A Stranger in Paradise

by Edward M. Lerner

  My visitor didn’t seem to have noticed my pause. “I’m Cheryl’s cousin, Clay. Clay Hartwick, Jr. Shucks, you’re family, sorta. Call me Clayboy, same’s every at home does.”

  Okay then, not Bubba. Gumbie. I had Gumbie in my waiting room.

  We adjourned, at my suggestion, to the inner sanctum. Surely a genuine client was no less likely to put in an appearance than Gumbie, and I was not about to risk being called cousin in front of any possibly fee-bearing client. You could have knocked me over with a feather when it turned out that Clay was a possible client.

  “Sorry ’bout parking in your spot. I didn’t wanna get my invention wet. Any wetter. Cheryl said you wuz a lawyer. I kinda thought you could get me a patent.”

  Were troglodytes patentable? I guessed that wasn’t what he meant. Anyway, assuming he could afford my legal fee, I was prepared to overlook a few things. One of the things I was willing to ignore was that I hadn’t been admitted to patent practice. After all, what’s family for?

  “Really,” I said cheerfully. “An invention. What does it do?”

  My visitor lit up. Chances were the good ole boys in them West Virginny hills didn’t provide much encouragement. “It separates trash. Anything you want, it just pulls that part right outta the rest.” He took a deep breath, preparatory to who knew what boring detail.

  I hastened to interrupt, my mind having found an alternative topic almost instantaneously. “About my fee, Clay.” Well, what about it? Consider that ugly truck . . . how much could he possibly afford? “If I decide there’s anything to your invention, I’ll represent you. If things work out, we’ll split the take. If they don’t work out, well, you won’t owe me anything. Fair?”

  “Sure is.” He’d taken in that deep breath now; I sensed that nothing under forty-five caliber would stop him. “I don’t read much, ya know, but I bought a few books cheap when the school libary”—sorry, that’s how he said it—“sold off a buncha old texts. One of ’em was about, um, thermo, you know, thermodynamos.”

  Thermodynamos, huh? Even I know the subject is called thermodynamics. It appeared that there wasn’t much chance of a healthy contingent fee here. Might as well get it over with, I thought. “Why don’t you show me?”

  We rode the elevator down to the garage level. His pick-up truck still squatted in my parking spot, a padlocked wooden box occupying the flatbed at the rear. I’d assumed it was for tool storage. This time, looking closer, I saw it had two locked openings—one at each end. Strange.

  Clay, meanwhile, had disappeared. Clattering from the general direction of the communal dumpster behind the next-door apartment complex suggested where I might logically go look for him. I didn’t: Three very warm days had passed since the last trash collection. He returned in a moment with a torn plastic sack of exceptionally ripe refuse. I backed away when he held it out for my inspection. “If you’ve seen one bag of garbage, you’ve seen them all.”

  “Okay.” He unlocked one door of the mystery box and began sprinkling in his scavenged materials. Peering over his shoulder while holding my breath, I saw only the wooden compartment that was gradually filling with refuse. Eventually, I had to breathe; I found that relocking the door hadn’t abated the stench much. He unlocked another door at the opposite side of the box. “Whatcha see in here?”

  I peeked in warily. Beyond the door, about half way across the box, was a partition whose only feature was an ant-sized black speck. The compartment itself was empty. The chambers at the two ends, as best as I could judge, accounted for the total volume of the wooden box. “Nothing.”

  “Good.” He locked this door, too. “Now think of aluminum.” He closed his eyes, as if this would somehow help his concentration. The air seemed to thicken about us. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. At some unknown signal he opened his eyes. “Okay, it’s done.” Clay unlocked the second door. “See if’n there’s anything in there now.”

  Feeling foolish, I reached inside. To my surprise, there was something in the previously empty compartment. My hand, when it reappeared, held a small but shiny ingot of what looked to be a few soda cans’ worth of aluminum.

  Once I lifted my jaw off the none-too-sanitary garage floor, I made Clay do several more demos. A lot more interested now, I named the materials to be sorted from the trash. Chances were astronomically in favor of this being some kind of a parlor trick. Problem was, little blobs of tin, plastic (I’d asked for PVC, not that I’ve have known it from plastic explosives), and glass had been materialized on command. Meanwhile, the source-side trash kept compacting as stuff was supposedly extracted from it.

  “Thermodynamos, you say?” I finally offered weakly.

  That was all the opening Clay needed. “Right. Ya see, I was flipping through this here used thermodynamos book when I came across a pitcher of a demon. Cute little fella, ya know? Forked tail and horns, jes like on the kind you wouldn’t wanna meet, but Max had a pleasant little face.”

  “Max? The demon had a name?”

  Clay’s neck turned purple. I guessed the color would’ve been red if he had been less grimy. “Cheryl did say you was sharp as a pitchfork. Hah, hah. No, I jes call him that. The book called him ‘Maxwell’s demon.’ I never did catch on who Maxwell was.”

  I glanced out of the garage. The rain was coming down in sheets, even heavier than when I’d dashed inside. The few cars creeping down the street had their headlamps on in a seemingly vain attempt to light their way. It was weather only a personal-injury lawyer could love. “What about Max?”

  The purple in Clay’s neck deepened a bit; I gathered this part of his story must’ve earned him a few yucks before now at the County Store. “Max sits in this here closed box, ya see, right at the wall that divides it into two parts. There’s a little door where he perches.”

  “What little door? I didn’t see one.”

  “Didja see a dot?”

  “Well, yes,” I admitted.

  “That’s Max’s door. He has this, like, tennis racquet that he swings at the molly-cules as they go by him. If’n he sees one kinda molly-cule, Max sends it to one side of the inner wall, otherwise, he sends it to the other side of the wall. Afore ya know it, all of one kind of molly-cule are on one side. The thermodynamos book talked about separating hot molly-cules from cold ones that way. Having Max take the good stuff outta trash was my idear.” He smiled at me, somehow shyly, as if he were waiting for my approval. Perhaps he was.

  My mind’s eye suddenly beheld a landfill; it was brimming over. Every day there are stories in the paper about landfills running out of space, about barges and trains roaming the world to find a place to dump refuse. Someone’s always quoted in these articles pushing recycling, and then someone else gets quoted about how expensive that is. Wouldn’t it be neat if . . . Don’t be ridiculous, I silently lectured myself. Demons?

  Something interrupted my daydreaming. I queried my on-duty ear: Was it an ambulance siren? No, it assured me. That left Clay. “What was that?”

  The big lummox smiled shyly at me once more. “Gramma Hartwick— she’s Cheryl’s gramma, too—has the Gift. I have a touch of it, jes like Cheryl does.”

  I could hear the capital letter in Gift. While I’d learned, if only too late, that my ex could be a bit of a witch, I’d never felt she needed any supernatural assistance. Perhaps that wasn’t how Clay meant it. “The Gift?” My question came out rather skeptically.

  He studied his boot-tip instead of meeting my eye. “The Gift of conjuring up demons.”

  * * *

  Clay, it turned out, did have some sort of Gift—only he could make the gadget work. I made him lift the box out of his truck so I could look underneath it for more trap doors. Nothing. He set it onto the garage floor, and it still worked. I went back to my office for a controlled sample of trash, in which I hid one of my lucky silver dollars. Its mate went into my pocket. Clay looked at me strangely when I
asked for silver, but did his thing again. The gizmo dutifully coughed up a silvery wad of metal that seemed to weigh the same as the coin from my pocket.

  “Cousin,” I said, smiling with the most heartfelt sincerity. “I believe that I get can you something even better than a patent.”

  Clay’s Gift apparently did not extend to making money. This was serious, since we needed a large enough stake to look respectable when we approached our potential customers. I, too, was monetarily embarrassed at this point—except for the Porsche. With an inward sigh, I resigned myself to its loss. Once we made our score, I could have a different car for every day of the week.

  After paying off my car loan, the sale proceeds got us both new suits —the custom-made King-Kong sized one was far from cheap—and a week’s rental on a shiny new SUV. After hoisting the prototype of Recyclemaster Deluxe (like that?) into the rented sport ute, we were ready to visit potential clients.

  As a marketing trial, I sent out one aluminum ingot, along with a brief message that it had been recycled “virtually for nothing” from garbage. Our target, at Clay’s suggestion, was Gigabuck Metals Corporation. Gigabuck must have called even before the mailman had left their lobby—they made a lot of money selling aluminum. A Mr. Hoyt Chillingham III, it seemed, wished to discuss our recycling process. “Would tomorrow be convenient?”

  I thought about the $1.98 or so left in my pocket. “Tomorrow,” I decided, “will be fine.”

  Chillingham III’s office seemed large enough for a Par 3 golf course. The plush carpet may even have been chosen with that eventuality in mind. My toes, imprisoned in rigid new wingtips, yearned to wriggle in that luxuriant pile.

  I had a hard enough time not gawking; there was no point in attempting to restrain Clay. He trundled along behind me, pushing the Recyclemaster Deluxe on its hand truck. Three coats of bright red enamel paint now covered the plywood box. Max, he had assured me, was ready to be called forth. Clay parked the box beside the desk, in the shade of a rubber tree.

  Chillingham pumped my hand vigorously, then Clay’s. The executive’s eyebrows rose in surprise when Clay gave him the squeeze. “Glad you could stop by.” He briefly studied his injured right hand, then massaged it with his left. “I assume this is your invention.”

  I nodded. “Perhaps you’d like a demonstration?”

  To make a long story short—keep it to yourself if you think that ship has already sailed—Chillingham’s eyes goggled like a bug’s when Clay and Max put on their show. A very well-to-do bug, I hasten to add. Well-prepared, too: He’d had three twist-tied bags of refuse ready for the trial.

  Chillingham pulled his eyes back into their sockets with studied professionalism. “So, Mr. Hartwick, I understand you’re interested in selling your process.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Clay’s asked me to handle the negotiations,” I offered smoothly, visions of sugar daddies dancing in my head.

  Chillingham’s arm swept grandly around Clay’s shoulders. “We don’t need any middlemen, do we, son?” His voice dripped sincerity. “That would just slow things down.”

  In response to Clay’s answering smile, I played what I hoped was my trump card. “Let’s not move too fast, cousin.”

  It seems I hadn’t paid enough attention to the bidding: I’d misunderstood what suit was trump. Blood may be thicker than water, but something cried out to Clay’s soul even louder.

  That something was—land.

  Since that day in Chillingham’s office, I’ve had time to cool off. Time to think things through. Time to meditate. As a result of that reflection, I discovered, once more, a lesson painfully learned through my experience with Cheryl.

  I rediscovered that I was an idiot.

  My ex had taken me to the cleaners in divorce court. Two years ago, I’d written that experience off to her good fortune in finding a lawyer even less scrupulous than myself. That wasn’t very likely, I’d figured, but it could happen. People do get struck by lightning, after all.

  If only she had been.

  Anyway, I digress. About Clay . . .

  Clay was like his cousin—calculating. Never mind the overalls and shit kickers and suddenly vanished Beverly Hillbillies accent: He’d been one step ahead of me all the way to Gigabuck Metals.

  His gadget worked, all right, certainly well enough to be worth Gigabuck taking it off the market. He hadn’t conned me there. Where Clay had gotten me was in knowing ahead of time what he wanted: the ancestral lands. Ten thousand acres of scrub pine forest struggling to grow around a badly reclaimed strip mine.

  Still, in his own way, Clay was a man of honor. He did offer me my half: the downhill five thousand acres. I swallowed hard and drove out with him to see it. Huge piles of mine tailings loomed over my proposed new domain, one big rainfall away from a mudslide. To make my day complete, Cheryl had appeared at the site to witness my decision.

  A little after the fact, I did my own homework. There was no market for that land. No one but a Hartwick would want the place. I accepted Clay’s consolation buyout offer for my five thousand acres, and left.

  The cousins were still laughing when I drove off.

  This story ends as it began, with rain falling in buckets. Even on high speed, my windshield wipers couldn’t begin to keep up with the load. Through sheets of water streaming down the glass, a traffic light stares balefully at me like a giant red eye. My radio is unequal to the storm. I turn it up.

  Cheer up, goes the old joke. Things could be worse. And sure enough . . .

  I turn off the radio with a snarl, damn near twisting off the knob. It seems that there’s been a major mineral find in West Virginia. Molybdenum. Guess on whose property.

  In my mind’s eye I see them, still laughing.

  In their own way, the Hartwicks have honor. When I’d adamantly objected to taking my half of the settlement in land, Clay made me one more offer. It involved his only other asset.

  As the traffic light turned green, I throw the truck into gear.

  You can call me Bubba.

  SMALL BUSINESS

  The blue shirt moved out of the holo at a glacial pace, as though sliding to the left down a very sticky inclined plane—not that, in microgee, any plane inclined more than any another. Just as a hint of the objective finally appeared, the bored technician, to the soft zzzp noise of Velcro parting, sidled in front of the camera. Sweat-stained denim once again filled the scene.

  There went an hour’s slow progress.

  “Damn,” Jason Grimaldi muttered. He batted aside a floating clipboard. His companions shushed him, although the only sound accompanying the video at that moment was the whirrr of a ventilation fan. Jason studied the wrinkled garment for clues to the nearest side of the obstruction.

  “Should we wait? He might step back.” The comment was a vintage Bill-ism. Jason did not get how someone who always hoped for the best became a revolutionary.

  Jason nudged a joystick. “Too risky, with the batteries so low. I won’t make a bet on how he’ll next move, either. I’m going for altitude.” Most rooms in the space station had an orientation, even when nothing but convention distinguished floor from walls from ceiling.

  The view in the holo display crept upward. A frayed collar came into view, then a neck. The nightshift stuckee needed a new uniform and a haircut. Channeling Bill, Jason hoped the sloppiness denoted lax discipline. They needed all the help they could get.

  Moving to either side of the neck would bring their objective into view the fastest—unless the tech moved again. Checking the power readout, Jason rejected the gamble. The gauge was approaching redline; they might not recover from another setback. So: onward and upward.

  It would be minutes until they could see over the man’s head. Jason stretched tense muscles as best he could. At two meters and almost a hundred kilos, he overflowed the standard-sized command seat. The bridge,
alas, offered no room for pacing.

  In the holo, salt-and-pepper hair gave way to shiny scalp. The target peeked at them through sparse wisps.

  The batteries were down to two percent.

  “Increase the focal length,” Sherry suggested.

  The hair in the foreground softened to a blur; details of equipment across the room became maddeningly almost discernible. Jason panned. The image vibrated as though, as though . . . As though what? The camera platform’s steady pace was not the problem—computers compensated for that. Jason gnawed on a pencil stub, staring at the fuzzy picture. Vibration? Why would there be . . .?

  Uh-oh. He cranked up the volume of the audio pickup. What was that tone beneath the ubiquitous fan noise? The microphone must be very near an unsuspected air vent to capture the bass rumbling of a duct. Too near.

  Target and technician alike spun from sight as Jason lunged for the joystick. For a time, the image tumbled too quickly for digital correction. The scene finally resolved into an ant’s-eye view of the console shelf onto which air currents had delivered the ’bot. The speaker emitted zzzps Jason had no problem identifying: approaching footsteps. Over the tearing sounds came a disgusted voice: “I hate bugs.”

  They glumly watched the descent of a bent-double sheaf of printout.

  Six months earlier, Jason would never have expected to end up a revolutionary either. Comfortably settled at K-State, he pursued his studies with monomania and a few close friends. When the mood was right, he and his university buddies might rail against the injustices of life. Why not? Griping was free, and a way to let off steam.

  Still, Jason listened more than he griped. His parents drove FedEx trucks. No matter what those boxes contained, delivery could only happen locally. He gave little thought to where the goods in those boxes were made. Preoccupied with his dissertation research, his material needs were few. His stipend as a graduate assistant paid the rent, and he tutored for mad money.