“Just a rumor. Some other D. B. Davis.”
The sales manager, Jack Galloway, said suddenly, “What are you doing now, Mr. Davis?”
“Not much. I’ve, uh, been in the automobile business. But I’m resigning. Why?”
“ ‘Why?’ Isn’t it obvious?” He swung around toward the chief engineer, Mr. McBee. “Hear that, Mac? All you engineers are alike; you wouldn’t know a sales angle if it came up and kissed you. ‘Why?’ Mr. Davis. Because you’re sales copy, that’s why! Because you’re romance. Founder of Firm Comes Back from Grave to Visit Brain Child. Inventor of the First Robot Servant Views Fruits of His Genius.”
I said hastily, “Now wait a minute—I’m not an advertising model nor a grabbie star. I like my privacy. I didn’t come here for that; I came here for a job...in engineering.”
Mr. McBee’s eyebrows went up but he said nothing.
We wrangled for a while. Galloway tried to tell me that it was my simple duty to the firm I had founded. McBee said little, but it was obvious that he did not think I would be any addition to his department—at one point he asked me what I knew about designing solid circuits. I had to admit that my only knowledge of them was from a little reading of nonclassified publications.
Curtis finally suggested a compromise. “See here, Mr. Davis, you obviously occupy a very special position. One might say that you founded not merely this firm but the whole industry. Nevertheless, as Mr. McBee has hinted, the industry has moved on since the year you took the Long Sleep. Suppose we put you on the staff with the title of...uh, ‘Research Engineer Emeritus.’ ”
I hesitated. “What would that mean?”
“Whatever you made it mean. However, I tell you frankly that you would be expected to cooperate with Mr. Galloway. We not only make these things, we have to sell them.”
“Uh, would I have a chance to do any engineering?”
“That’s up to you. You’d have facilities and you could do what you wished.”
“Shop facilities?”
Curtis looked at McBee. The chief engineer answered, “Certainly, certainly...within reason, of course.” He had slipped so far into Glasgow speech that I could hardly understand him.
Galloway said briskly, “That’s settled. May I be excused, B.J.? Don’t go away, Mr. Davis—we’re going to get a picture of you with the very first model of Hired Girl.”
And he did. I was glad to see her...the very model I had put together with my own pinkies and lots of sweat. I wanted to see if she still worked, but McBee wouldn’t let me start her up—I don’t think he really believed that I knew how she worked.
I HAD A GOOD time at Hired Girl all through March and April. I had all the professional tools I could want, technical journals, the indispensable trade catalogues, a practical library, a Drafting Dan (Hired Girl did not make a drafting machine themselves, so they used the best on the market, which was Aladdin’s), and the shoptalk of professionals...music to my ears!
I got acquainted especially with Chuck Freudenberg, components assistant chief engineer. For my money Chuck was the only real engineer there; the rest were overeducated slipstick mechanics...including McBee, for the chief engineer was, I thought, a clear proof that it took more than a degree and a Scottish accent to make an engineer. After we got better acquainted Chuck admitted that he felt the same way. “Mac doesn’t really like anything new; he would rather do things the way his grandpa did on the bonnie banks of the Clyde.”
“What’s he doing in this job?”
Freudenberg did not know the details, but it seemed that the present firm had been a manufacturing company which had simply rented the patents (my patents) from Hired Girl, Inc. Then about twenty years ago there had been one of those tax-saving mergers, with Hired Girl stock swapped for stock in the manufacturing firm and the new firm taking the name of the one I had founded. Chuck thought that McBee had been hired at that time. “He’s got a piece of it, I think.”
Chuck and I used to sit over beers in the evening and discuss engineering, what the company needed, and the whichness of what. His original interest in me had been that I was a Sleeper. Too many people, I had found, had a queezy interest in Sleepers (as if we were freaks) and I avoided letting people know that I was one. But Chuck was fascinated by the time jump itself and his interest was a healthy one in what the world had been like before he was born, as recalled by a man who literally remembered it as “only yesterday.”
In return he was willing to criticize the new gadgets that were always boiling up in my head, and set me straight when I (as I did repeatedly) would rough out something that was old hat...in 2001 A.D. Under his friendly guidance I was becoming a modern engineer, catching up fast.
But when I outlined to him one April evening my autosecretary idea he said slowly, “Dan, have you done work on this on company time?”
“Huh? No, not really. Why?”
“How does your contract read?”
“What? I don’t have one.” Curtis had put me on the payroll and Galloway had taken pictures of me and had a ghost writer asking me silly questions; that was all.
“Mmm...pal, I wouldn’t do anything about this until you are sure where you stand. This is really new. And I think you can make it work.”
“I hadn’t worried about that angle.”
“Put it away for a while. You know the shape the company is in. It’s making money and we put out good products. But the only new items we’ve brought out in five years are ones we’ve acquired by license. I can’t get anything new past Mac. But you can bypass Mac and take this to the big boss. So don’t...unless you want to hand it over to the company just for your salary check.”
I took his advice. I continued to design but I burned any drawings I thought were good—I didn’t need them once I had them in my head. I didn’t feel guilty about it; they hadn’t hired me as an engineer, they were paying me to be a show-window dummy for Galloway. When my advertising value was sucked dry, they would give me a month’s pay and a vote of thanks and let me go.
But by then I’d be a real engineer again and able to open my own office. If Chuck wanted to take a flyer I’d take him with me.
Instead of handing my story to the newspapers Jack Galloway played it slow for the national magazines; he wanted Life to do a spread, tying it in with the one they had done a third of a century earlier on the first production model of Hired Girl. Life did not rise to the bait but he did manage to plant it several other places that spring, tying it in with display advertising.
I thought of growing a beard. Then I realized that no one recognized me and would not have cared if they had.
I got a certain amount of crank mail, including one letter from a man who promised me that I would burn eternally in hell for defying God’s plan for my life. I chucked it, while thinking that if God had really opposed what had happened to me, He should never have made cold sleep possible. Otherwise I wasn’t bothered.
But I did get a phone call, on Thursday, 3 May 2001. “Mrs. Schultz is on the line, sir. Will you take the call?”
Schultz? Damnation, I had promised Doughty the last time I had called him that I would take care of that. But I had put it off because I did not want to; I was almost sure it was one of those screwballs who pursued Sleepers and asked them personal questions.
But she had called several times, Doughty had told me, since I had checked out in December. In accordance with the policy of the sanctuary they had refused to give her my address, agreeing merely to pass along messages.
Well, I owed it to Doughty to shut her up. “Put her on.”
“Is this Danny Davis?” My office phone had no screen; she could not see me.
“Speaking. Your name is Schultz?”
“Oh, Danny darling, it’s so good to hear your voice!”
I didn’t answer right away. She went on, “Don’t you know me?”
I knew her, all right. It was Belle Gentry.
VII
I MADE A DATE with her.
My first impulse had been to tell her to go to hell and switch off. I had long since realized that revenge was childish; revenge would not bring Pete back and fitting revenge would simply land me in jail. I had hardly thought about Belle and Miles since I had quit looking for them.
But Belle almost certainly knew where Ricky was. So I made a date.
She wanted me to take her to dinner, but I would not do that. I’m not fussy about fine points of etiquette. But eating is something you do only with friends; I would see her but I had no intention of eating or drinking with her. I got her address and told her I would be there that evening at eight.
It was a cheap rental, a walk-up flat in a part of town (lower La Brea) not yet converted to New Plan. Before I buzzed her door I knew that she had not hung onto what she had bilked me out of, or she would not have been living there.
And when I saw her I realized that revenge was much too late; she and the years had managed it for me.
Belle was not less than fifty-three by the age she had claimed, and probably closer to sixty in fact. Between geriatrics and endocrinology a woman who cared to take the trouble could stay looking thirty for at least thirty extra years, and lots of them did. There were grabbie stars who boasted of being grandmothers while still playing ingénue leads.
Belle had not taken the trouble.
She was fat and shrill and kittenish. It was evident that she still considered her body her principal asset, for she was dressed in a Sticktite negligee which, while showing much too much of her, also showed that she was female, mammalian, overfed, and underexercised.
She was not aware of it. That once-keen brain was fuzzy; all that was left was her conceit and her overpowering confidence in herself. She threw herself on me with squeals of joy and came close to kissing me before I could unwind her.
I pushed her wrists back. “Take it easy, Belle.”
“But, darling! I’m so happy—so excited—and so thrilled to see you!”
“I’ll bet.” I had gone there resolved to keep my temper...just find out what I wanted to know and get out. But I was finding it difficult. “Remember how you saw me last? Drugged to my eyebrows so that you could stuff me into cold sleep.”
She looked puzzled and hurt. “But, sweetheart, we only did it for your own good! You were so ill.”
I think she believed it. “Okay, okay. Where’s Miles? You’re Mrs. Schultz now?”
Her eyes grew wide. “Didn’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Poor Miles...poor, dear Miles. He lived less than two years, Danny boy, after you left us.” Her expression changed suddenly. “The frallup cheated me!”
“That’s too bad.” I wondered how he had died. Did he fall or was he pushed? Arsenic soup? I decided to stick to the main issue before she jumped the track completely. “What became of Ricky?”
“Ricky?”
“Miles’ little girl. Frederica.”
“Oh, that horrible little brat! How should I know? She went to live with her grandmother.”
“Where? And what was her grandmother’s name?”
“Where? Tucson—or Yuma—or some place dull like that. It might have been Indio. Darling, I don’t want to talk about that impossible child— I want to talk about us.”
“In a moment. What was her grandmother’s name?”
“Danny boy, you’re being very tiresome. Why in the world should I remember something like that?”
“What was it?”
“Oh, Hanolon...or Haney...or Heinz. Or it might have been Hinckley. Don’t be dull, dear. Let’s have a drink. Let’s drink a toast to our happy reunion.”
I shook my head. “I don’t use the stuff.” This was almost true. Having discovered that it was an unreliable friend in a crisis, I usually limited myself to a beer with Chuck Freudenberg.
“How very dull, dearest. You won’t mind if I have one.” She was already pouring it—straight gin, the lonely girl’s friend. But before she downed it she picked up a plastic pill bottle and rolled two capsules into her palm. “Have one?”
I recognized the striped casing—euphorion. It was supposed to be nontoxic and non-habit-forming, but opinions differed. There was agitation to class it with morphine and the barbiturates. “Thanks. I’m happy now.”
“How nice.” She took both of them, chased them with gin. I decided if I was to learn anything at all I had better talk fast; soon she would be nothing but giggles.
I took her arm and sat her down on her couch, then sat down across from her. “Belle, tell me about yourself. Bring me up to date. How did you and Miles make out with the Mannix people?”
“Uh? But we didn’t.” She suddenly flared up. “That was your fault!”
“Huh? My fault? I wasn’t even there.”
“Of course it was your fault. That monstrous thing you built out of an old wheelchair...that was what they wanted. And then it was gone.”
“Gone? Where was it?”
She peered at me with piggy, suspicious eyes. “You ought to know. You took it.”
“Me? Belle, are you crazy? I couldn’t take anything. I was frozen stiff, in cold sleep. Where was it? And when did it disappear?” It fitted in with my own notions that somebody must have swiped Flexible Frank, if Belle and Miles had not made use of him. But out of all the billions on the globe, I was the one who certainly had not. I had not seen Frank since that disastrous night when they had outvoted me. “Tell me about it, Belle. Where was it? And what made you think I took it?”
“It had to be you. Nobody else knew it was important. That pile of junk! I told Miles not to put it in the garage.”
“But if somebody did swipe it, I doubt if they could make it work. You still had all the notes and instructions and drawings.”
“No, we didn’t either. Miles, the fool, had stuffed them all inside it the night we had to move it to protect it.”
I did not fuss about the word “protect.” Instead I was about to say that he couldn’t possibly have stuffed several pounds of paper into Flexible Frank; he was already stuffed like a goose—when I remembered that I had built a temporary shelf across the bottom of his wheelchair base to hold tools while I worked on him. A man in a hurry might very well have emptied my working files into that space.
No matter. The crime, or crimes, had been committed thirty years ago. I wanted to find out how Hired Girl, Inc., had slipped away from them. “After the Mannix deal fell through what did you do with the company?”
“We ran it, of course. Then when Jake quit us Miles said we had to shut down. Miles was a weakling...and I never liked that Jake Schmidt. Sneaky. Always asking why you had quit...as if we could have stopped you! I wanted us to hire a good foreman and keep going. The company would have been worth more. But Miles insisted.”
“What happened then?”
“Why, then we licensed to Geary Manufacturing, of course. You know that; you’re working there now.”
I did know that; the full corporate name of Hired Girl was now “Hired Girl Appliances and Geary Manufacturing, Inc.”—even though the signs read simply “Hired Girl.” I seemed to have found out all I needed to know that this flabby old wreck could tell me.
But I was curious on another point. “You two sold your stock after you licensed to Geary?”
“Huh? Whatever put that silly notion in your head?” Her expression broke and she began to blubber, pawing feebly for a handkerchief, then giving up and letting the tears go. “He cheated me! He cheated me! The dirty shiker cheated me...he kinked me out of it.” She snuffled and added meditatively, “You all cheated me...and you were the worst of the lot, Danny boy. After I had been so good to you.” She started to bawl again.
I decided that euphorion wasn’t worth whatever it cost. Or maybe she enjoyed crying. “How did he cheat you, Belle?”
“What? Why, you know. He left it all to that dirty brat of his...after all that he had promised me...after I nursed him when he hurt so. And she wasn’t even his own daughter. That proves it.”
/>
It was the first good news I had had all evening. Apparently Ricky had received one good break, even if they had grabbed my stock away from her earlier. So I got back to the main point. “Belle, what was Ricky’s grandmother’s name? And where did they live?”
“Where did who live?”
“Ricky’s grandmother.”
“Who’s Ricky?”
“Miles’ daughter. Try to think, Belle. It’s important.” That set her off. She pointed a finger at me and shrilled, “I know you. You were in love with her, that’s what. That dirty little sneak...her and that horrible cat.”
I felt a burst of anger at the mention of Pete. But I tried to suppress it. I simply grabbed her shoulders and shook her a little. “Brace up, Belle. I want to know just one thing. Where did they live? How did Miles address letters when he wrote to them?”
She kicked at me. “I won’t even talk to you! You’ve been perfectly stinking ever since you got here.” Then she appeared to sober almost instantly and said quietly, “I don’t know. The grandmother’s name was Haneker, or something like that. I only saw her once, in court, when they came to see about the will.”
“When was that?”
“Right after Miles died, of course.”
“When did Miles die, Belle?”
She switched again. “You want to know too much. You’re as bad as the sheriffs...questions, questions, questions!” Then she looked up and said pleadingly, “Let’s forget everything and just be ourselves. There’s just you and me now, dear...and we still have our lives ahead of us. A woman isn’t old at thirty-nine...Schultzie said I was the youngest thing he ever saw—and that old goat had seen plenty, let me tell you! We could be so happy, dear. We—”
I had had all I could stand, even to play detective. “I’ve got to go, Belle.”
“What, dear? Why, it’s early...and we’ve got all night ahead of us. I thought—”
The Door Into Summer Page 12