Short fiction complete, p.97
Short Fiction Complete, page 97
“But even so . . .”
“And we’d like to have something left after the tax mob’s skimmed it,” Mick said. That, at least, was something Bascomb would understand.
“But so much. So much.”
“What would you pay for a year at Fort Knox with a shovel?” Mick asked. “Look. Considering what it is and what you’ll get from it, that’s cheap.”
“It’s not that simple,” Bascomb protested. “Our production cost includes all sorts of investment in production facilities. Those costs won’t just vanish because we’ve changed our source of supply. Here: just for example, we own seventeen ore boats in the Great Lakes. Not one is fully depreciated. We have long-term leasing arrangements on nine more. This . . . this magic trick of yours—”
“It’s no trick,” Mick said. “Perhaps,” Bascomb snapped. “Nevertheless, whatever it is, it would render those ships obsolete. And they would be virtually useless for any other purpose. Yet the costs of having built them or leased them would continue whether we continued to use them or not. Not to mention the taxes. Similarly with our mining equipment—our costs of developing the mines themselves! And our taconite plants! Our furnaces!
We have millions and millions tied up in that equipment.”
“Swallow hard,” Mick said. “One way or another, you’ll have to write those costs off. If you don’t, you’ll have the bankruptcy court doing it. Now, are you interested in the services we’re offering? Or are you interested?”
Bascomb subsided into his chair. “I think, before I make any sort of commitment, I should consult with my staff.”
Mick shrugged. “Fair enough. Just show ’em my little demonstration there and tell ’em the deal. And while you’re doing that I’ll take a stroll down the street and talk to some people. Lots of people going to be interested in a deal like this.”
On his way out, he glanced back once. Bascomb was still slumped behind his desk, watching the mound of iron shards slowly build. He looked very grey and very old.
Back at his hotel, a message slip was waiting. Chug wanted him to phone. Mick stuffed the note in a pocket and went to lunch. If Chug wanted him bad enough, he’d call again. If it was urgent, he’d have somebody go sit in front of the door.
She favored her mother, Terry did, which was just as well considering what her father looked like; not that he’d looked like that when he married her mother, but he’d not been exactly a Greek god, either. Lacking words, Mick fiddled with his pipe, packing the tobacco tight without getting it too tight, then cracking the head off the kitchen match with a thumbnail and dabbing the flame over the pipe bowl until it was burning evenly. He made no move to pick up the menu the waiter had left beside his napkin.
“Dad . . .?”
“Uh?”
“Ma said to tell you you work too hard.”
“So? What else I got to do?”
Her head tilted just enough to say she’d thought about it and she had some answers. “Go fishing? Lie on a beach someplace? Tennis? Golf?”
“Calling it something else doesn’t make it not work.”
“Lying on a beach? That’s work?”
“For me,” Mick said, “it’s work. That all she’s got to say?”
“No. But that’s all I’m going to tell you.” She’d got a job with a trade journal that focused on manufacturing processes. She didn’t use half of what the university had taught her about engineering because nobody, to look at her, thought she’d want to dirty her hands. But she could tell the difference and relative advantages between casting and extrusion and sintering; cermets and plastic, paper sandwitches, and a thousand alloys; and when a word processor developed jittering logorrhea four hours before an issue went to bed, she troubleshot it herself, patched a compatible (but better) chip into the circuits, reprogrammed, and finished the assignment with forty-three minutes to spare. Time enough to do her nails.
The waiter came back with her sherry and his double Irish. He ordered the stuffed pork chops; she ordered a salad.
“Dad, you’re up to something,” she said when the waiter had gone.
“Always was. Always will be. Who says so?”
She made a flutter of the fingers that conjured up a vision of butterflies. “It’s all around, like water to fish.”
Mick humphed. “Well, if everybody says so, must be they know something.”
“All they know is they don’t know enough. They’re wondering what it is.”
“You included?”
“Of course me included. I’m the one everybody asks.”
He sampled his Irish and thought about it.
“Well?” she prompted.
He shook his head. “If it works, you’ll be the daughter of the richest man in the world. You won’t have to work for a living.”
“I don’t,” she said. “Dad, why bother? You’ve got enough. You don’t have to wheel and deal. All the trouble you have with Ma, that’s the reason for it.”
“Sit in a lawn chair and clip coupons?”
She’d started to pick up her wine glass; she put it down again. “Dad, you send Ma her check every month, and it’s more than she knows what to do with. She sends me some of it. And you send me a check. You don’t need more than you’ve got. What do you want any more for?”
“You said you don’t need to work,” Mick said. “So why do you?”
She started to speak but no words came out. She leaned back, composed herself, tried again. “I guess mostly to show I can do it.” She spoke as if it was a truth she’d never looked in the eye before.
Mick nodded, smiled. “Should I be different?”
She was quiet a moment. Her hand reached for her glass, but she did not take it up. “I think that’s what Ma was talking about,” she said.
Mick grunted. There was a nerve there he hadn’t known he had. “Tell your ma a leper doesn’t change his spots. They just get bigger.”
His fame had got to the offices of Transcontinental Light and Power ahead of him. When Mick was admitted to the Presence, two grey, hollow-jowled men were waiting with Spencer Fiske. All three watched with wary suspicion while Mick assembled his dingus on the collapsible plant stand he’d brought. When it was ready he straightened up. “Got a wastebasket?”
No status-conscious executive would admit to lacking one, though Fiske’s contained only a few scraps off a doodle pad. Mick inspected it; hand-tooled leather, or a very good imitation. Good solid bottom. It ought to work just fine. Holding it out to one of the underlings, he said, “Put some water in it. Three quarters full.”
The man had already accepted the basket. Now he looked blank.
“Water,” Mick repeated. “W-A-T-E-R. Wet stuff. People wash their hands in it. Take baths. Some people drink it when there’s nothing better.”
“Mister Fiske?” the man appealed.
“The washroom’s just down the hall, George,” Fiske said. As George went out, Fiske turned to Mick. “Perhaps if you’d explain what you intend to show us . . .”
“Rather just show you,” Mick said.
“That way we don’t argue how much you saw and how much I told you to see.”
Fiske’s only response to that was a stony eye. The silence held until George returned with the wastebasket. It sloshed and slopped and dribbled on the carpet.
“I think it’s leaking a little,” George said.
“That’s all right,” Mick said. It wasn’t his carpet. He turned a thumb toward the open space between the legs of his plant stand. “Right there,” he instructed.
George looked to Fiske, who only nodded. Getting down on his knees, George tried to work the basket in between the plant stand’s legs. Finally, Mick took pity on him and lifted the stand and set it down again straddling the basket. George blinked up at him; himself, he’d never have thought of it.
For Mick it was back to work. With a plumb bob and a tape measure he set to checking what his vector and distance settings should be. Just to be sure. He made a show of it. While Fiske and company watched in dumb silence, he scribbled figures on the back of one of the doodle pad sheets and did more arithmetic than was absolutely necessary. “What’s twenty-three divided by seven?” he asked. He scribbled some more. “Never mind. I got it.”
He checked his figures against the dial settings. He fiddled with one of them, then checked the doodle pad sheet again. Only when he had everything perfect did he hook up the battery and punch the button. Anticlimactically, nothing obvious happened.
“Well?” Fiske asked.
Mick opened the spigot. After a moment a dribble of water came out. It splashed on the plant stand’s framework and spattered on the floor. Mick ignored the protests. Quickly but with care—a live congruency wasn’t something to get careless with—he disassembled the enclosure sphere, then the dingus, and finally the plant stand. All that remained was a thin stream of water from a point in midair down into the wastebasket. Mick cupped a hand under the stream long enough to show it really was coming down from above, that it wasn’t a jet coming from below. Some splashed on the carpet. With the same hand, still wet, he produced a large pellet from a pocket; it turned his fingers purple. He flipped it into the wastebasket. “Dye,” he said.
Fifteen seconds later, starting from the top, the water in the stream turned purple.
“All right, you’ve seen it,” Mick said. “What we call it is a congruency, and what it means is there’s a space down there in the basket that’s the same as the place up here. Down in the basket it’s under about a foot of water, so the water pressure’s forcing it in down there, and it comes out up here where there isn’t any pressure. If we had some pressure up here . . .” He paused. “Got another wastebasket?”
After a scramble, they came up with one from an anteroom. Mick held it under the stream to catch the water before it could return to the one on the floor. He nodded to George. “Hold it right here for a while,” he said and let him take it.
The second basket slowly filled while the level in the basket on the floor went slowly down. His audience watched as if waiting for a fish to jump out. After a while, the stream became a dribble, then a steady drip, then stopped. Casually Mick wandered over and peered into the one on the floor. “The level’s down below the congruency,” he explained. He tapped the basket’s rim, setting up waves of water. A few drops dripped from the upper congruency point. “Still there, though.”
He took the basket from George and lifted it to engulf the upper congruency point. The basket on the floor began to fill again, the level quickly rising to cover the odd knot on the surface of the water out of which the water flowed.
Mick raised his basket higher. The congruency punched a hole in the bottom. Water escaping through the hole intercepted the congruency and vanished while the level in the basket on the floor continued to rise. After a moment, an equilibrium having established itself, the flow from the basket on the floor to the upper congruency resumed, while the stream from the basket Mick was holding added itself to the downward stream. Mick emptied his basket into the one on the floor and stood back. The downward stream from the upper congruency stood alone, sourceless, without visible means of support.
“Like it?” Mick asked.
Fiske’s expression was half scowl, half frown. “An interesting stage trick,” he said at last. “But I understand you had a business proposition to offer.”
Mick nodded. “You’re looking at it.”
“I don’t . . .”
One of the aides—not George, the other one—leaned down and muttered something into Fiske’s ear. Whatever he said served to deepen Fiske’s scowl.
“You can do it with water, or you can do it with something else,” Mick said. “Anything else. If you want, you could dump sand in buckets and run ’em on a chain. The thing is . . .” He interposed a hand into the stream of water, making it splash on the carpet. “You’ve got energy here. You could run a small motor off as much as this is putting out right here, or maybe a couple of light bulbs. Instead, you’re getting your rug wet.”
Ear cocked as if listening for subliminal resonances, Fiske tapped a thumbnail on his desktop. “Suppose we have something clear,” he said. “Are you seriously advancing this . . . this trick as a system of power generation?”
“Any reason I shouldn’t?” Mick asked. “Just for example, suppose you’ve got a hydropower dam that if you used it to put out all the juice you wanted, you’d run the reservoir down faster than the river fills it again. With this little gadget you can pull the water back up from below and use it as many times as you want if it doesn’t evaporate first. You don’t have to worry about how to keep the reservoir full. Shucks, you don’t even need the dam. You could build a tower next to the river and have the water coming out at the top and running back down to the bottom; stick a turbine down at the bottom and you’re ready for business.”
“But that’s impossible,” one of the aides—the one who wasn’t George—protested. “The laws of conservation don’t . . .”
“Since when did they pass that law?”
Not-George spluttered. “You can’t. You just can’t!”
Mick stuck his hand into the stream of falling water. Drops splashed in all directions. “Can’t I?”
Fiske winced. “What he’s saying is, the law of conservation of energy doesn’t permit what you describe.”
“Well ain’t that just too bad,” Mick said. “Somebody going to write me a ticket? Sing Sing? Alcatraz?”
“There’s something utterly preposterous here,” Fiske said.
“Yup,” Mick said. “What you’re looking at here’s an eternal juice machine, and you’re saying you don’t see it. More than that, it’s a free ticket into the twenty-first century. No more A-rabs or coal miners or environ-a-mentalists or Eskimos to say if we can bum the candle or what the price is. Just what the Great White Fathead in Uncle Country’s been down on his knees every night and most afternoons asking for. And there it is, bright and shiny, right in front of your baby blue eyes. Never mind what’s legal and what ain’t. With a thing like this you can afford to write your own laws. Who do you think you are? The three wise monkeys?”
Three pairs of eyes looked at him dumbly. He let his breath out with an audible sign. “Well, OK. I’ll just leave this little demonstration here to remind you, and when you make up your mind it’s the real potatoes you can give me a call.” He flipped his card on the desk and turned to leave. With the door shouldered open, he paused. “How about I just sell you the juice, and never mind how I got it?”
In slow silence, Fiske traded glances with his men. He wore the look of a country boy near the end of his first snipe hunt, not yet completely sure he was had. “We prefer to produce our own,” he said cautiously.
“Even if I sell it cheaper than it costs you to make?” Mick asked.
“Our cost per kilowatt is the lowest in the industry,” Fiske said.
“Was,” Mick said, and let the door swing shut behind him.
When he got back to his hotel, every light in his room was burning. Their blaze struck out at him when he opened the door. He stopped on the threshold, not moving. He might have left one or two lighted, but not all those.
“It’s all right,” said a voice. “C’mon in.”
The man who had spoken was slouched in a chair at the room’s far end, middle-aged and sedentary looking. Looks could fool, though. Mick stayed where he was.
“Friend, I don’t know what your business is,” he said, “but I want you to know all my plastic’s got a picture of me on it, I got a dime to tip the bellboy, and I bought my watch in a drugstore.”
The man got up slowly, as if it was something he did as rarely as possible. “Not here for your wallet,” he said. “Michael Candido?” As he spoke he was crossing the distance between them. He had a belly that looked to have recycled more than a few quarts of beer.
“If it’s business, ask my secretary for an appointment,” Mick said.
By then the man was almost at arm’s reach. Mick had kept the door open with his heel, and he was ready to hurl himself out into the hall when the man produced-a wallet from inside his jacket, flipping it open and holding it out for Mick’s inspection. Instead, Mick looked the man straight in the eye through a very long silence, taking his measure. Only then did he carefully fumble out his glasses, make a show of adjusting them on his nose, and closely peer at the credentials offered. All the while he kept his heel against the door.
“Says right here you work for me,” Mick said.
“Uh?”
“Courtesy of the Bureau for the Infernal Ravenous,” Mick said. He peered closely at the name. “Herbert Halberstadt?” he pronounced experimentally.
“Close enough,” Halberstadt said. “We, uh, thought it might be best to talk with you informally. For a start, anyway.”
“That’s why I didn’t hear you knock? Just you and me and the bug in the light fixture?”
Halberstadt had the decency to look sheepish. “It wasn’t my idea. I only do what they tell me. Look, can we go sit down?”
Mick tossed a glance to the armchairs at the room’s far side. “Over where the bug can pick us up better?”
“It can hear us anywhere,” Halberstadt said. “It’s my knees. Can’t stand up as long as they used to. They hurt.”
“Too zoon oldt, too late schmardt,” Mick shrugged. He could sympathize with that. He let the door come shut behind his foot and, brushing past Halberstadt, plunked himself down in one of the chairs. More slowly, Halberstadt took the other.
Mick got out tobacco, pipe, and fixin’ equipment. “All right. What’s Uncle want?”
Halberstadt cocked his head. “Let’s say we’ve taken an interest in your activities.”
“Do I get a right to remain silent? Make a phone call? Have a law boy present?”
“We’re not charging you with anything. We—”
“That’s nice to know.”
Halberstadt gave him a look of annoyance. “We want you to know we’re very carefully watching what you do.”
