No.” Rudolf crumpled the letter and turned on the TV.

  Wearing his flying-saucers-and-other-silly-season-nonsense grin, a network commentator was saying, “Whatever its origin, has finally flushed itself out into the ocean where it goes unnoticed among the countless pollutions emitted daily from Greater New York.”

  Rudolf wished he dared tell the commentator where it had really gone.

  “… Another eye-smarting day predicted as the Regional Authority again confirms its ban on all open burning. Experts predict…” Rudolf switched to another channel and got more news. This time he finally realized he was looking at the fast-rising skeleton of St. Audrey’s new building. Rudolf counted on his fingers trying to figure how long it had been since he and Flaherty had begun their unlikely partnership.

  He wondered what the wild Irishman was up to. So many things could go wrong: He could have his pockets picked; he could be lured into a bar and have his brains picked; he could, Rudolf realized, actually be kidnapped by the golden horde. Rudolf wondered again about the blast that had disfenestrated their taxi. Maybe he should have signed with the golden horde. Working from the inside maybe he could have convinced St. Audrey that something had to be done quick. Then he remembered Flaherty had tried to work from the inside. How long, he wondered, had Flaherty had a drinking problem?

  “I hate to bring this up,” Lillith said, “but men and women — even us minority groups — all have one thing in common.”

  Rudolf gave her a look of bleak inquiry.

  “What are we going to do about a toilet?”

  Rudolf tried to concentrate. Whatever bisected the would-be bandit had not cut the rest of the house in two. Either its effect was limited or Tuchi had cranked down the range. Rudolf was not enthusiastic about staying where one murder had already happened, but logic told him that wherever he went the alien would not be far behind. The incubator had been in Rudolf’s pants pocket, beside his bed in the upstairs. If the alien had not been able to get it from there…

  Which put Rudolf back where he had started. Tuchi had a heat ray. But he did not know its range. The one thing he knew for sure was that nothing would ever get him back inside that bathroom again.

  Lillith was looking at him. “Isn’t there one in your camper?” he asked.

  “They took it out to make room for photographic equipment.”

  Rudolf went out into the back yard where an awning was flapping itself to pieces in the winds of procrastination. He came back with a plastic bucket fastened to the end of a pole made from the stiffening rod of the awning.

  “What’s that other piece of rope for?” Lillith asked.

  “Tripping line.”

  “Not elegant, but I guess it’s practical.”

  A short time later biology’s non-negotiable demand had Rudolf on one end of the pole and a plastic bucket on the other. Dumping it into the john without spilling was remarkably like trying to land a twenty-pound fish on four-pound tackle.

  The problem was complicated when the tripping line became snagged beneath the seat of the john. Mumbling curses in Sioux and English, Rudolf raised the bucket to free it. There was a blue flash and a sound like a concussion grenade going off inside a coffin. In reconstructing the incident later Rudolf was sure he would have dropped the bucket anyway but he was spared that misadventure by the abrupt disappearance of bucket, contents, tripping line, and the last eighteen inches of the pole.

  CHAPTER 10

  Downstairs Lillith poured him a slug of Irish Tranquilizer. “You can’t say you didn’t know it was loaded,” she said.

  Rudolf said nothing. The trap had been set to make him lose his head suddenly and irrevocably, had he been rash enough to sit enthroned. He went upstairs again. Poking with the pole, he learned the field was roughly a yard across and centered over the john. Sometimes it snapped at his pole and other times it did not. He couldn’t deduce what triggered it.

  Finally, disgustedly, he took a great whipping whack at it and was once more rewarded with the blue flash and doomsday bang. Downstairs he studied the end of the pole. It was the common commercial grade of aluminum used for TV antennas and lawn furniture. Now the end he had whipped through the field was converted to that same superhard compound as Lillith’s radio. He wondered if Flaherty would remember to analyze it.

  Lillith sat across the room wearing her blue robe as if she still expected him to perform some magic that would let her take a bath. Though the robe covered far more than the hot pants she had worn all day Rudolf found his eyes drawn perversely to gentle swells and almost-seen outlines. She sat demurely, legs coiled beneath her, reading an ancient Life. It never occurred to Rudolf that Lillith was giving him the business.

  The phone rang. When a man asked for Miss Lasky he handed it to her. Lillith uncoiled like a contented cat. She listened at length, trying several times to get a word in. Looking at Rudolf, she raised eyebrows in despair. “All right,” she finally said.

  “What’s going on?” Rudolf asked when she had hung up.

  “Riot at Johns Hopkins. Bunch of longhairs say they’re vivisecting or some damned thing.”

  “You’re going? Won’t it be dangerous?”

  “I’ll be back as soon’s I can,” Lillith promised. She bustled about picking things up and finally was ready to go. “Don’t look so woebegone,” she said. “Really, I will be back.” And Rudolf stood in the doorway wondering if his naked need had been so obvious. Why else, he wondered, would she have kissed him?

  He tried to forget about the superbly engineered photographer and concentrate on another female in his life. There must be some way to make peace with Tuchi. There was one very simple way. But where, Rudolf wondered, would he be without the incubator? Back on the reservation, that’s where!

  Suddenly Rudolf realized there was a way. He went back upstairs to the bathroom door. “Tuchi,” he called, “I can’t give you the—” He still couldn’t bring himself to say incubator out loud. “I can’t give you the thing you asked for but I’ve plenty of pure aluminum now. I’ll give you all you want. Tuchi — are you there?” There was no answer. Rudolf poked with the aluminum pole and burned off another inch. He tried several more times but there was no answer from the alien.

  He turned on the TV and hunted for the late
evening news. As per Lillith’s report angry longhairs chanted slogans around a vaguely Greek templish building which he learned was the Johns Hopkins medical center. The police didn’t seem too excited. Nobody else paid any attention. Men in white coats bustled in and out carrying books and briefcases, occasionally turning to glance self-consciously at the camera. One burly, bushy eyebrowed man in a white lab coat and carrying a bulging manila envelope stopped at the head of the steps. He faced the camera, waved and smiled. Rudolf could have sworn it was Flaherty.

  There was the unmistakable sound of the dump truck. A moment later Flaherty entered. “How did you do it?” Rudolf asked. “Did you fly?”

  “Do what?”

  Rudolf pointed at the TV where longhairs still milled, shouting angry slogans.

  “Everything comes to him who waits,” Flaherty said. “But it comes quicker if you plan ahead.”

  “You arranged a riot just so you could get in to use a microscope during the commotion?”

  “Remember, I did my postgrad in rioting in Ireland. Someday one of those kids can tell his grandchildren he was on the side of the angels,” Flaherty said, “though I muchly doubt if he knew it at the time.”

  “But you showed your face. Why did you have to wave to me?”

  “Dear boy, I wasn’t waving at you.”

  “Oh!” Rudolf guessed the Irishman was thumbing his nose at the golden horde for some devious reason.

  “What’d you learn?”

  “Now I know how to program a ‘die’ command into a double helix.”

  “I’d be more interested in a culture that didn’t die,” Rudolf said.

  “Now where would we be if we developed one and some of our curious friends got hold of it? Anyhow,” Flaherty continued, “we’ve got other fish to fry.”

  “A fish damn near fried me while you were gone.”

  Suddenly Flaherty noticed they were alone. “Where’s the lovely, lissome Lillith?” he asked.

  “Off covering your riot.”

  Flaherty laughed.

  “What’s more important than a culture that doesn’t die?” Rudolf asked.

  Flaherty tossed him the scrap of scorched metal from Lillith’s lighter. “This’ll get you as rich as the aluminophage if you learn how to make it.”

  “Like this?” Rudolf asked, and handed Flaherty the end of the awning pole.

  “What happened?”

  Rudolf told him. “Why is it so important?” he asked.

  Flaherty found Tullamore Dew and poured a drink. “I couldn’t begin to explain the crystalline structure,” he said, “but they’re extremely long, extremely regular. Now what does that hint to you?”

  “I never got that far.”

  “Superhard, superstrong, superductile. If St. Audrey could get his hands on enough of this he could build a mile-high building with inch-thick walls. The difference to architecture is the jump from a straw hut to the Great Pyramid!”

  “Just what we need,” Rudolf groused, “more goddamn buildings!”

  “If people are going to breed like yeast somebody has to build the tanks to hold them.”

  “You want to sell this to St. Audrey?”

  “I was thinking more in terms of giving it to him.”

  “We are on the same side, aren’t we?”

  “Aye,” the Flaherty agreed. “Think of the fun he could have tryin’ to figure out how it’s done. Why, it’d fair put him off the track of the aluminophage.”

  “Suppose he does find out.”

  “It’s done by instantaneous heating followed by equally instantaneous cooling.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “With the present state of the art it’s something more than impossible. But I’m not opposed to letting the golden horde spend themselves into a hole learning that.”

  “Is that why you waved to the camera?”

  “It’s also why I didn’t strip the film out of the scanning microscope’s recording camera.”

  “You left a picture of the true-breeding aluminophage!”

  “I said scanning microscope,” Flaherty said. “I made damn sure the camera wasn’t working when I looked over my specimens in the transmission microscope in another room.”

  “What’d you learn that makes you so happy?”

  “Remember how I told you it was impossible — the way there was more energy coming out than went in?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, the little buggers don’t live eight days and then die. They only live four hours.”

  “The wit of your remark utterly escapes me.”

  “‘Tis the damnedest thing y’ever saw,” the Flaherty marveled.

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “Oh aye. Darwin would have such an intellectual orgasm the poor man’s brain would run out his nose.”

  Rudolf sighed.

  “Instant evolution.”

  Sooner or later the Irishman would start talking sense, Rudolf decided. All he had to do was wait.

  “‘Twas the ‘true breeding’ that put me off,” Flaherty continued. “Tuchi, poor slime, probably wasn’t deliberately misleading, but mental set has a lot t’do with how you approach a problem. I went at it as if true breeding were right and proper.”

  Rudolf wondered if any of this would ever be understandable.

  “The way this species gets around the limitations of the solar constant is by not breeding true.” The Irishman laughed. “How a man gets entangled in semantics. A bacterium’s math is different from ours.”

  While Rudolf stared in mute despair the Flaherty drew a breath, poured another drink, and got under way again. “Two equals one. That’s sexual reproduction: infinite possibilities of mixing genes for greater variety. Sex was the greatest invention ever. Animals evolve thousands of times faster than they did with budding or fission where one splits into two and there’s never a chance of combining strange genes just to see if the little bugger’s going to be yellow or brown or kinky-haired.”

  “I receive a distinct impression that you’re trying to tell me something,” Rudolf said.

  “I am. Our aluminophage reproduces sexually.”

  “I’m happy for them.”

  “They live four hours, eat a bit of alumina, carry it partway toward reduction, then they copulate and die.”

  “Why must people always go to extremes?” Rudolf wondered.

  “The next generation doesn’t breed true. They’ve evolved just far enough to take the partially reduced alumina and bring it a bit farther toward reduction to pure metal. Then they die and their offspring are different enough for the next step. Darwin and Huxley would have come unglued.”

  “How do you move an electron from a tight low-energy orbit to a wide high-energy orbit in steps?” Rudolf asked. “I thought it was like a quantum jump.”

  “As you told the young lady about the feathers,” Flaherty said, “‘It works.’” He scratched his bulbous nose and thought a moment. “Maybe they build up some kind of leverage, generation after generation, until finally that electron snaps out.” He poured another drink.

  “You’ve stated the problem quite nicely,” Rudolf said. “Now what can we do about it?”

  “Understanding the problem is ninety percent of solving it,” Flaherty said. “Any mail?”

  “Begging letter for me. Another special delivery for you.”

  Flaherty tore his into shreds without opening it. “How about our feelers?” he asked.

  “There’s a paint company thinks they can use the ooze without us going to the bother of pressing it. Could turn into a good thing.”

  “How much are they interested in?”

  “About three times as much as we’re producing.”

  Flaherty smiled. “We shall soon be faced with the happy problem of where to store all our money.”

  “D’you suppose the golden horde could tie up a deposit in a Swiss bank?”

  “Given time they could do anything. We might spread it around a bit; put some in
Mexico.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Peso’s sounder than the dollar,” Flaherty said. “Those Europeans who make snide remarks about banana revolutions have all had wars and devaluations since the last Mexican bank failed. And they pay ten percent.”

  “Where do you learn these things?”

  “On that page in the paper that poor people never read.”

  “Do you think we should incorporate or go public or whatever they call it?”

  “I’d rather wait a while… till I’ve worked out whether we can do without the one indispensable article.”

  Rudolf told the Irishman about his unsuccessful offer to Tuchi. They went upstairs to the bathroom door and Flaherty spent ten minutes loudly cajoling an empty toilet bowl. Finally they gave up and went to bed.

  Rudolf checked the crack under his doorway and chinked it with newspaper. How thin could Tuchi spread herself across a dry surface? He had a sudden flash of brilliance and went downstairs for a can of Drano, then sprinkled the dry caustic crystals along the bathroom door threshold.

  Life settled into a routine of hard physical labor which was endurable only because they were piling up money in denominations Rudolf had never believed existed. He had employed a firm of New York accountants whom the Flaherty had guaranteed to be at odds with the golden horde and the nagging problems of bookkeeping and quarterly estimated returns were being taken care of. Rudolf wanted to hire labor to expand but Flaherty convinced him it would be impossible to hire help that could not be rehired by the golden horde.

  “But they’re sneaking in here still, stealing samples and photographing us from every angle,” Rudolf protested.

  “True.” Flaherty turned up his transistor. Nowadays each carried one going full blast on different stations when they had to talk out in the open where Riordan’s parabolic mikes could pick up a whisper from a half mile. Inside house and lab they had antibug jammers to gum up the low frequency FM spike mikes that Sid removed once a week.