Day After Tomorrow

VIII

Back at his suburban auto-bungalow, he threw all except the high priority switch and went on down into his small cellar den. He didn’t really feel like a night on the town anyway. A few vodka martinis under his belt and he’d sleep late and he wanted to get up in time for an early start for Astor, Florida and his bass fishing. Besides, in that respect he agreed with that irritating wench, LaVerne Polk. Vermouth was never meant to mix with Polish vodka. He wished that Sidecars would come back into popularity.

In his den, he shucked off his tweed jacket, kicked off his shoes and shuffled into Moroccan slippers. He went over to his reading rack and scowled at the paperbacks there. His status books were upstairs where they could be seen. He pulled out a suspense yarn, tossed it over to the cocktail table that sat next to his favorite chair, and then went over to the bar.

Up above in his living room, he had one of the new auto-bars. You could dial any of more than thirty drinks. Auto-bars were all the rage. The Boss had one that gave a selection of a hundred different drinks, running from Absinth Coolers to Zombis. But what difference did it make when nobody but eccentric old-timers of flighty blondes drank anything except vodka martinis? He didn’t like auto-bars anyway. A well mixed drink is a personal thing, a work of competence, instinct and art, not something measured to the drop, iced to the degree, shaked or stirred to a mathematical formula.

Out of the tiny refrigerator he brought a four-ounce cube of frozen pineapple juice, touched the edge with his thumbnail and let the ultra thin plastic peel away. He tossed the cube into his mixer, took up a bottle of light rum and poured in about two ounces. He brought an egg from the refrigerator and added that. An ounce of whole milk followed and a teaspoon of powdered sugar. He flicked the switch and let the conglomeration froth together.

He poured it into a king-size highball glass and took it over to his chair. Vodka martinis be damned, he liked a slightly sweet long drink.

He sat down in the chair, picked up the suspense novel and scowled at the cover. He ought to be reading that Florentine history of Machiavelli’s, especially if the Boss had gotten to the point where he was quoting from the guy. But the hell with it, he was on vacation. He didn’t think much of the Italian diplomat anyway.

He couldn’t get beyond the first page or two.

And when you can’t concentrate on a suspense yarn, you just can’t concentrate.

He finished his drink, went over to his phone and dialed Department of Records and then Information. When the bright young thing answered, he said, “I’d like the brief on an Ernest Self who lives on Elwood Avenue, Baltimore section of Greater Washington. I don’t know his code number.”

She did things with switches and buttons for a moment and then brought forth a sheet from a delivery chute. “Do you want me to read it to you, sir?”

“No, I’ll scan it,” Larry said.

Her face faded to be replaced by the brief on Ernest Self.

It was astonishingly short. Records seemed to have slipped up on this occasion. A rare occurence. He considered requesting the full dossier, then changed his mind. Instead, he dialed the number of the Sun-Post and asked for its science columnist.

Sam Sokolski’s puffy face eventually faded it.

Larry said to him sourly, “You drink too much. You can begin to see veins breaking in your nose.”

Sam looked at him patiently.

Larry said, “How’d you like to come over and toss back a few tonight?”

“I’m working. I thought you were going on a vacation down to Florida, or someplace.”

Larry sighed. “I am,” he said. “Okay, so you can’t take a night off and lift a few with an old buddy.”

“That’s right, I can’t,” the columnist told him. “Anything else, Larry?”

“Yes. Look, have you ever heard of an inventor named Ernest Self?”

The other nodded. “Sure I’ve heard of him. I covered a hassle he got into some years ago. A nice guy.”

“I’ll bet,” Larry said. “What does he invent, something to do with printing presses, or something?”

“Printing presses?” Sokolski’s expression was blank. “Don’t you remember the story about him?”

“Brief me,” Larry said.

“Well—briefly does it. It got out a couple of years back that some of our rocketeers had bought a solid fuel formula from an Italian research outfit for the star probe project. Paid them a big hunk of Uncle’s change for it. So Ernest Self sued.”

Larry said, “You’re being too brief. What do you mean, he sued. Why?”

“Because he claimed he’d submitted the same formula to the same agency a full eighteen months earlier and they’d turned him down.”

“Had he?”

“Probably.”

Larry didn’t get it. “Then why’d they turn him down?”

Sam said, “Oh, the government boys had a good alibi. Crackpots turn up all over the place and you have to brush them off. Every cellar scientist who comes along and says he’s got a new super-fuel developed from old coffee grounds can’t be given the welcome mat. Something was wrong with Self’s math or something and they didn’t pay much attention to him. They wouldn’t even let him demonstrate it. But it was the same formula, all right.”

Larry Woolford was scowling. Science wasn’t his cup of tea. He said, “Something wrong with his math? What kind of a degree does he have?”

Sam grinned in memory. “I got a good quote on that. He doesn’t have any degree. He said he learned to read by the time he’d reached high school and since then he figured spending time in classrooms was a matter of interfering with his education.”

“No wonder they turned him down. He sounds like a weird to me. No degree at all. You can’t get anywhere in science like that.”

Sam said, “The courts rejected his suit but he got a certain amount of support here and there. Peter Voss, over at the university, claims he’s one of the great intuitive scientists, whatever that is, of our generation.”

“Who said that?”

“Professor Voss. Not that it makes a great deal of difference what he says. Another crackpot. A weird if there ever was one.”

Larry wound it up. “Okay. Thanks, Sam. Take care. You worry me with all the boozing you do.”

Sam snorted. After his less than handsome face was gone from the phone screen, Larry walked back to the bar with his empty glass and stared at the mixer for several minutes. He began to build himself another flip, but cut it short in the middle, put down the ingredients and went back to the phone to dial Records again.

He went through first the brief and then the full dossier on Professor Peter Luther Voss. Aside from his academic accomplishments, particularly in the fields of political economy and international law, and the dozen or so books accredited to him, there wasn’t anything particularly noteworthy. A bachelor in his fifties. No criminal record of any kind, of course, and no military career. No known political affiliations. Evidently a strong predilection for Thorsten Veblen’s theories. And he’d been a friend of Henry Mencken in his youth, back when that old nonconformist was tearing down contemporary society seemingly largely for the fun involved in the tearing.

On the face of it, the man was no radical, and the term “crackpot” which Sam had applied was hardly called for.

Larry Woolford went back to the bar and resumed the job of building his own version of a rum flip.

But his heart wasn’t in it. The Professor, Susan had said.