Hidden Variables

by Charles Sheffield

  THE SOFTEST HAMMER

  Fires fascinate me, always have. I had stopped to watch a big one in Silver Spring, and it was ten o'clock before I headed round the Beltway to Dave Bischoff's apartment.

  I was very late, but as it turned out I needn't have hurried. Some year we'll have to get organized, but until we do it's either feast or famine. Half the time four or five people bring manuscripts to read, other weeks we have nothing to do but play cards, drink, smoke, and swap the latest facts and rumors from New York.

  This was one of the dry weeks. The game of Hearts was going so well that I didn't get more than a look and a nod when I came in. I had to wait until the round ended with George Andrews dropping the Queen of Spades on Rich Brown in the last trick (poetic justice—Rich had given it to him on the pass). Then I put my beer in the icebox, found another chair, and got down to the serious business of dumping on George, who had been doing well all evening and was fifty points in the lead.

  "I'm late because I stopped to watch a fire," I explained, while George was shuffling and dealing.

  "House?" asked Rich. After a couple of beers he gets terser and terser. I think I can tell how long a meeting has been going just from Rich's words-per-minute statistics.

  I shook my head. "Apartment building, over in Silver Spring."

  There was silence for a few seconds, while everybody sorted their cards and decided what they would pass, then Jack Locke leaned back against the couch and looked across at me.

  "How many floors?" he asked.

  He's an odd duck, Jack is. You can never tell what he's going to say. Sometimes I blame the Scots accent that makes even normal statements come out sounding strange, but mostly I think it's inside his head. I thought for a moment.

  "About twelve floors, I'd say. The whole building went before I left. The fire trucks were there, but the hoses couldn't pump water in fast enough to stop the spread."

  Jack nodded, as though my statement confirmed some point he had been making. "Often the case, that is. D'yer know, half the fires in big buildings stay out of control just because the flow rate isn't big enough through the hoses?"

  "So what?" That was George, with a miffed look on his face. He takes his card games seriously, and he had just missed picking up the Jack of Diamonds. "They couldn't handle hoses bigger than the ones they have now—they'd be too heavy to move around."

  Jack nodded, and sipped his beer. "Aye, true enough. But d'yer know, a few years back I came this close"—he held up finger and thumb, an inch apart—"to having my hands on something that would have solved that problem. If things had worked out a bit differently, I'd be a multi-millionaire today."

  Nobody spoke, but George sniffed and I don't think it was allergies. About one meeting in four, Jack brings in a story for us to read and criticize. We tear them to pieces. He's one of these people who can tell a story over a beer in the most natural way in the world, but the typewriter does something to him and his written prose comes out like a bad marriage of Jacqueline Susann and Bertrand Russell. We keep telling him to write out some of the yarns he spins us, and then he gets mad and swears they're all the truth, not stories at all.

  George followed up on his sniff. "I presume this was after your experience with the hurricane down in the Caribbean?"

  Last time, Jack had told us of a treasure hunt with a British group, looking for sunk galleons on the Spanish Main. George had spotted an inconsistency in the range of Jack's ship, and he had pointed it out with considerable pleasure. Jack pointed out, with just as much pleasure, that he had been quoting tank capacities in Imperial gallons, natural for a British ship, and they are twenty percent bigger than U.S. gallons. It made his story possible—just.

  "After I got back from Trinidad, that's right," said Jack seriously. "I'd seen enough of the sea after that hurricane, so I took a job as a lab technician in a little town in upper New York State."

  George growled, but this time he didn't challenge. We've had some pretty odd jobs between us, and lab technician was one of the more mundane ones. It didn't compare with two years with a circus, or eight years in a mental hospital (as a nurse, not a patient). Myself, I've been a builder's laborer, a private tutor, a cook in a holiday camp, and a tour guide for European charter parties. Jack's in his early forties, but he must have had a different job every three months to explain all the places he says he's been and the people he's worked with.

  "I wouldn't think you'd get much fire-fighting in upper New York," said Dave from the kitchen. He'd dropped out of the game to make popcorn, and given Melanie his hand to play. "I wouldn't think you'd get much of anything up there. I spent a summer up in the Finger Lakes area when I was a kid, and it was the dullest place I've ever been in my whole life."

  "But that's because you were a kid," said Jack over his shoulder. He turned to the rest of us. "Who was it, Conan Doyle or Chesterton, who said there's more wickedness in the middle of the country than you'll find in the big cities? It didn't take me long to find out that was true. In a couple of weeks, I realized I was seeing the worst eternal triangle I'd ever run across."

  He was dealing out cards slowly, not looking up at us. When nobody spoke he knew he had us and went on. "It was an absolutely traditional set-up. Beautiful young wife, stuck away from the city life where she was brought up and looking for something a bit more exciting than she could find in Lundee, New York. And the two men, one of them tall, handsome and impressive, the other short, balding and nearsighted. Funny thing was, it was the handsome one, Vic Lakman, who was married to glamorous Ginny. And it was little Dieter, Dr. Dieter Mahler, who came in to seduce her and break up the happy home.

  "After you'd been around him for a few days you could see how Dieter Mahler could do it. He never thought for a moment that he was under-sized and funny looking. He was cheerful, very bright, and fascinated by women. He just assumed that they would find him as attractive as he found them. They might start out laughing at him, but pretty soon they would begin to accept him at his own evaluation. Surprising, isn't it, how much the view we hold of ourselves conditions the way that others view us?"

  "People must think you're wonderful, then," said George sourly. He had just picked up the first trick, and from his comment I thought that it might have the Queen of Spades in it. I decided to play the hand accordingly. (I was right, but it didn't help me much—I never win at cards.)

  Jack ignored George's acid.

  "Vic Lakman couldn't blame anybody but himself for Mahler's arrival in Lundee," he went on. "He and Dieter Mahler met at a conference in Atlanta on fire-fighting equipment, and Vic decided that it would be worth a lot to have Mahler come north for the summer. Did I mention to you that Vic Lakman's lab was doing research in fire-fighting?"

  "I missed it if you did," said Dave. He was back in the game, and the cards were beginning to grease up with the butter from the popcorn. We're a disgusting lot, we got through a deck a week that way. "What were they making, hoses?"

  Jack shook his head. "Chemicals. The stuff you put in fire extinguishers. And they were just getting into slippery water."

  He paused and looked around the table. "I suppose you all know what slippery water is, don't you?"

  There was a long silence, while we all waited for somebody else to be the first to admit ignorance. It rang a faint bell with me so I took a shot at it.

  "Isn't it the same as 'wet' water, water with detergents added to it to make it spread more quickly? I've seen that used at a couple of fires."

  "Not quite the same, but you're close." Jack paused and played a card with a look of deep concentration, then laid his hand face down on the table. "Slippery water has an additive, yer see, same as wet water does, but for a different reason. You use it to increase the amount of water that will pass through a hose. What you do is, you take a polyethylene oxide polymer and add about a pound of it to every four thousand gallons in the water tank. That's not much additive, but it lowers the viscosity and doubles the flow rate through the hose with no
increase in head pressure."

  Jack's always trotting out strings of facts like that, and we have a devil of a time contradicting him. As it happens, in this case I took the trouble next day to look up what he said in the 'Brittanica' that Linda bought me for my last Christmas present, and what Jack told us is quite true about slippery water. But I didn't know it at the time, and we all started to look at him and at each other, wondering if this was the point where he was beginning to stray away from the strict and absolute truth.

  Jack ignored the looks and took a big handful of popcorn.

  "Mahler was an expert on fire-fighting chemicals," he said in a corn-garbled voice. "Usually he taught at some rinky-dink college down in the south, and an upper New York summer must have been a rare treat for him. He turned up at the lab one day with his silver cigar case and his patent medicine for the gout, and Vic Lakman settled him into a little beach house by the side of the lake. That part of the State has lakes all over, thousands of them. The Lakmans had a nice bit of beach property, clean and private, and Dr. Mahler liked to have a quiet place to call his own. For what he got up to, he needed the privacy."

  Jack rubbed his hands on his pants and picked up his cards. "Vic Lakman was a big, handsome man with blond hair and a fair beard. Remember what George looked like when he grew a beard last year?"

  We nodded, and George looked self-conscious.

  "Well, that's what Lakman's beard was like. Except that on him it looked good.

  "He was a self-made man, somebody who grew up in Long Island City in the Greek or Italian section. I don't think that Lakman was his original name, he started out with something with a bit more of a spaghetti-and-garlic ring to it. But nobody in Lundee was going to suggest that to him. He had a tough reputation, and he'd come up a long way. Somewhere along the road to the top he'd collected Ginny and he was as proud, doting—and jealous—of her as a man can get. His work habits didn't show it much, because next to Ginny that lab was his pride and joy. He put in twelve-hour days, six days a week, and on Sunday he played golf with the bankers who were financing his expansion plans.

  "Ginny was a bird in a gilded cage. It took little Dr. Mahler about two seconds to see that and to make up his mind what he was going to do about it.

  "I was there the first time they met, one afternoon when I was cleaning up after a messy lab experiment. Ginny came by to see Vic, and she was wearing a pale pink sun dress, off the shoulder. As usual, Vic was off in one of his endless meetings, but I thought that Dieter was going to leap on her at first glance. Within five minutes of the first introduction he had her admitting that she missed access to swimming at the lake, now that he was living in the beach house, and a minute after that he had invited her to come out there, any time she wanted to, for a swim and maybe a drink. She smiled a little—she was about four inches taller than he was—and she thanked him, but she didn't commit herself one way or the other. I thought that was the end of it.

  "The following week, Vic sent me out to the beach house one afternoon to drop off some research papers that Mahler had asked for. He did a lot of his work, all the theory part, away from the lab, and only went in there when there were experiments to be done.

  "Dieter Mahler was in the outside shower when I got there. Lakman had installed a solar-heated water tank to feed the shower so when somebody came in from the beach—Lakman had imported tons of sand for that—they could take a warm rinse. Most people needed it, too, because that lake water was freezing.

  "The big water tank was up on the roof, up where it would catch the most sun, and when I got there I could hear Mahler, singing in a horrible cracked tenor inside the shower stall. And I was very surprised to find Ginny Lakman sunbathing on the beach, lying on a big pink air mattress about seven feet square.

  "She was quite a sight. Her little green bikini showed an even, all-over tan, and if she was pale in parts they must have been awfully private ones. I couldn't help goggling. Everything was in the right place, and there was plenty of it. I don't know when I last saw so much smooth, warm flesh. But I think the thing that I noticed most of all was the little heap of cigar ash next to the air mattress.

  "I dropped off the papers and left. It wasn't the sort of scene I wanted to tangle with. I'd seen Vic when he was angry, one day when he chewed me out for screwing up a telephone message he was supposed to get and didn't. What would he do if he thought his precious Ginny was playing the two-backed beast with Mahler? I didn't even want to think about it.

  "That was all I knew of it for another couple of weeks. At least they kept away from the lab, and I was too busy with the work there to stick my nose in where it wasn't wanted, whatever those two were up to."

  Jack paused. We all waited patiently while Dave examined his hand with excruciating care and at last played an apparently random card from it. I always feel that when Dave is stoned you can tell just what he will be like when he's a hundred years old. He gets slow, tremulous, and not quite all there.

  We watched while George dropped the Queen of Spades on Dave's lead, and Jack nodded knowingly.

  "Aye, you can go badly wrong if you don't watch what other people's hands are holding," he said. "That was Dieter Mahler's problem. He had his eye too much on Ginny, and he underestimated the way that Vic could work like a fiend at the lab and still keep his eye on her too. I didn't know it at first, but Dieter had set another lure for Vic Lakman, one that he expected would hold all his attention. The first I heard of it was late one afternoon, when they were sitting talking in the lab.

  " 'It won't be expensive to make,' Mahler was saying. He was puffing on one of his Pittsburgh stogies, and he had unbent far enough to loosen his tie a little. 'You'll need an initial investment in equipment, then it will get cheap. And it will be a lot better than any of the polymers we use now. Not just twice as good—a lot better.'

  "Vic Lakman was leaning across the bench towards him. He looked about twice as tall as Mahler, like a Viking god looming over a Nibelung dwarf. 'How good, Doctor?' he said. 'You're suggesting that I ought to invest a lot of money in new equipment, but how good will this new stuff be?'

  "Dieter Mahler waved his cigar in a circular smoke pattern. 'A hundred times as good as what we have now, at the very least. Probably more like a thousand times better. I assure you, it will revolutionize fire-fighting. Invest in this now, and in five years time we'll be the only people in the business.'

  "Lakman pulled a pad of paper over to him and began to scribble numbers. I don't think he saw his wife enter, or the quick look that passed between Ginny and Mahler. Nobody took much notice of me—low-priced lab technicians didn't seem to count in business or pleasure.

  " 'No good,' said Lakman when he finally finished figuring. 'According to this estimate, I'd have to find a hundred and fifty thousand for a working prototype plant. I can't do that without something to show people. Sure you didn't drop a decimal point somewhere?'

  "Mahler shrugged. 'What can I say? Error is always possible, and I can't prove I'm right unless we do some kind of small demonstration and make the new polymer. I could do that on a small scale for, oh, say five thousand. That would give us just a couple of pounds of it—but it would be enough to show off what it can do.'

  "Lakman crumpled his sheet of calculations up into a ball and looked around the lab—right through me, as I said I didn't count for much. He looked at Mahler again, then from him to Ginny. Finally he nodded. 'All right. I can find five thousand. How soon will you be done if you begin today?'

  " 'Two weeks,' said Mahler. Then, too cocky, he made what I thought might be a bad mistake. He added. 'I'll make this my top priority,' and he gave Ginny another quick look, one that was a good deal more direct and was probably meant to reassure her that one of his priorities wouldn't go any lower. She didn't blush, but not many women can do that after they reach thirty—even when they have a lot more to blush about.

  "Neither Mahler nor Lakman was going to tell me anything, of course, but it was obvious enough for me to p
iece it together for myself. Mahler had dreamed up some new super-additive, something that would make water really slippery. With that super-slippery water, a fire-fighting unit would be able to pump maybe a hundred times as much water through a hose with no extra equipment."

  "Now, just a minute, Jack," broke in George. He was looking pleased with himself. Just last week, Jack had told him that a story he had brought to be read was a piece of mindless flatulence. We don't pull punches in the group, but George thought that was going too far and he had been waiting to get even with Jack since then.

  "You're making up this whole thing," he said. "What you just said is a pure physical impossibility. It's absolute nonsense. Water has inertia, like everything else. There's no way you could increase flow without overcoming the inertia, and that would mean completely new equipment to pump the water."

  Jack looked at him gravely."You're quite right, George," he said. "I was overstating. It's not like me to exaggerate, and I'm glad you cut me off when I began to do it. What I meant was, all the work that you'd usually do againstfrictional forces would be avoided when you were pumping water through the hose. You would still have to accelerate the water, and if you were sending it up to a high floor you'd still have to give it enough speed to get it up there. Even so, Mahler's super-slippery water would make a huge difference—most of the problem with the high-velocity hoses comes from fighting the frictional losses—especially when you're using a very long hose.

  "Let me go on, and I'll make sure I don't exaggerate anything else. After the meeting with Lakman, Mahler began to come into the lab every day and stay until after midnight. He had a private room in the back, and he locked it when he went in and when he came out. It was easy enough to see how things were going in the experiments from the look on his face when he came out for coffee or to go to the John. Sometimes he'd walk right past me as though I didn't exist, and on other days he'd come out with his cigar lit, and he'd stop and chat and puff away, and swell up with satisfaction like a contented little rooster.