The Aluminum Man

by G. C. Edmondson

  There was a sudden commotion around the shaggy young man with the bullhorn. After a moment’s confusion another uglier man in a tie dyed T-shirt and ill-fitting bell bottoms came up holding the bullhorn. “All power to the people!” he yelled.

  “Right on!” the crowd responded.

  Rudolf stared. At this distance he couldn’t recognize the stranger who had captured the bullhorn but he would know that transit-mix basso anywhere.

  The Irishman began an oration on finks and traitors, punctuated with “all powers” and “right ons.” When the first speaker surfaced and tried to recover the bullhorn Flaherty kicked him in the face and yelled, “This Judas betrays you. Behold the man who sold his immortal soul for debased coinage! He knows where the vivisection is!

  “You there, Indian!” He pointed the bullhorn at Rudolf. “Two men are coming over the fence. Don’t kill the misled innocents. Just show them the pens where you’re torturing animals.”

  A pyramid formed and the two observers vaulted over. They came cautiously toward Rudolf. “What do you want to see?” he asked.

  The young men had the surprised look of a sleepwalker who wakens sans trousers in the middle of the shopping plaza. They looked at each other. “Inside the building,” one finally said.

  “Be my guest.” Rudolf led them through the door saying, “Now in this corner we raise young English majors in sterile conditions. When they reach maturity we sell the hearts, kidneys, and other usable organs to St. Audrey. You know him?” The young men shook their heads.

  “Guy that’s putting up that new building,” Rudolf said. “He lives off in a place called Northumber. You can find it on any highway map.

  “Now here,” Rudolf pointed at a rusting gravel sieve, “is where we torture puppies in the name of science. If you’d care to capture the vicious freak who sent you on this wild goose chase I’ll gladly put him to the rack too. Now in this laboratory,” Indicating the open door of Flaherty’s cubicle, “we deflorate virgins whenever the moon is right.” Rudolf led them on a grim tour of the facilities, rubbing their noses in the total lack of any animal life.

  “What’re you doing here?” one of the freaks finally asked.

  “Making a living and minding my own business. What about you? More importantly, who suckered you into coming?”

  The two observers went over the fence and sheepishly admitted through the bullhorn Flaherty still held that they had found nothing.

  Flaherty did his best to direct their violence toward Northumber but the mob had had enough. One by one cars filled and began driving away. An olive drab sedan with a rooftop bubblegum machine flashing red came tearing up to the gate. “What’s going on here?” a deputy shouted.

  “You’re late,” Flaherty said, and handed him the bullhorn.

  There was an acrimonious exchange of credentials with the Flaherty refusing to believe they were real deputy sheriffs and the deputies refusing to believe the whole riot had not been of Flaherty’s instigation. Rudolf began to wonder if they really were bona fide law officers. He began calculating angles, trying to see if there were some way he could use the dump truck to sweep them and their car away without hurting the embattled Flaherty.

  A pickup with camper on the back detached itself from the tangle of exiting cars and crept toward them. Lillith Lasky got out and began focusing a camera.

  “Now who the hell are you?” a deputy asked.

  Lillith produced her identification. The deputy suddenly visualized himself immortalized as Life’s embodiment of piggery. He decided to cool it. After a few face-saving growls they got in their car. Then just as they were leaving one got out again with a folded paper. “Almost forgot,” he said. “If you’re really Francis Xavier Flaherty, this is for you.”

  “Now what was that?” Rudolf asked when the deputies had left them alone with Lillith.

  “Without even looking I’d say it’s an injunction against our producing aluminum by a process for which the golden horde’s already filed a patent application.”

  Rudolf hastily scanned the legalistic gobbledegook. As near as he could make it out that made several times today the Irishman had been right.

  “What’re you doing here?” he asked Lillith.

  “My specialty is covering riots,” the dark-haired girl said. Turning to Flaherty she added, “Yours seems t’be starting them. Did this one backfire?”

  “Darling,” Flaherty said, “where I grew up they grant degrees in the subject. Somebody turned this one back against me and it took a while to get them pointed in the right direction again.”

  “Do you think they’ll go to Northumber?”

  “Not a chance,” Flaherty said. “They’ll go home and pretend they haven’t been made fools. Och, and it’s been a day. Now please, darling, don’t tell me you have a surprise for me too.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Lillith said. “I don’t know if this’ll make the next issue but I thought it might be of interest.”

  Rudolf stared blankly at an eight by ten color glossy of two young people splashing hand in hand through the surf. He looked at the typewritten caption taped to the lower edge of the print. Society beauty finds fun in the sun. After a moment Rudolf realized it was Pamela enjoying herself in Bermuda. And her smirking companion was that goddamn Mohawk!

  Flaherty took the picture from his hands. “May’s well load up that flit gun. The culture’s gone sexual by now.”

  “That sounds like fun,” Lillith said.

  Rudolf came to abruptly. “Doesn’t that injunction stop us?”

  “It may stop us from selling it but I don’t see anybody stopping you from dancing right now.”

  Rudolf was tired of dancing, tired of pretending, tired of everything. He filled a fly sprayer with a watery dilution of the muck Flaherty gave him and tramped glumly up and down the freshly scraped pit floor spraying.

  “What exactly would happen if the true breeding strain ever got loose?” he asked when they were driving back to the small white house in the village.

  Flaherty shrugged. “There’re lots of things with alumina in them. Carborundum wheels might turn to mush and put the razor blade manufacturers out of business overnight. It might even…” The Flaherty yawned and dropped the subject.

  Inside the house Rudolf sat and grumped while Lillith and Flaherty exchanged blarney in the kitchen. He turned on the TV, hoping illogically that the news would show Northumber being attacked by peaceniks. Instead he saw St. Audrey’s new building nearing completion. Concrete crews were pouring around the clock, working overtime in an effort to make up for their late start. The building was bigger than Rudolf had realized.

  Flaherty came from the kitchen smiling broadly, laughing too loud. “Good for what ails your troubled soul,” he said, and pressed a drink on Rudolf. Rudolf sipped it. Tullamore Dew with soda wasn’t bad at all. Moments later the Flaherty was back. “How’d you like it?” he asked.

  “All right. Why?”

  The Flaherty grinned. “‘Tis home made.”

  “You? That’s all we need now — a bust for moonshining!”

  “Ah,” the Flaherty said. “Now did I say I distilled it?”

  “How else do you make booze?”

  “By fermentation.”

  For once Rudolf was on solid ground. As a boy he had seen enough illicit distilling on the reservation to be familiar with the process. “You can make beer and wine that way,” he said. “But the only way you get hard liquor is by concentrating the naturally fermented stuff with a still.”

  “Aha!” the Flaherty triumphed. “What’d you think a high tolerance yeast was meant to do?”

  “Search me.”

  “Yeasts suffer from the same limitations as all other life processes: No organism can exist in an atmosphere of its own waste products.”

  “That’s the main trouble with our planet,” Lillith contributed from the kitchen doorway.

  “Yeasts convert sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide,” the Irishman continue
d. “The only trouble is they die when the alcohol concentration reaches fourteen percent. That’s why hard liquors have been possible only with distillation to separate the alcohol from the water.”

  “I thought you were just working on something to eat up garbage,” Rudolf mused.

  “I am.”

  Rudolf looked at his glass. “I’m drinking garbage juice?”

  “If I can get the tolerance up to a hundred eighty proof you’ll drive your car on it too.”

  Rudolf put the glass down. “Somehow that seems more suitable.” Then suddenly he saw the implications of Flaherty’s remark. “With petroleum reserves going to hell and electric cars still just a dream…”

  “And alky burns cleaner than gasoline,” the Irishman said. “Not near the smog.”

  “We can make money.”

  Flaherty’s face fell. “Oi’m afraid not,” he said. “I was under contract when I started working on this.”

  “They steal one; we steal one,” Rudolf said.

  “Though your morality is on a level with Moses’ I’m not disagreein’ from that angle. ‘Tis the legal beagles that’ll have’t sewed up.”

  “It’s all right for them to steal from us but we can’t from them?”

  “They have a license,” Flaherty said.

  Rudolf picked up his glass and sipped cautiously. For garbage juice it didn’t taste bad. With his income cut off it might be the only booze he could afford.

  “How’s the bug situation?” Lillith asked.

  “Who cares? We don’t have any more secrets.”

  “I most devoutly hope we have one,” Lillith said.

  Abruptly Rudolf remembered the corpse they had disposed of. There was a knock on the door. He kicked aside the day’s unopened mail sack and went to see what new disaster plagued his latter end.

  Four Indians stood in the doorway. One was an elderly man dressed soberly in a somewhat old-fashioned suit. The others were younger and wore their storebought clothing more easily. The older man looked expectantly at Rudolf. “Am I supposed to know you?” Rudolf finally asked.

  “Just passing through town,” the elderly man said. “Thought we’d stop in and see how you’re doing.”

  “Passing from where to where? This place isn’t on the road to anywhere.”

  The elderly Indian saw the mail bag Rudolf had kicked aside. “You must be very busy these days,” he said. “Forgive us for wasting your time.” He tipped his wide-brimmed hat and they walked away.

  “Who was it?” Flaherty called.

  “More moochers.” Sipping the wild Irishman’s garbage juice, Rudolf suddenly remembered where he had seen the old man. He was the janitor from the reservation school.

  “They were Indians, weren’t they?” Lillith asked.

  “Yeah.” Mentally, Rudolf added, Where were they when I needed them? He took another sip and wondered what Tuchi was up to.

  By the time Flaherty had set the table and Lillith was serving, Rudolf had decided the wild Irishman’s garbage squeezings were not bad at all. He poured himself a second glass. Without soda it was even smoother. He tasted the food Lillith put before him. “What’s this stuff?” he asked.

  “Gefilte fish.”

  “Don’t they have any bones at all?” Rudolf tried to think of something nice to say about the dark-haired girl’s cooking but his mind was sidetracked with another thought. Tuchi had been spawning. Everything loved to nibble on Tuchi. What did Tuchi eat? How long before twenty-five-hundred little Tuchis matured and each produced another twenty-five hundred? Remembering Earth’s cannibal history Rudolf decided the ensuing period would conform amply to the Chinese curse: May you live in interesting times.

  His mind surfaced and he tuned in on Lillith and Flaherty’s channel. “… money’s the key,” the Irishman was saying. “It buys legislators and makes laws. Bankrupt St. Audrey and he’d be a toothless joke.”

  “How could you do that?” Lillith asked.

  Flaherty sighed. “Leverage and a seat on the stock exchange. It’d also take some knowledge of the market.”

  “Could you—?”

  “Not. a chance,” the Irishman said. “I’m a genetic engineer. I may not know much but oi’ve learned niver t’play the other man’s game.”

  “But you can’t just give up like that!” Lillith agonized. “Poor people need to breathe. It’s—”

  “I don’t wish that poor man any harm,” Flaherty said, “but I’d say Hail Marys for Lucifer if St. Audrey’s building would just fall down.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s stretched thin,” Flaherty explained. “Any little slip could dump him lower than Humpty’s rump.”

  Rudolf refilled his glass. “You’re sure this’s refined garbage?” he asked.

  “Bottled yesterday noon,” Flaherty reassured him.

  “How much’ve you got?”

  “Just this bottle here in the house. There’s a couple of gallons out at the lab in those plastic bleach jugs. Might be more by morning.”

  “A gallon should cover the evening quite nicely.”

  Flaherty gave him an odd look.

  “Is it true what they say about drunken Indians?” Lillith asked.

  “I dunno,” Rudolf said. “Is it true what they say about Jews?”

  “Touche.” They touched glasses. Rudolf focused with some difficulty. Lillith was wearing her working uniform of hot pants and a navy blue jumper which bulged in the appropriate places. The apron she wore over abbreviated shorts gave an air of indecent exposure each time she turned around.

  “Nice to see you go,” Rudolf muttered.

  He sat brooding at the table while Flaherty and Lillith roused themselves to clear away the wreckage of dinner.

  “St. Audrey’ll destroy the incubator,” Lillith mourned. “It’s Earth’s last chance to breathe.”

  Flaherty nodded.

  “But isn’t there something you could do?” Lillith asked.

  “Many things. But the cures might be worse than the disease.”

  Rudolf roused momentarily. “What could be worse than St. Audrey running the world?”

  “St. Audreys have always run the world,” Flaherty said. “A fish by any other name would still stink.”

  Rudolf suspected the Irishman was trying to impart some universal truth but he was too tired to decipher it.

  “People who live in glass houses shouldn’t,” the Irishman continued. “And with modern surveillance you can’t even keep your rotten fish in a concrete tank.” Bearing pole and bucket, he stumbled upstairs.

  Rudolf heard a car go down the village street. Where had he heard that exhaust before? Suddenly Rudolf knew he was hearing an oriental red Lamborghini. The last time he remembered hearing it was an instant before he had been going to return Tuchi’s incubator. Now what the hell would Pamela be doing heading out toward the gravel pit this time of night?

  Lillith looked up as he opened the door. Rudolf started to tell her what he suspected, then realized no girl as sharp as Lillith would refrain from some shot about whoring off after false gods. “Tell Flaherty I remembered something at the shop,” he said. “Be right back.”

  “Do you think you ought—” But before Lillith could pass judgment on his driving, the dump truck roared off into the night.

  Halfway to the gravel pit Rudolf passed a TR-3 parked off the road, two pairs of feet already sticking out an open door. A faint doubt crept into his mind. By the time he reached the gravel pit at the end of the deadend road Rudolf knew he had mistaken some makeout artist’s TR-3 for the Lamborghini exhaust.

  As long as he was here he might as well bring home another gallon of Flaherty’s garbage squeezings. He unlocked the gate and drove the truck into the shed. Fumbling in the dark he finally found the keyhole in the lab door. The concrete floor inside was slick. He took a step and skidded, lighting heavily on the back of his lap.

  For one horror-stricken moment Rudolf thought he had stepped on Tuchi or one of her offspring. Then
he felt the muck. It must have gotten tracked in here or spilled from one of the Irishman’s experiments. Muttering disjointed bits of the disaster-to-enemy curse, Rudolf stepped carefully back to the doorway where he could find the light switch.

  There was a path of silversheening mud from doorway to workbench. Rudolf ran his finger through it. It was just the normal muck that had made them rich. Beneath it he felt rough concrete. He wiped his hands and found the plastic jug. He smelled it, took a sip, and knew he had Flaherty’s unpatented garbage juice. It tasted good. He took another drink, then scuffed his foot thoughtfully through the aluminum muck-scum’ on the concrete.

  Whenever the wild Irishman got a package on he talked in riddles — some sort of mental shorthand that might make sense to another genetic engineer but was a holy mystery to Rudolf. He tried to remember what the Flaherty had said this evening. Somewhere amid all that blarney Rudolf was sure he had heard something important.

  He scuffed the muck again and took another drink. As his shoe rasped over rough concrete Rudolf remembered another bit from one of Flaherty’s impromptu lectures about bauxite and other alumina ores. He saw Flaherty’s pure culture alongside another half empty flask of the sexual variant he, Rudolf, had flysprayed over the empty pit this afternoon. Suddenly Rudolf knew St. Audrey’s new building was going to fall down just as the wild Irishman had prayed.

  CHAPTER 13

  It was important, he realized, to get the right bottle. He needed the sexual culture he had sprayed over the pit this afternoon. Rudolf hefted the flasks. He saw his bleeding madras loin cloth and the wrist and ankle ornaments fabricated from a feather duster. Might as well take them. He tasted the liquid in the plastic bleach jug again. Surely the Irishman was putting him on. Garbage squeezings couldn’t taste that smooth.

  He locked up the gate. Driving through the village, he knew Lillith and Flaherty would recognize the unmistakable blat of the unmuffled dump truck but… He’d be back before morning and he could tell them about it then. He took another tiny sip.