The Aluminum Man Read online

  Flaherty gagged and vomited and did the usual things people do when they’ve almost drowned. Finally he pointed. Rudolf walked into the darkness and stumbled over a lath and canvas canoe. It was heavier than his, but it had an outboard. He began horsing it down to the river.

  “Where we going?” Flaherty protested.

  “To make some money!”

  “Ah, the curse! ‘Tis called Holy Ireland because there’s so little of it there. And what would you be needin’ money so bad for that you’d be leavin’ in the middle o’ the night?”

  “Later,” Rudolf said. “Let’s go.”

  “You go, lad. I’ll be back when I’ve communed with nature, purged my soul, and finished my whiskey. Won’t you be spendin’ the night?”

  “Find me some clean dry blankets, find me a square meal, and I’ll spend a week.”

  “You may have a point,” Flaherty conceded.

  “I’ve also got my totem.” Rudolf wondered if Tuchi meant anything in Sioux. Someday he’d have to learn the language properly. Once reestablished on the cocktail circuit all he needed was some goddamn paleface anthropologist speaking perfect Sioux to shoot him down again. As if he didn’t have enough trouble with Mohawks!

  The door opened again. “Careful with that incubator,” the alien warned. “It could disrupt your ecology.”

  “It’s two hundred years too late for that,” Rudolf said.

  “Before my ship moves, you’d better.”

  “How far is safe?”

  Tuchi hesitated. “With those leathery skins you may be immune to gamma radiation.”

  “My skin’s not that thick!” Flaherty hastened. “You going now?”

  “Before your primary has brought light again.”

  “We won’t wait for sunrise,” Rudolf reassured the alien. “Thanks for everything.”

  “Whatever that means,” the alien said absently. The door closed again with the smooth sucking sound of an airtight seal.

  Rudolf began tossing things into the canoe. He got Flaherty on his feet. Finally they were drifting down the stinking river.

  “You shouldn’t have sold that canoe,” Flaherty repeated.

  Rudolf was busy with the outboard. “Why?” he asked.

  “That curdle you chose to swindle was buying pure aluminum.”

  “You think my canoe was made out of old beer cans?”

  Flaherty sighed and stared through the smog blanket at dimmed stars. “Pure aluminum is softer than Wrigley’s Doublemint,” he said. “You sold that poor thing commercial boat grade.”

  “So what?” Rudolf was fiddling in the dark with the outboard. Like everything else in the white man’s world, it refused to perform the way he expected.

  “That aluminum was alloyed with eight percent magnesium. It had bits of chromium, manganese, and zinc.”

  “You worry too much.” Rudolf was worrying a little himself. This goddamn outboard refused to start no matter how many times he dislocated his shoulder.

  “Gas turned on?” Flaherty asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Not flooded?”

  “How would I know?”

  “Can you smell gasoline?”

  “No.”

  “You check the tank?”

  “No.”

  It was too dark to see. Rudolf put his finger in and felt nothing. He gritted his teeth and began plowing through the jumbled gear in the middle of the canoe. Twenty minutes later he was convinced there was no gasoline.

  “Must’ve left it ashore,” Flaherty said.

  They had drifted downstream. He could never get back to the campfire and the alien’s ship without a paddle. Abruptly and irrelevantly he remembered who had wished that his adversary had written a book. Job was an author too. Maybe he had established the trend.

  Rudolf sighed and tried to relax. The current was carrying him slowly back to civilization, to riches, to the front seat of Pamela St. Audrey’s oriental red Lamborghini. Now what could he do to fix that goddamn Mohawk’s wagon?

  CHAPTER 2

  Rudolf woke and for one magic moment he seemed back in some Rousseau-Thoreau dream of how it had been before Whitey came and real estate plummeted. Fog lay low and the canoe drifted in an eerie world where totem animals were not absurd inventions. For an instant he understood how an Indian living this way could instinctively know oneness with nature, could actually practice all that ecology crap.

  Now wide awake, Rudolf saw sludge, smelled corruption. Sun and flies were rising. Rudolf sat up and began planning how to get his.

  He had been an engineering student, until an English instructor had noted his facility with words and encouraged the young Indian in a literary career. Sometimes Rudolf lulled himself to sleep planning cruel and unusual ends for that unsuspecting man.

  Flaherty stirred and groaned. He opened his eyes, closed them again, and screwed up his face in pain.

  “Got any money?” Rudolf asked.

  Flaherty began searching his pockets.

  “Not that kind. I mean big money.”

  “Where are we?”

  “Somewhere downriver, I guess.”

  Flaherty opened his eyes and squinted. The fog was burning off, leaving only a brown blanket of smog. “What’m I doing here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know metallurgy. I need you.”

  “I don’t need you.”

  “Yes you do.”

  “Why?”

  Rudolf produced the incubator the alien had traded him.

  “What good is it? That poor oyster’s already hocked itself off this afflicted planet — if any of it really happened.”

  “Don’t you want to get rich?”

  “No.”

  Rudolf was so startled he said nothing for a minute. “Why?” he finally managed.

  Flaherty pointed at the river, the scum-clotted banks, the brown sky. “Each time I made money I made that a little worse. I’ve dropped all research in favor of a high tolerance yeast.”

  Rudolf wasn’t interested in high tolerance yeasts. “White man not interested in money? Christ, I might as well go back to the reservation!”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Jesus!” How to explain what it was like to grow up half freak, half zoo animal? Poked and probed by anthropologists, slobbered over by do-gooders, encouraged to revive Indian crafts, told to adapt to modern ways, trying always to divine what improbable directive would next emerge from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

  “Once the gorilla swung all over Africa,” Rudolf said. “Then the forest went. Now he humps around, walking when he evolved for swinging. An evolutionary blind alley isn’t a fun trip.”

  “Sounds like growing up in Ireland,” Flaherty said.

  They rounded a bend and saw a dock. Flaherty knelt and began paddling with his hand. “Ow, me head aches!” he groaned. Rudolf began paddling too.

  “Don’t git many campers anymore,” the grizzled native said. “You fellers see that flash upriver last night?”

  “Flash?”

  “Coulda been a falling star. Maybe one of them rocket things.”

  “Going up or down?”

  The old man gave Rudolf an odd look. They paid and Flaherty nursed his outboard into life. Hours later he headed into a cove. Then they were in a car only slightly newer than that upended vehicle in the forest.

  “I suppose that flash was just our friend taking off,” Rudolf said.

  Flaherty shot him a quick look. “Want to go back and see if the poor thing made it?”

  There was an uncomfortable silence. Finally Rudolf said, “What’s a genetic engineer? Where do you get a degree like that?”

  “Percussion U.”

  “Never heard of it.” It certainly wasn’t Ivy League.

  “School of hard knocks. Like Freud got his degree in psychiatry.”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Each time I did, some dipshit perverted my work and got rich. I got tired of being a pervert.”

  Rudolf pa
tted the incubator in his pocket. “You think this’ll destroy civilization?”

  “I wish it would. But as a matter of fact, I don’t even think it’ll work.”

  Rudolf felt a moment of pure panic which, for Rudolf, always involved subliminal shots of himself back on the reservation. Then he guessed what was eating on the Irishman. “Relax. It really happened.”

  “I’m sure it did. But what kind of planet did that poor gob of slime come from?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “Me bhoy, do you know what rust is?”

  “Iron oxide.”

  Flaherty wrenched violently to avoid a little old lady in a Ferrari. “You’ve never seen aluminum rust. Right?”

  “No.”

  “Wrong! You’ve never seen aluminum. It reacts violently with oxygen.”

  “Why hasn’t civilization exploded?”

  “Aluminum oxide makes a protective cover. But if you think aluminum’s not explosive, you’ve never heard of thermite.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “You will,” Flaherty prophesied. “But not now.”

  “So what’s wrong?”

  “If a bacterium eats alumina and excretes metal, how small would the granules be?”

  “Pretty small, I guess.”

  “Aye,” Flaherty gloomed. “A molecule with a molecule-thick layer of oxidation. Less than zero.”

  Rudolf saw himself back on the reservation. “You’re sure?”

  “And how do we get a bauxite bed? I’ve no longer possession of my own bed.”

  “You said there’s aluminum everywhere.”

  “There’s more in the tropics.”

  “If our process is cheap we can work low grade ore.”

  “I suppose so. But why?”

  “What have you got against refining aluminum without pollution or electricity?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Do you think it’s immoral for a poor Indian to get rich while he’s benefitting mankind?”

  “Why should I interrupt my own research?”

  “For half?”

  “You’ll have to come up with a better reason than that.”

  “What do you want?”

  Flaherty sighed. “I want peace. I want to go to hell in my own quiet way.”

  “Are you hiding from somebody?”

  “Sort of.”

  “You want a quiet place to work, somebody to run errands to the liquor store?”

  They inspected houses from New Rochelle to Far Rockaway. Finally they chose one.

  “Damp,” the agent warned. “Cellar’s not floored.”

  Flaherty dribbled acids over soil from the cellar. “Perfect for mushrooms,” he said. They rented it. Rudolf wet down the cellar floor and gave the incubator a squeeze. “You any good at cooking beans?” Flaherty asked.

  “On the reservation one learns.”

  Rudolf’s TV had elicited a laugh when he’d hocked his all for rent and eating money. He turned it on. Bored, he watched some gabby talk show. Finally the news came on. They stared at riots, hijackings and bombings. Suddenly Flaherty leaned forward.

  “… Week’s second explosion in upstate New York. Observers have found traces of radioactivity but no debris…”

  “This afternoon Ambassador Fyodorenko denied any hostile intent on the part of the Soviet Union’s new…”

  “D’you suppose the poor thing’s having trouble getting away?” Flaherty wondered.

  Rudolf felt a slight uneasiness. He went to the basement. The mud was tinged with faint silvery streaks like spilled paint.

  “There it is,” Flaherty said. “Now how do we gather it up and sell it?”

  “Sluice box?” Rudolf vaguely remembered gold miners.

  “Aluminum isn’t heavy enough.” Flaherty picked up a pinch of silvery slime and frowned.

  “Flotation?” Rudolf hadn’t the slightest idea how flotation worked but it had something to do with copper mines.

  Flaherty gave him an odd look. He found an empty peanut butter jar, scooped mud, added water and a drop of dishwashing detergent, and shook it. They waited.

  Flaherty’s jaw dropped. “Be… damned if I didn’t forget the oil!”

  There was mud in the bottom. The middle was filled with rapidly clearing water. There was a scum of floating metal on top. Flaherty opened the jar and stuck in a finger. “Greasy!”

  “What does that mean?”

  “What you can’t understand means trouble. How much money d’we have?”

  “Eighty-two dollars.”

  Flaherty hmmed and clucked. “Microscope and reagents,” he said. “Got to have it all back.”

  Rudolf sighed and began changing into his clean clothes. Two hours later he returned from the hock shop with Flaherty’s esoteric tools. There was a stink of hot oil coming from pots on the stove.

  Rudolf had supposed geneticists used transmission electron microscopes that took up half a building. Surely the days of discovery by white-coated men peering into test tubes had ended with Pasteur or with TV commercials? Flaherty’s was a simple optical microscope out of freshman biology. Yet his joyous blasphemies convinced Rudolf that something was happening. “Are we in business?” he asked.

  “Buy a washing machine.”

  “A what?”

  “To wash clothes. I don’t care if it’s automatic.”

  “I have fifty dollars and twelve cents to last the rest of our lives,” Rudolf said.

  “You also have a tendency to worry. Hock the microscope again.”

  “Don’t you need it?”

  “I know what’s going on now. Remember I said surface oxidation would eat up the whole granule?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Our slimy friend thought of that. Each grain has some kind of waxy coating. When I boiled it the wax came off.”

  “Then what?”

  “It oxidized.”

  “So how are we going to get metal?”

  “You do worry.”

  “Every time I spend my last fifty dollars.”

  When Rudolf found out how much extra it cost to deliver the venerable Maytag he was suddenly thankful no purchaser had been found for Flaherty’s car. Straining and sweating like he hadn’t since reservation days, Rudolf got the washer roped to the back of the car.

  “What are we actually doing?” he asked when it was clanking in the basement.

  Flaherty grinned. “The impurities wet and sink. The greasy metal floats and we skim it off the top.”

  “How do we get the grease out without oxidizing the metal?”

  “First, we get enough concentrate so we can experiment.”

  Which took another couple of days and turned the basement into a viscid quick-sandy ooze. Ranged about the kitchen were buckets of the metallic granules. Flaherty had punched holes in the bottoms and lined them with cheesecloth. In these strainers the slurry compacted into a waxy sludge. Rudolf was getting tired of beans. Flaherty was getting thirsty.

  Rudolf had been checking the mail with increasing desperation, hoping illogically for a royalty check. Hell, even ten dollars for Swedish rights… He heard the put-put of a mailman’s scooter and caught the mail as it came through the hole in the door. One envelope looked important.

  “Feces!” He threw the letter on the mud-saturated rug and stamped it, chanting half remembered fragments of a Sioux curse.

  “You haven’t been that alive in days,” Flaherty said. He picked up the letter. “What’s the Six Nations Benevolent Fund?”

  “Goddamn Mohawk!” Rudolf growled.

  “Now what’s wrong with Indians helping one another?” Flaherty wondered in his transit mix voice.

  Flaherty learned of Rudolf’s expulsion from the cocktail circuit — of his sudden replacement in Pamela St. Audrey’s oriental red Lamborghini. “But sure and you don’t take these people seriously?” he asked.

  “These people mold public opinion. They could help me — help every Indian if I coul
d just focus their attention.”

  Flaherty laughed. “You’ll play hell focusing their attention. What do these people do?”

  “Why, all sorts of things. They’re in the arts, they teach, they uh—”

  “What does your Pamela do?”

  “Well, she’s on several important committees. She’s active in charity work—”

  “I’ll put it another way. What does her father do?”

  “Mr. St. Audrey? I’ve only met him once. I think he’s — Yes! He’s putting up that new building. You know, the architectural showplace that’s going to revolutionize everything.”

  “Now there’s a man who’s changing the world. And I doubt if he has time for cocktails.”

  “But he’s not interested in liberal causes.”

  “He sure isn’t. Now, about selling this aluminum—”

  Rudolf listened, half understanding as Flaherty offered ideas and shot down his own proposals. “If we had a thousand tons it’d be easy. Now scrap buyers only pay half what it’s worth but nobody else buys small lots.”

  Yet when Rudolf loaded the car and drove to an oil-soaked yard where trucks waited before a scale, the cigar-chomping weigher said, “Nope. Get that grease out and I’ll give you twenty-nine cents a pound.”

  When they returned home the mailman had left Rudolf an ad for a potion to restore his flagging virility, and a much forwarded envelope for Flaherty. The Irishman tossed it into the trash without opening.

  “Beans?” he asked.

  “Not hungry.”

  “Well now, it’s not all that bad,” Flaherty said from the vantage point of middle age. “I knew we wouldn’t sell it.”

  “Then why’d we waste all morning?”

  “Would you have believed me?”

  “No,” Rudolf admitted.

  “What do we do now?”

  “We could melt it. If we had a reducing furnace.”

  “I’ve got two dollars and seventy-one cents.”

  “Hardly enough for a pint of poteen. Better go buy me that anyhow.” Flaherty turned on the TV, then ignored it. He muttered something about molecular bonds and began fiddling with a slide rule.