REPORT CHEMICAL
Now he stepped forth into No. 2 slab yard. Filled with slabs—yet crisscrossed with exact lanes between all such; slabs, each of which—heated—would eventually become one plate. The moonlight showed the white-paint markings on each slab, which designated, even if cryptically, the amount of sulphur—of manganese—of every element that slab possessed, so that the plate eventually rolled from it would “hit” specifications. As to tensile strength. As to coefficient of elasticity.
And crossing the slab yard, and emerging again on a narrow road, he went down that road 75 feet where he at last came to a building of orange brick with low steps, over the arched entrance of which, bathed in the moonlight, were the words:
PHYSICAL AND CHEMICAL LABORATORY
Up the steps he went, specimen test tubes swinging.
The physical laboratory was in front. Three young men, in clean striped overalls, stood in front of giant tensile-strength machines, which were pulling away on steel specimen bars held in their giant jaws. One such bar, in fact, as Boyd Arganbright stepped over the threshold, snapped. With a bang that shook the entire building. The machine stopped automatically, as its weighing beam fell suddenly—making an electrical connection by so doing. The operator was already taking out the two pieces of specimen bar. To measure, in hundredths of a millimeter, how far two punched points on it had stretched before snapping. And to find, thus, its “coefficient of elasticity.” And to calculate, from that fallen weighing-beam—and a rotary slide rule on the operator’s desk near by—how many thousands pounds of tension each square-inch of that steel had survived—could survive.
Towards an arched doorway at the back of the physical lab Boyd Arganbright proceeded. Past a smaller machine, with operator, in which machine, at the second, a square-inch cube of concrete, manufactured from worthless slag, was apparently defying two compressing blocks to do their worst. Suddenly, however, the cube popped—like a bomb. The weight beam fell. And Boyd Arganbright proceeded through the arched doorway into the next room.
Here was a quieter place of science. Containing not machines but working booths—all empty at this hour, however, for no night work was now being done in steel analysis—along the windows; booths provided with stone ledges on which could be seen retorts and Bunsen burners and test-tube racks—parts of experiments which even now were ascertaining what was in which slab—which ingot; and whether a piece of steel made from one “Bessemer-blow” could drill a plate made from a certain open-hearth “pour”; whether—
At the rear of the big room an elderly man, with green eyeshade, sat at a mahogany desk. He looked up. He was a man of about 55, with kindly face and whitened hair.
“Ah there, Boyd?” he said. “I’m still here—as you see—working on that zirconium alloy report! And what did you find?”
“Well, Mr. Moorhatch, it’s just as I thought; the smoke from that northeast battery of stacks—yes, the ones we call Silk-Hat Squad!—is too impregnated with—well, for the love of Mike!”
Boyd Arganbright was staring at an evening paper on Gregory Moorhatch’s desk. Or, rather, the desk Moorhatch was now working on—since the Chief Chemist had a most ornate and richly furnished private room off the laboratory which he heartily disliked.
A 2-column headline in the paper, staring in return up at Boyd Arganbright, read:
ECCENTRIC MIDWEST MILLIONAIRE
McCORNISS INTERRED TODAY ON
HIS LONELY RIVER ISLAND
“Sa-ay!” commented Boyd Arganbright. And reached eagerly for the paper. “Do you mind?”
“Not at all,” said the other tolerantly. And resumed checking, with a light pencil, the elements of some complicated chemical reaction in his report which he was evidently doing at the time of the interruption.
Boyd Arganbright, who already had picked up the paper, was reading the brief story. Brief, because it comprised not more than about 3 inches of text beneath the 2-column head—or 6 column-inches in all. But though brief, in a manner of speaking, it was more than interesting to him. Considering that—
“’twas the McCorniss story I was reading,” he said, as he finished it, and laid the paper back on Moorhatch’s working desk. “And its headline rather shocked me. For I didn’t even know he was dead.”
“No? A friend of yours?”
“Oh, in a manner of speaking. In reality, rather, a friend of my father’s. I met Philaster McCorniss, for the first time, just after my mother died; I was 7, and Father, you see, took me up to McCorniss’ house for a week’s visit to sort of help me half get my mind off of Mother’s passing. Not that it could—God, no! Though McCorniss was mighty kind at the time. Seemed to understand my kid grief. He—”
“Was this,” asked Moorhatch, “in this town of Shelby’s Bluff from where he was bur—”
“Oh, no, I’ve never been there. McCorniss was then living in a residence in Cleveland. For this was some years before he retired to his own father’s original town. Anyway, as to our friendship—such as ’twas!—outside of various letters between us between the years, I saw him only twice additionally; once when we both happened to be in St. Louis; and the other time when he came to Irontown here to Father’s funeral.”
“I see. Well, your eccentric friend is dead all right, Boyd. And, so it seems, has made the papers like nobody’s business with his island vault—and its uniquely balanced trick lid by which, in case he should ever come to inside, he could let himself out!—and the terms of his will, the usual copy of which some reporter I see has as usual got hold of!—tossing back to Agriculture virtually that which came out of Agriculture—i.e. the fortune that came out of that plow?”
“Just reverse English,” laughed Arganbright, “of ‘dust unto dust’!”
“Yes. But how come, Boyd, you didn’t see the story on your family acquaintance’s passing? For there was a small story—about one-quarter the size of this one—in yesterday morning’s papers, due to his being the son of the inventor of the Helical Plow? I didn’t read it, because of skipping on to more important news. But it did hold his name in its single head.”
“Well, if he died 12 hours short of last midnight—as this story states—it couldn’t have been in the evening paper that I always read when I go off this confounded 4 to midnight shift. And, since I don’t take the morning paper—well, there you are. You wouldn’t know then, not having read it, just what he died of? I’m interested. This story doesn’t even touch on that. It’s all about his bequests, and his will, and his island, and his vault, and the weird funeral. I’d be interested to know what took him off because half a dozen doctors, he once told Father, had said he had some mysterious undiagnosable trouble with his heart, and another half a dozen, equally as great, said he had nothing wrong with it!”
“Well, whatever it was—half a dozen doctors, it seems, may have been 100 per cent wrong! No, I don’t know what carried him off. But I think it downright disgraceful the way they hustled him virtually off his deathbed into that vault of his. Just because the river happened to be rising a bit. My God! For from the time he died till the time he went into his vault wasn’t more than 26 hours. Disgraceful, that’s what!”
“Well,” laughed Arganbright, “someday when somebody leaves you a hundred thou—as he did that town—just for planting ’em before such and such an hour, I’ll bet you’ll be down to the undertaker’s speeding him up. For what moots it, after all? When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
“Oh, you are, are you?” grimaced Moorhatch. “Well, if you’re going to get philosophical about it, Boyd, you might as well be scientific about it too. After your own field. Why not just say that when a man’s dead, he’s in the process of dissolving into nitrogenous elements—and so forth. And now that we’ve gotten back to practical chemistry again by this roundabout road, how-about and what-about those exposed electric cables outside O-H 3?”
“Yes. Well, Mr. Moorhatch, it’s just as I thought. The smoke from that northeast battery of stacks is too impregnated with sulphur-dioxide—at least for the good of those particular cables! Whether, on damp days—and days incidentally also that it blows toward those cables—it picks up enough moisture right in the air to turn the sulphur-dioxide into pure sulphuric acid—or whether it creates the sulphuric acid only when and as it hits such moisture as is right then condensed on the copper lines, I don’t know. But—”
“—but the point is that the lines right there are getting eaten with pure H2SO4?”
“And how! They’re pitted, right at that point, as though the anhydrous acid had been spattered on with a brush!”
“Any appreciable diminution of their caliber—enough, that is, to change their electrical resistance?”
“Oh, no, no. That is, I happen to know from the Power Division that the coefficient of current saturation there—rather, should I say, its inverse!—is not only ample—but too ample! But the mechanical tension in the cables there is severe—and some fine day, Mr. Moorhatch, and soon, one will part—tear open at some huge pit—and, well, write the rest of the story yourself. Some hunky’s eyes maybe go out. And the northwest corner of the plant be tied up till the troubleshooters at least lash things together with a ‘come-along.’”
He walked over to one of the booths—his own!—and, unhooking his specimen tubes from his belt, set them in a wooden test-tube rack. Then he went to a nearby locker—also his own—where he unhooked his climbers quickly, and tossed them clatteringly in, following them with the safety belt suspended from his specimen belt. After which he returned to his superior, who was sitting back in his swivel chair thinking.
“And what,” asked the latter, a bit quizzically, “will our practical construction-inspection chemist’s specific recommendation be for that specific lesion and disease? That, perhaps, we use coal in N-E 2 with less sulphur in it? Or that we build a smokescreen there?”
“Neither,” Arganbright grinned. “I’m going to recommend to the Power Division—rather, ask you to do it—that between the three poles on that line—the one ahead of the one I went up—and the one after—enamel-coated transmission line be installed in place of—”
“Enamel-coated?”
“Yes. Brand-new stuff. Recently created by the New York Transmission Company. Has to be specially made with respect to the exact date of proposed installation, as it hardens in 5 days after it’s coated and so has to be put up while it’s still soft. But once up—and it hardens—it still has sufficient elasticity in the coating that it doesn’t crack when it swings, or elongates with heavy current, or contracts with zero current. Which is the most important thing. For that sulphur-dioxide-laden smoke just yearns for tiny cracks leading to pure copper! But wait—you haven’t yet heard all the recommendations that, through you, God willing, I’m going to make! After recommending this change to the Power Division who’ll do quite nothing on it whatsoever, I’m going to recommend to the Safety Division—again through you!—that they make the Power Division do what the Chemical Division—”
“I get you,” laughed the other, “The one sure way to get quick action around here when hard dollars are involved. Yes, you’re right. We’ve two Gods here—Dollars and Safety—and we sometimes have to appeal to one to make the other behave. Well, about this enamel-coated transmission line, what’s the name—”
“Wait, Mr. Moorhatch. I want to analyze my scrapings tomorrow. To see if any other by-products in that smoke are in this eat-fest. The pits seem so damned—well, so damned vicious. There’s four kinds of this enamel-coating, you see, known as alpha, beta, gamma and delta. And I’ll figure out which is indicated. And then you can figure on how to put the fear of the Lord into the Power Division’s heart.”
“Okay. But so far as that goes, Boyd, it more than likely as not will be my talented German successor who’ll have to do the figuring—not I.”
“Not—you? Your—successor?” Boyd Arganbright’s face fell. For he liked this man immensely.
“Yes. I gave in my resignation, Boyd, a month ago. To take effect one week from today. For I inherited a gold mine in Chile, South America. Yes, that uncle I’ve spoken about. It’s a mine that needs tough intensive working—but can produce. But it’ll need somebody on the spot who’s personally interested. I can pull out of it better than my salary here. And, even if I don’t, I do so want a change. My God, boy, I’ve been here in this plant longer than you’ve been on earth!” He paused. “But about—my successor. Westover went over the whole plant today with a German chemist who’s passing through America. Graduate of a lot of colleges in Germany. And does know metallurgy. I talked to him. And damn it, Boyd, he’s not half as good a man as you. Dyestuffs are what, if anything, he shines in. And Lord knows dyes are no by-product of steel. He demands a 10-year contract if he comes on here as Plant Chemist. And Westover—who has the whole say-so on filling this office, from the directors—is about ready to hire him, I think.”
Boyd Arganbright bit his lip.
The other looked at him strangely.
“Listen here, Boyd, this may be speaking damned frankly—but hadn’t you better—that is, can’t you—speed up the matter of—of marrying that daughter of Westover’s? You love her. So what—what the devil! For you know it’d be better to be Chief Chemist here—which you would be then—than to be such in some faraway mill which I have no doubt someday you will be?”
He looked helplessly at Boyd Arganbright.
The other nodded.
“I know! I love Irontown. And I love this mill. Where I worked in summers as a boy. And between the college years when I was getting my chemical education. And as you say, I do love Alyda. And I’d marry her to get quite nothing at all—let alone your job which I sure wouldn’t object to!—since you’re voluntarily doffing it. But—” He sighed. “Well, Mr. Moorhatch, I’m going to tell you something now—since you’ve told me something. Or rather—show you.” And fishing down into his coat pocket, he brought up the four pieces into which he had ripped that note awhile ago. And laying them out, ragged edges together, on the other’s desk, said briefly:
“Read—and weep!”
The other read them. And whistled.
“My God, Boyd—how—how did this come about?” He had gathered the four pieces together now, and was handing them back to Arganbright.
“How?” the other replied bitterly. “Well, I’ll tell you how. But first—”
For as he spoke he had withdrawn from his pocket a paper of matches, and lighting one, he applied it deliberately—and with resentment aforethought—to the corner of the four gathered-together pieces. Which promptly took fire.
“Here—here, man!” the older man expostulated, hastily shoving over his ashtray. “Blow that out! Those pieces are evi—”
“—evidence of quite nothing,” retorted the other bitterly. “No—leave ’em alone, boss! For the note they comprise was written in my own room—on my own machine—so’s it never could be evidence. It even contains a lot of added misspellings by which the lady who didn’t sign it can prove she wouldn’t never nohow make such a dema—burn, goldarn you—” This to the pieces of paper from which a tongue of flame arose. “—as I’m burning.” He turned to the other as the pieces crumbled into ashes. “Gone now—but gone not, alas, the $25,000 demand that was on ’em. That still persists and exists!”
The other was looking at him helplessly. “My God, Boyd—married—by bell, book and candle. No wonder—but how—How did that come about?”
“Well—werry simply. In a manner of speaking. Sadie and I more or less grew up together. Cross-the-fence neighbors. I lived with my father; and she lived with her father. You may remember him. He’s dead today; but, when alive, he worked in the soaking pit, and was called Rye-bread Pete in the mills here. Because of the huge rye-bread sandwiches, 4 inches thick, that he used to make up for his own lunch pail! Anyway, Sadie and I were in similar boats—having no mothers. She worked in the cannery across town. And was, I regret to say, known as Golddigger Sal! I worked in the mills; and, later, managed to get to go away to college. All right! Well, just after I was turned 21, and was home on a vacation from college, Sadie found she’d gotten herself into trouble. Thought she had, that is! Oh, no, I wasn’t the one she even thought got her that way. My association with Sadie was purely platonic at best. And Sadie came to me—told me about her presumed condition—told me that Rye-bread Pete was on the warpath—and asked me if I’d take out a marriage license with her just to assuage his wrath. If and as soon as he would begin to see what her dizzy spells—and subsequent phenomena—meant. Not, you understand, that he’d have been able to deem me to be the guilty party; he would know I couldn’t be if for no other reason than the sheer chronology of the case. Sadie’s idea was that if he thought his gal was going to get hitched properly, even to the innocent guy, he’d keep from ripping the whole house apart. Anyway, being myself a shining knight in armor—and Sadie being the first fair lady who’d ever appealed to my bursting chivalry—I took out the said license with her. To assuage her father. But instead—he up and died. And she didn’t have to use it. And lo—it even turned out that she wasn’t in trouble; her dizzy spells had been coming from overeating the plums she was supposed to can without tasting; and her growing embonpoint from the gas from the said plums! A comedy of errors, not?
“Though—not the way it turned out. For when I finally came back from finishing college, I came back, it seemed, just in time to get thrust upon me a part in the Irontown community play. And ow—what a part! For I had to talk, at various points in it, in the styles of at least 8 different people—including a Southerner and a German!—though alack, I had only one voice to do it in! Today, according to an article I read in a recent Science Review I have at home, a man can—by talking into the focus of a certain more or less well-known small all-metal mail-order radio—create a different voice for each pitch of voi—but here!—I’m ’way off the track. For I was talking about this play. A play in which, incidentally, Sadie also had a part. You were then in Europe; so you know nothing about it. But, by the exigencies of the plot of the play, Sadie and I had to get married at one point in it. And lo—the gink who played the minister—he got his part because he was studying for the ministry—was a minister; no fooling! For his ordination papers had been issued him a week before, and had never reached him. And so Sadie and I were married.
“Married absolutely, Mr. Moorhatch. For when I learned of Lon Callowby’s ordination papers having already been issued to him, I went to a big lawyer in the next city and looked into the situation. And married—Sadie and I were! By the laws of this state. For the date of the ordination was of record. And was one week before the date of the play. The ceremony, moreover, only had about 800 witnesses! And was word for word correct. And was valid because of my having taken out a marriage license with Sadie. Even the one technicality that might have served as a lever against it: namely, that the names in the license would be different from the names in the ceremony, was out: for in that community-play everybody kept their own first names. Including even I—at least in that main part wherein I had temporarily to simulate those other 7 ginks! And so the ceremony had run ‘Do you take this woman, Boyd, to be your true and wedded wife?’ and ‘Do you take this man, Sadie, to be your true and wedded husband?’
“There was no out. But I did nothing at the time. One reason being that divorces cost money—and I had none—quite none. I called up Sadie—she was then working in the same city as a filing clerk for some rich broker—and told her the lowdown. That we were married, all right. But that I had no money to cancel it off. And I came back to Irontown knowing—thinking at least—that if or when the time ever came I needed to be free, she’d let me free without a moment’s hesitation.
“And when finally the time came when I did need my freedom—yes, after I met Alyda Westover!—and wrote to Sadie telling her that I’d now have to have some co-operation as to charges and evidence—well, that letter you just read was what I got. She wouldn’t phone her demand—nor write it; she came to my rooming house when I was at work—and wrote it out on my own machine. And when I called her by wire later to try to argue the matter—I found she’d left already—for Europe.” Boyd Arganbright gave a weary gesture with his hands. “After all, of course, Sadie was always known in the canneries as Golddigger Sal. And if she values being legally married to me as worth twenty-five thousand—nobody can stop her.”
“No,” agreed Moorhatch, shaking his head, “there’s nothing can be done—when the party who’s connected to you by bell, book and candle refuses to be disconnected. I knew of one man who spent 35 years of his life trying to get free of a detestable creature who didn’t want him to marry the woman of his heart; he tried every legal artifice known; he spent thousands of dollars; yet he failed.
“For his wife wouldn’t even take twenty-five thousand dollars to give him his freedom. While yours—but I suppose that if you had the twenty-five thousand you’d pay her off gladly?”
“God, yes. Thankfully! To have Alyda thereby—’twould be like buying a gold bar with a few pennies.”
“I know, of course,” said the other dryly, “that you’re speaking in terms of pure idealism, because you’re terribly in love, and can’t think of material things just now. But I’m emboldened also to add to the situation the rather crass statement that if you were free to marry Miss Westover—and did—you’d be next Chief Chemist here. At $15,000 a year to start. And to end where I ended: at $20,000.”
“Oh, yes,” said Boyd Arganbright, airy-fairly waving the other’s picture away with a genuinely careless gesture of his hand. Since, being in love, he was quite and utterly unable to think in dollars.
“Does—er—Miss Westover or her father,” the other now inquired, “know about this complication that stands in the way of your marrying Miss Westover?”
“Miss Westover does. She only, however.”
“I—see.” Moorhatch was regretfully silent. “Well, by gosh, Boyd, I don’t know what to say. Much less suggest. You need your freedom to marry a girl. Whereas your Sadie, playing around, as it appears, with a man who’s already married, can’t marry him even if she had her freedom—and so doesn’t need it! And by the time she does, if ever she does—or by the time you’ve saved enough money up to pay her off—well, you’ll probably have a bit of gray in your hair, no?”
“A bit is right,” admitted Boyd Arganbright unhappily. “Sadie probably long ago perceived that as an ‘unmarried woman’ she’d probably garner much more coin than as one married. And without losing any of the joys thereof. Oh well!” He shrugged his shoulders. “In less than a short while—”
But now a long loud hollow whistle permeated the air.
“My God!” Arganbright ejaculated. “Here I am—in my Uniform No. 3—my pole-inspection uniform, at least when the climbers and safety-belt are on me!—and which uniform—”
“Which uniform,” the other put in with an smused smile, “becomes, with a few changes, I note, your ‘roof-inspection’ uniform—your ‘dynamo-pit inspecting’ uniform—your ‘structural steel inspection’ uniform—never, e-Gad, have I seen such an elastic uniform as that be!—but what were you going to say when the whistle blew?”
“I was then going to say,” replied Boyd Arganbright, looking ruefully up and down himself, “that in but a short while I’d be seeing Alyda Westover herself. Thanks to an appointment I had to meet her in her car, about a block outside the plant, at 5 after midnight. But now—thanks to yon whistle—which announces midnight itself!—I’ll have to step on the old gas to make that date! In fact, I’ve just time to ablute the old mitts in the physical lab on the way out—and hold the said appointment in purely informal dress: the said pole-hiking Costume No. 3. Well—good night—and here goes!”
And holding out those very soiled pole-climbing hands as a reminder to himself not to march past that washbowl in the next room, he hurriedly exited from the chemical laboratory.