Hard-Boiled Immortal
By Gene Doucette
GeneDoucette.me
Amazon Edition
Copyright © 2014 Gene Doucette
All rights reserved
Cover by Kim Killion, Hot Damn Designs
This book may not be reproduced by any means including but not limited to photocopy, digital, auditory, and/or in print.
The Immortal Chronicles: Hard-Boiled Immortal is one of an ongoing series of short stories written by Adam, the immortal narrator of Immortal and Hellenic Immortal. Look for more from Adam in future Chronicle stories, and get ready for the third book—Immortal at the Edge of the World—coming in October, 2014.
The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal At Sea (volume 1)
Adam's adventures on the high seas have taken him from the Mediterranean to the Barbary Coast, and if there's one thing he learned, it's that maybe the sea is trying to tell him to stay on dry land.
The Immortal Chronicles: Hard-Boiled Immortal (volume 2)
The year was 1942, there was a war on, and Adam was having a lot of trouble avoiding the attention of some important people. The kind of people with guns, and ways to make a fella disappear. He was caught somewhere between the mob and the government, and the only way out involved a red-haired dame he was pretty sure he couldn't trust.
The Immortal Chronicles: Immortal and the Madman (volume 3)
On a nice quiet trip to the English countryside to cope with the likelihood that he has gone a little insane, Adam meets a man who definitely has. The madman’s name is John Corrigan, and he is convinced he’s going to die soon.
He could be right. Because there’s trouble coming, and unless Adam can get his own head together in time, they may die together.
Hard-Boiled Immortal
I knew she was bad news the minute she walked into the bar.
She was a redhead. I always had a thing for redheads. One in particular, actually. She was dead, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t holding my breath for a second or two every time I saw another girl with red hair.
This one was very much alive, and once she walked in she was also the life of the room. Men I’d been serving drinks to for years, who smiled so little if you told me they had no teeth I would’ve believed it, lit up like a kid meeting the world’s cutest bunny.
The girl’s name was Lucy and she was there to see a buddy of mine, who we’ll call Al. That wasn’t his name, but Al turned out to be kind of important, and this story is kind of embarrassing for him, so even though he’s not around any more let’s stick with Al.
The redhead was either going to get him killed, or she was going to get me killed. I could tell right away. Call it gut instinct if you want, but I’m alive today because I know what bad news looks like as soon as I see it.
Also, she was a succubus.
* * *
The year was 1942, and there was a war going on.
I don’t like wars. I try to stay out of them whenever I can, and I give that same advice to other people as often as possible. I’ve even introduced myself that way a couple of times: hi, I’m whatever-my-name-is-in-this-era, nice to meet you and stay out of wars.
The people who most need to hear this advice almost never do.
Sometimes it’s impossible to stay out of a war, though, and there are a couple of reasons for that. For one thing, there have been so many it’s almost impossible to move around without stumbling across one from time to time. It’s hard to appreciate—from a modern perspective—how very often war broke out, especially if you were trying to make a living anywhere in Europe or Asia. I’m pretty sure whoever said war was politics by other means had it exactly backwards.
Another reason it’s sometimes impossible to stay out of war is every now and then the war is too big to stay out of. Like when they started calling them “world wars.” This is not to say there were places in the world unaffected by the first or second Big One, just that it was hard to get to those places, and it was difficult to know where those places might be in advance of the actual wars.
Chicago wasn’t such a place. I’d been in the Windy City on and off for twenty years, mostly because it was a decent place to drink. That was especially true during Prohibition, when you needed a city that was big enough and mean enough to support a decent collection of speakeasies if you wanted to get drunk in America and you weren’t a Kennedy or a Capone. You’re welcome to ponder the merits of trying to get drunk in the States when the States clearly preferred it if everyone got drunk elsewhere, and to be honest I don’t know why I stayed either. Maybe I just didn’t have the energy to move somewhere else.
Or it might have been that I stayed in Chicago because I had lost something there. The last time I saw the aforementioned redhead—the apparently dead one—she’d been on the far end of a dance floor in an illegal establishment that burned to the ground about ten minutes later. That was how I had arrived at the conclusion that she was no longer alive. It was a shame, because I’d only been looking for her for about ten thousand years, and you hate to see that sort of perseverance go to waste.
So I may have stuck around in Chicago as long as I did to see if I was wrong. Sure, I was pretty positive she didn’t make it out of that fire, but I never saw a body. Plus, it was a great excuse to spend all my spare time checking out redheads and hanging out in clubs.
But by ’42 I’d had enough of the wild life and had settled down into a monogamous relationship with a bar called Jimmy’s. Jimmy was an old prick of a guy, connected, but in a kind of polite way. He mostly used his family name when he wanted to make someone nervous about their bar tab, but that was about it. So he was a prick, but a pretty honest one.
Jimmy needed a night guy for his bar, someone who could close up whenever the last drunk weaved out the door, no matter what time that was. I could bartend well enough to pour booze, and as long as he didn’t mind if I drank on the job, everything was good. There was even a little space in the back where I slept after closing on nights when I didn’t get an invitation to sleep elsewhere. No shower, but there was a sink in the back and a Y up the street.
It was a sweet little arrangement for a guy who’d just as soon sleep in a bar anyway and didn’t harbor any particular ambitions beyond that, which described my entire existence for pretty much the last three quarters of the twentieth century.
* * *
It was at Jimmy’s that I made friends with Al, a mostly forgettable guy except that the stuff in his head was the kind of stuff you never end up forgetting even if you want to.
Al worked at the University of Chicago, but it wasn’t really clear if he worked for the university, based on some of the things he talked about after he’d had a few. Like “unlimited free energy”, which is what he used to shout after about five or six beers, sometimes toasting the ceiling. For the longest time nobody understood what he meant, because he never filled in the details, so we figured maybe he was talking about a new brand of coffee.
It bugged me enough to ask him what he meant by it, but most nights he’d just shake his head and say he couldn’t possibly explain.
My concern—because I’d heard this kind of talk before—was someone had sold him on a perpetual motion machine. I’d invested money in enough of those to know to stay away. Not that Al was someone I’d peg as a sucker for that sort of scheme. He was a chubby little prematurely balding guy that wore the kind of thick round glasses that made you think he was intelligent. And he was. Sure, I’d never seen him wear a suit that fit properly, he had a weird barking laugh and bad breath, and overall came across as a real goof. But when you talked to him and saw his eyes light up, you realized he lo
oked that way and dressed that way because he was too busy thinking about things nobody had ever thought of before to worry about anything else.
One night he made his usual toast to unlimited energy, and I asked him as I always did what he was going on about, and for whatever reason—maybe he’d had just the right number of beers, or maybe he just couldn’t keep it to himself any longer—he answered the question.
“Atomic power, Rocky,” he said. “That’s what I’m talking about.”
Rocky was the name I was using. It made more sense in the Twenties, I’ll be honest.
“Atomic,” I repeated back. “Like with the atom?”
“I know a fella named Adam,” said the slightly less drunk guy sitting next to Al. His name was Federico, and he wasn’t talking about me, he was talking about another Adam. I hadn’t started using the name yet.
“Not Adam, Freddie,” Al said.
“I get you,” I said. “Atom. The building block of matter.”
Al laughed. “Yes, yes, if you are Democritus that would be correct.”
I actually knew Democritus, but I wasn’t going to come out and say that. I first heard the word—and the idea—of the atom from Democritus’s own lips. I might have even been standing next to him when he invented the concept, I couldn’t remember. There was lots of wine involved.
“So, atoms aren’t the building block of matter, you’re saying.”
“Blocks, you mean like bricks?” Federico offered. “Hey everyone, Al figured out how to get energy out of bricks!”
“What, is he eating ‘em?” Someone shouted from the other end of the room. Everyone laughed.
Let me back up and set the scene, because they don’t make many places like Jimmy’s any more. This was a poorly lit dive bar that was just about exactly as seedy as possible in a time before enforced health inspections and fire codes. The permanent cloud of smoke that hung over the room was so thick the bare bulb light fixtures had almost no chance. There was sawdust on the floor that was mostly there so nobody slipped on spilled drinks, the walls were too thin to keep the cold from the winters out, and there were nights when the rats outnumbered the people. Most importantly—and this was sort of nice—pretty much everybody there knew everybody else there at least well enough to borrow money from and call an asshole when such a thing was necessary.
The general feeling about Al, among the patrons, was that he was a decent guy. Maybe a little weird, and not the person you want next to you in a fight, but decent. And clearly he was the smartest guy there. This commanded a kind of respect that kept him out of most of the fisticuffs that might be considered ordinary in this sort of setting. And if it didn’t—if someone decided to give him some trouble—I’d get involved, and by this time everyone there had a decent sense that it was a bad idea to get me involved. I commanded respect too, but a different kind.
“I am not eating bricks, thank you!” Al said, in response to what was some good-natured ribbing. “All right, all right, I will explain.”
“Everybody shut up,” Freddie said, “he’s gonna explain.”
“But all of you have to keep this under your hats because it’s important but it is also secret.”
There was a collective ooooooh from the room. Nobody there could think of any reason a guy who worked at the university would need to keep secrets, important or otherwise, but because this was the most interesting thing going on that night—nobody was loudly mad at their wife or had a beef with a local boxer, a horse, or a sports team—we tried to humor him. Sure, the war could pop up again as a topic of conversation at any time, but it was the topic everywhere, so nobody really wanted to bring it up if they didn’t have to. Sometimes they did have to. Sometimes someone’s kid was in a bad place and we had to talk about it.
But this night was for atoms and how to break them.
It’s pretty much impossible to explain even a simple thing to a barroom of drunk laborers, so Al didn’t have an easy time of it. The average education level in the place—once you took Al out—was somewhere short of high school, and I’m not even counting me. I never went to school of any kind, but I got extra credit for being around when everything they taught in schools was invented.
This isn’t to say I understood all that he told us either, but I came a little closer than most.
“So the C here, that’s what again? The speed of light?” A guy named Vinnie, who I was pretty sure broke other people’s fingers for a living, was the one asking. He was holding up a napkin with Einstein’s equation written on it, and shouting from the other side of the bar. For most of the evening Al had been jotting things down on napkins and passing them around because we were short on blackboards.
“That’s right, Vin,” Al confirmed. His mini-lecture had already gone past Einstein, but I might have been the only one clear on that.
“Light has a speed? How come?”
“It just does. And it’s a big number.”
“Like what, in miles per hour?”
“Yes, like in miles per hour.”
“Hey, that’s a good question,” a Polish longshoreman named Henryk said.
“I’m nearly positive it isn’t,” Al said.
“No, no, hear me out.” He grabbed the napkin from Vinnie. “So I get this. Mass is the size of a thing, right? And the speed of light is a really large number, so what you’re saying is you add the mass and the speed of light together, plus the two, and that’s an even bigger number, and that’s how much energy there is in this lump of mass.”
Al had been all the way up to chain reactions, but at this question he was about ready to cry.
“You almost have it, Henny,” I said. “Except when you put the numbers together like that you’re multiplying them and not adding them. And the two means it’s square. Right, Al?”
“Yes, Rocky, thank you.”
“What is a square?”
“A thing with four corners, Hen!” someone shouted from in back.
“C squared means it’s C times C, so the whole thing on the right is Mass times the speed of light times the speed of light. So it’s a really big number.”
Al jumped in. “The point being, to break the bond of an atomic nucleus is to convert a portion of the mass contained therein to energy, and the energy being released is tremendous. Does this make sense?”
Henryk and Vinnie were both nodding like it really did make sense. “So here is the good question,” Hennie said. “Does it release even more energy in Europe?”
“No,” Al said. “Why would it?”
“Because they use kilometers there! A kilometer is smaller than a mile, so the speed of light in kilometers per hour would be an even bigger number.”
* * *
After that, Al pretty much gave up trying to explain the idea of free energy to the guys at the bar, other than me. I was always eager to hear more, and I understood most of the ideas he was bouncing around pretty well when he kept the math out of it, which he tried to do.
We developed this conversational approach where he’d explain something in a way I could understand, and then he’d have to stop and try to prove what he said was a real thing. I didn’t need the proof, but he seemed to think it was important, which meant writing stuff down on more napkins. When he was done he’d hand me the napkin, I’d nod a few times, and either throw it away or hand it off to anyone else who looked curious. There was no way we were going to grasp the point he was making on those napkins, but it made him feel better to draw it out. Plus I think three or four of the times he was explaining something to me he ended up figuring out a thing he hadn’t understood before, so I like to think I was helping.
I’m usually a huge fan of science. There have been some times when I’ve been dubious, like when someone doing something scientific decides to lock me up, and then I’m not so pleased. But that doesn’t happen often, and since basically every last creature comfort modern people now take for granted came from someone performing an act of science, overall I’m pretty happy with
what’s come out of the discipline. I’m not even talking about the big inventions like cars and television and radio. Sure, those are great, but after the wheel I think the modern world was founded on indoor plumbing and flush toilets, and someone had to invent those too.
I was pretty positive the things Al had been talking about were even more important than toilets. I knew next to nothing about electricity, but I knew there were power plants in the world that produced that electricity. What he was describing sounded a lot like an improvement on anything already going on, which is what you’d think too if someone said they could power a city just by stacking a certain kind of metal in the right order. So I kept on digging for more details, and he kept giving them to me, up until the day he told me he couldn’t any more.
But before he got to that, he had to tell me about the girl he’d just met. That these two things came together did not escape my attention.
“You have to meet her, Rocky. She’s something else,” Al said. “I mean it, she’s a straight knockout.”
“Is she now.”
“I know you’re thinking a guy who looks like me doesn’t land a knockout, but my Lu-Lu, she loves me for my brains.”
“That’s something you’ve got plenty of. Lu-Lu?” I was pretty sure my buddy’s standards were low when it came to attractiveness in women, only because he wasn’t what I’d call handsome, so he was right about my skepticism. I also wondered if, with a name like that, the girl was Asian.
“It’s Lucy. She likes it when I call her Lu-Lu. She’s gonna come round, so you can meet her.”
“Here? You should think about bringing her someplace nice. Someplace clean, maybe. Even the rats think twice about this bar.” Bringing a girl he thought was pretty into a barroom full of guys who didn’t know what tact was, was a bad idea, but I didn’t say that.
“I’m telling you, it’s love. I want you to meet her. I told her about you.”
Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) Page 1