The Aluminum Man

by G. C. Edmondson

Tuchi squirmed and contracted like a salt-sprinkled slug. Rudolf remembered the Drano he had sprinkled across the threshold but surely the alien must have neutralized that somehow. He guessed she was squeezing out another septet of monsters. Turning to Flaherty he said, “You said you’d worked out how to do without it. I guess the time has come.”

  Somewhere a car started and laid a strip of rubber down a village street. “Goddamn squirrel-brains!” Flaherty parenthesized.

  Tuchi was squirming to angle her triangular head toward Rudolf’s bedroom door. Rudolf wondered how much longer the alien’s patience would last. “All right,” he said. “We’ll give it to you!”

  “I’d be careful,” Flaherty began.

  “You’d be dead too,” Rudolf added.

  “The decision is no longer yours,” Tuchi said. “Your confederate must cooperate too.”

  “I’m cooperating,” Flaherty said hastily.

  “Wait just a minute,” Rudolf added. “I’ll get it for you.”

  “That’s what you think,” Tuchi snapped.

  “I will! It’s right here in my room.” Rudolf hitched the sagging towel up around his waist and stepped back slowly, expecting to be zapped any moment. Giving silent thanks that Pamela was asleep, he opened the door to his room. She had the blankets clear up over her head now. He rummaged through his pants. Where the hell, he wondered, had he put the incubator? He always carried it in his pocket.

  Tuchi oozed farther into the room. “You were saying—?” she sneered.

  “I don’t get it.” But even as he said it Rudolf had a sudden horrible suspicion that he had just gotten it. Careful not to waken her, he peeled blankets away from Pamela’s head. Then recklessly he snatched the covers away from a bundle of pillows. Pamela was gone. So was the incubator.

  “Well now,” Flaherty said, “how d’ya like them apples?”

  “I do not eat apples,” Tuchi said. “Which of you chooses to remain hostage while the other goes to recover my property?”

  Rudolf tore off downstairs and out into the street. The Lamborghini was gone. He was halfway into the truck before he realized the futility of it all. Besides, he couldn’t just bug out and leave Flaherty holding the bag. He went back upstairs where the Irishman sat contemplating his captor. Flaherty looked a mute question at him.

  “I’m waiting for you to say something brilliant like you planned it this way,” Rudolf said.

  “I’m afraid ‘tis not my day for brilliance.” Flaherty’s ravaged face seemed suddenly much older. “I’ll stay,” he said. “Good luck.”

  “You think I can catch a Lamborghini with a dump truck?”

  The Irishman sighed. “No, I fancy not. They’ll be guardin’ Northumber like the Coca-cola formula.” Turning to the alien he said, “We throw ourselves on the mercy of the court.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can kill us quickly or slowly,” Rudolf said. “Neither will get your incubator back.”

  “My patience stretches thinner than I,” Tuchi said. “I shall remove small pieces until your amenability increases.”

  “Ow!” Flaherty yelled, and began hopping on one foot. The toe of his shoe was smoking. Hastily, he began unlacing it.

  “Now just a goddamn minute!” Rudolf roared. “You’re responsible for that incubator being gone. Don’t take it out on us.”

  “By what exercise in rhetoric do you reach that conclusion?”

  “I told you to be quiet. The only reason I flushed the toilet was to keep you from spilling everything to the bugs.”

  “There are intelligent insects on this planet?”

  “Listening devices,” Flaherty explained. He had his shoe off now and had stopped blaspheming oftener than once per second.

  “Nobody knew there was an incubator to steal,” Rudolf continued, “until you made sure the whole world heard about it.”

  “And the red-fringed specimen who carries the incubator?”

  “You have a trace on it?”

  “Naturally.”

  “I can save you some time,” Rudolf said, and gave detailed directions to Northumber.

  “This Northumber… it has sewers?”

  “I guess.”

  “Hmmm.” The alien began shrinking back under the bathroom door.

  “Wait a minute,” Rudolf yelled, “about that trap — could you show me how it works? I’ll make you a nice deal—”

  But like a movie of spilled water running backward, the alien disappeared through the crack. Resigned, Rudolf went for the hammer and nail puller.

  “How d’ya like them apples?” Flaherty repeated when Rudolf came back upstairs.

  Rudolf didn’t like them at all. It was hard to decide whether Pamela’s deep-dyed duplicity hurt worse, or the knowledge that he had fallen for it. That his money tree was dying came in a poor third. “I thought you had it all worked out,” he growled. “Why did you tell me to sign?”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “I could have sent her ass flying home.”

  “Would you?”

  “No,” Rudolf admitted. “You’re hooked on booze. I’m hooked on Pamela.”

  “Still?”

  “I don’t know. Where do we stand on that contract?”

  “We haven’t signed it yet. Anyway, I doubt if St. Audrey intends to alter the world as he knows it. Now that he has it, the incubator’ll quietly disappear. You’ll be discredited, a medicine show charlatan. Nobody’ll ever believe we were making aluminum in the first place. The only difference is several billion people will die of respiratory disease before cancer or starvation gets them.”

  “I wonder how we’re fixed for money?”

  “Dear boy, you’d be a poor relation in the golden horde but you could support a few poor relations of your own without dipping into capital.”

  A few months ago Rudolf would have been content with the knowledge that he was comfortably fixed, that the specter of an ignominious return to the reservation could never become reality. But now… He had lingered on the fringes of real power. Life would never be the same.

  “Did you know Lord Acton never did anything else noteworthy in his life?” Flaherty asked.

  “Who?”

  “The Sassenach baron who said, ‘Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’”

  While Rudolf was wondering if he were a mind reader the Irishman blew it by adding, “I doubt if men like St. Audrey know the difference between right and wrong.”

  Rudolf wrenched the last spike from the door. “All yours,” he said.

  Flaherty hesitated. “Maybe we’d better use the pole to see if…”

  “I doubt if I’ll ever again feel comfortable close to a sewer,” Rudolf answered.

  “Aye,” the Flaherty gloomed. “The days of happy relaxation have retreated into the mists of memory. Och,” he moaned, “the head oi’ll have tomorrow!”

  Rudolf slapped the bunched pillows from his bed and tried to sleep. Surely there must be other girls as delicately and ineffably beautiful as Pamela. Remembering how he had planned to end this evening, Rudolf went to sleep wondering if there were such a word as effable.

  It was dawning gray when he awoke to a pounding on the door. He heard Flaherty grumbling and swearing in his transit-mix basso and tried to go back to sleep. It was a moment before he realized the Irishman was not answering the insistent knocking. Rudolf crawled into his trousers and stepped outside. Like an inept angler, Flaherty was trying to dump a bucket into the john.

  Rudolf stumbled downstairs, kicking aside unopened sacks of mooch letters and marriage proposals. One of these days he’d have to hire a secretary to answer all that crap. Meanwhile it seemed simpler just not to open anything that didn’t obviously contain a check. It was a moment before his sleep-bleared eyes recognized the dour, bulldog-faced man in the pepper and salt suit. There seemed something vaguely out-of-place about him. “Yes?” Rudolf asked.

  “I’ve been empowered to make certain in
quiries about a Mr. John Wilson last seen at this address.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Young man, short hair. Believed armed, considered dangerous. We have reason to believe he might have prowled this house.”

  “You’re wasting your time,” Rudolf said. “I never heard of him.” By now he realized that Riordan was sniffing around about the hippie who’d managed to get himself bisected in Tuchi’s trap. But surely, even this archaic gumshoe could come up with a better approach. Suddenly he noticed what was different. Riordan wore a false mustache and van Dyck. Rudolf struggled not to laugh.

  Flaherty came bumbling downstairs with the bucket. “Needs a stronger pole,” he growled, then he saw Riordan. Rudolf saw the sudden focusing of animus and stepped aside just as the wild Irishman emptied the bucket emphatically in the general direction of the fake mustache. “If you’re willing to share it, take some home for St. Audrey,” Flaherty yelled, and slammed the door.

  Rudolf stared. “That wasn’t very kind,” he said when he could talk again.

  Flaherty looked at his empty bucket. “You’re right,” he agreed. “The least I could do is offer him a full one.” He washed his hands and began making coffee. Rudolf thought about going back to bed. He knew he’d never sleep again.

  The phone rang. Rudolf picked it up. “Mr. Redwolf?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Arthur Many Birds, calling in behalf of the Winnebago Home for Orphan—”

  “This is an unlisted recording,” Rudolf said. “You have thirty seconds to cover your tracks. Please get your return address correct since the post office is finicky about misdirected explosives.” While the line was silent he made a beeping sound and hung up. Good god, he thought, it isn’t even six o’clock yet!

  Flaherty looked no worse than usual for this time of morning. They ate a grumpy breakfast and drove out to the gravel pit. Flaherty lost himself in his lab and Rudolf began harvesting their last crop. Moments later the Irishman came out of his cubicle waving a test tube.

  “Now what?” Rudolf asked.

  “The high tolerance yeast! I’ve got a strain that stays alive in an ambient of fifty percent waste product.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Flaherty abruptly subsided. “Nothing much really, It was a personal goal. I s’pose though that the world’ll get excited when I get it up to ninety percent.”

  Rudolf decided it was going to be one of the Irishman’s days for talking in riddles. “Now that it makes no difference anyway, could you tell me how the incubator works?” he asked.

  Flaherty wiped his socratic nose and frowned. “I’m probably wrong about Tuchi’s, but I know how I’d build one. Sure’n there might not be a laser fine enough to make the hole.”

  “What hole?”

  “Remember, I told you they reproduce sexually, unlike most earth bacteria.”

  “Yes.”

  “They can reproduce by fission too. There’s an uncomfortable point of theology involved but…”

  “Now what would the gods have to do with it?” Rudolf wondered.

  “As Virgil once told a young playwright, the only time to introduce a god into the plot is when the humans have gotten it so thoroughly screwed up nobody can find a way out.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “Well, the only deus we’d ever get ex this machina would be some spook that could drill a hole or weave a screen small enough to separate the sexual from the asexual form.”

  Rudolf guessed the Irishman would sooner or later start making sense.

  “‘Tis like birth control — or potatoes in the jungle,” Flaherty continued. “Take dogs, humans, any strain that’s bred too fine and beginning to lose fertility. As long’s they’re well-fed they don’t reproduce. Do you know how a kennel gets a litter of pups when everything else fails?” Rudolf didn’t.

  “Starve the parents three to five days before breeding. Take potatoes…”

  “What on earth for?” Rudolf wondered.

  “Plant them in hot, jungle country and you get beautiful vines. Somewhere in the gene there’s a certain dark wisdom that doesn’t worry until the first cool night or the first hungry spell suggests that Eden may not be forever. That’s when potatoes or humans start making seed.”

  Rudolf couldn’t see what this had to do with aluminum.

  “The parent bacterium can’t reduce aluminum,” Flaherty continued, “but it breeds true. Has to because it reproduces by mitosis — splitting in two. No chance for stray genes to combine. But get it out of low-grade ore — give it just one square meal and it switches over to sexual reproduction. These offspring are much smaller. The incubator might be just a radiation-proof box to discourage mutations. Probably it has some low-grade ore inside just rich enough to let one out of a hundred go sexual instead of splitting. The parent strain stays poor and pure. The sexuals get out through the hole or mesh or whatever into the outer chamber whence we squirt them over the gravel pit.”

  Rudolf thought a moment. Like everything the Irishman said, it made sense while he was saying it. “But if only the sexual form gets out of the incubator, how did you ever get the parent strain?”

  “Took a squirt fresh from the incubator and sealed it in a test tube — clay with about seven parts per million of alumina. They reverted to the asexual form, soaked up water, and grew several diameters.”

  “Then we can keep a pure culture going just by starving it?”

  “That, I suppose, is why Tuchi warned us not to open the incubator.”

  “But if it’s as simple as that we’re still in business!”

  “Aye,” Flaherty gloomed. “It could be a dangerous business.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “If the true breeding strain got loose I’m damned if I’d know how to kill it.”

  “Who cares? It’ll just make more air.”

  “Aye, dear boy, but you wouldn’t have your monopoly any more.”

  “No, but we can scare the bejeezus out of St. Audrey. What d’you suppose he’ll do if we threaten to flood the market?”

  “You meant apart from killing us?”

  Abruptly, Rudolf remembered their cab ride home from Northumber. He wished he’d thought to ask St. Audrey about that.

  “Actually,” Flaherty continued, “I’m more worried about them forcing the thing open.”

  “Maybe it’ll have an interlock that’ll blow Northumber into orbit,” Rudolf said hopefully.

  There was a noise down the narrow road to town. Flaherty looked out the door. “Wurra, wurra,” he said in that comic brogue he could turn on or off.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I suspect I shouldn’t have waved at the camera after all.”

  Rudolf looked out. A line of cars was moving slowly toward the gravel pit. They all seemed full. While Rudolf stared, people began getting out. It looked like the usual crowd of longhaired riot freaks. Rudolf wondered what they were doing here. Squinting, he barely made out a placard. It seemed to say something about vivisection. Rudolf could swear he’d seen those same faces on TV the other day when Flaherty had created his little sideshow to use an electron microscope.

  “They didn’t learn about this place by themselves,” Flaherty said. “The golden horde means to do us in.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Ignore them. Maybe I can think of something before they get mean.”

  “I hope it’s better than your last idea.”

  Flaherty winced and went back inside the lab. Rudolf followed him. “That south end of the pit’s ready for reseeding,” he said. “Do you have anything safe that I could use?”

  “Give me a week or two to find some half micron filters and…”

  Suddenly Flaherty slapped his forehead. “I’ll force feed some of the parent stock. They’ll all go sexual and you can plant them in a few hours.” While Rudolf watched, he drew a drop of liquid, added it to some mud in another flask, and corked it. “Tomorrow you can put this m
uck in a flit gun and do a dance for Riordan.”

  Rudolf nodded and went back to scraping up muck with the dozer blade on the front of the dump truck. Outside the fence young longhairs and older ecology minded types marched like obedient sheep, carrying placards denouncing Rudolf as a vivisectionist, a capitalist, and several other things he had always wanted to be. He tried to ignore them as he drove back and forth scraping up the layer of aluminum-rich muck. He wondered what the antivivisectionists thought he was doing.

  The demonstrators tired of peaceful picketing. They began chanting, making angry gestures. Rudolf looked around. Off in the other direction was a small swamp of weeds and cattails where Riordan hung out with his cameras and telescopes. If Rudolf had to run it was the only available cover. A determined mob could flush him in minutes. Abruptly, Rudolf realized he was a sitting duck. He drove the dump truck inside the shed and rushed into Flaherty’s laboratory. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he began, then he stopped.

  Flaherty was already gone!

  CHAPTER 12

  Rudolf stood unbelieving. After all he’d done for the Irishman and now that goddamn drunk had abandoned him! What was he going to do? Rage alternated with despair as he heard the chanting outside. He looked at the dump truck. It had a large dozer blade in front. If he shifted down and took a run at them maybe he could tumble those cars off the narrow road and make a break for the village.

  But he’d have to wire the doors shut so the freaks couldn’t get at him. And the glass wasn’t bulletproof — not even rockproof, he realized. If he ground up a few demonstrators in the process of getting out, what would the law do to him? It might be self defense but if the golden horde had inspired this they could surely inspire judges and prosecutors too. What the hell was he going to do?

  He wondered if he could talk to them, reason with them. What was all this randygazoo about vivisection anyway? Maybe if he let them in and showed them there were no animals here… He stepped out of the shed and walked toward the fence where an unkempt young man was exhorting the crowd through a bullhorn. Faces turned toward Rudolf and he knew he could never outshout a bullhorn.

  The crowd had gathered into a tight knot facing the gate to the gravel pit. There was no way out. Rudolf decided to wait till the first rock came his direction. Then he would charge through the gate with the dozer blade at knee level. He wondered how many he could kill before they got him.