Firewater Read online

  “Good girl! You’re doing fine!”

  “Is that all we want, Theseus?” Larry asked again. “Gabble?”

  Hebster heard a crash in the outer office and footsteps running across the floor.

  “See here, Mr. Hebster,” Theseus said at last, “if you don’t want to buy Larry’s reductio ad absurdum exploder, and you don’t like my method of decorating bald heads for all its innate artistry, how about a system of musical notation—”

  Somebody tried Hebster’s door, found it locked. There was a knock on the door, repeated almost immediately with more urgency.

  “He’s already found something he wants,” S.S. Lusitania snapped. “Yes, Larry, that was the complete list.”

  Hebster plucked a handful of hair from his already receding forehead. “Good! Now, look, I can give you everything but the two Empire State Buildings and the three Radio Cities.”

  “Or the three Radio Cities,” Larry corrected. “Don’t try to cheat us! Two Empire State Buildings or three Radio Cities. Whichever is more convenient. Why… isn’t it worth that to you?”

  “Open this door!” a bull-mad voice yelled. “Open this door in the name of United Mankind!”

  “Miss Seidenheim, open the door,” Hebster said loudly and winked at his secretary, who rose, stretched and began a thoughtful, slow-motion study in the direction of the locked panel. There was a crash as of a pair of shoulders being thrown against it. Hebster knew that his office door could withstand a medium-sized tank. But there was a limit even to delay when it came to fooling around with the UM Special Investigating Commission. Those boys knew their Primeys and their Primey-dealers; they were empowered to shoot first and ask questions afterwards—as the questions occurred to them.

  “It’s not a matter of whether it’s worth my while,” Hebster told them rapidly as he shepherded them to the exit behind his desk. “For reasons I’m sure you aren’t interested in, I just can’t give away two Empire State Buildings and/or three Radio Cities with foundations intact—not at the moment. I’ll give you the rest of it, and—”

  “Open this door or we start blasting it down!”

  “Please, gentlemen, please,” Greta Seidenheim told them sweetly. “You’ll kill a poor working girl who’s trying awfully hard to let you in. The lock’s stuck.” She fiddled with the door knob, watching Hebster with a trace of anxiety in her fine eyes.

  “And to replace those items,” Hebster was going on, “I will—”

  “What I mean,” Theseus broke in, “is this. You know the greatest single difficulty composers face in the twelve-tone technique?”

  “I can offer you,” the executive continued doggedly, sweat bursting out of his skin like spring freshets, “complete architectural blueprints of the Empire State Building and Radio City, plus five… no, I’ll make it ten… scale models of each. And you get the rest of the stuff you asked for. That’s it. Take it or leave it. Fast!”

  They glanced at each other, as Hebster threw the exit door open and gestured to the five liveried bodyguards waiting near his private elevator. “Done,” they said in unison.

  “Good!” Hebster almost squeaked. He pushed them through the doorway and said to the tallest of the five men: “Nineteenth floor!”

  He slammed the exit shut just as Miss Seidenheim opened the outer office door. Yost and Funatti, in the bottle-green uniform of the UM, charged through. Without pausing, they ran to where Hebster stood and plucked the exit open. They could all hear the elevator descending.

  Funatti, a little, olive-skinned man, sniffed. “Primeys,” he muttered. “He had Primeys here, all right. Smell that unwash, Yost?”

  “Yeah,” said the bigger man. “Come on. The emergency stairway. We can track that elevator!”

  They holstered their service weapons and clattered down the metal-tipped stairs. Below, the elevator stopped.

  Hebster’s secretary was at the communicator. “Maintenance!” She waited. “Maintenance, automatic locks on the nineteenth floor exit until the party Mr. Hebster just sent down gets to a lab somewhere else. And keep apologizing to those cops until then. Remember, they’re SIC.”

  “Thanks, Greta,” Hebster said, switching to the personal now that they were alone. He plumped into his desk chair and blew out gustily: “There must be easier ways of making a million.”

  She raised two perfect blond eyebrows. “Or of being an absolute monarch right inside the parliament of man?”

  “If they wait long enough,” he told her lazily, “I’ll be the UM, modern global government and all. Another year or two might do it.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting Vandermeer Dempsey? His huskies also want to replace the UM. Not to mention their colorful plans for you. And there are an awful, awful lot of them.”

  “They don’t worry me, Greta. Humanity First will dissolve overnight once that decrepit old demagogue gives up the ghost.” He stabbed at the communicator button. “Maintenance! Maintenance, that party I sent down arrived at a safe lab yet?”

  “No, Mr. Hebster. But everything’s going all right. We sent them up to the twenty-fourth floor and got the SIC men rerouted downstairs to the personnel levels. Uh, Mr. Hebster—about the SIC. We take your orders and all that, but none of us wants to get in trouble with the Special Investigating Commission. According to the latest laws, it’s practically a capital offense to obstruct them.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hebster told him. “I’ve never let one of my employees down yet. The boss fixes everything is the motto here. Call me when you’ve got those Primeys safely hidden and ready for questioning.”

  He turned back to Greta. “Get that stuff typed before you leave and into Professor Kleimbocher’s hands. He thinks he may have a new angle on their gabble-honk.”

  She nodded. “I wish you could use recording apparatus instead of making me sit over an old-fashioned click-box.”

  “So do I. But Primeys enjoy reaching out and putting a hex on electrical apparatus—when they aren’t collecting it for the Aliens. I had a raft of tape recorders busted in the middle of Primey interviews before I decided that human stenos were the only answer. And a Primey may get around to bollixing them some day.”

  “Cheerful thought. I must remember to dream about the possibility some cold night. Well, I should complain,” she muttered as she went into her own little office. “Primey hexes built this business and pay my salary as well as supply me with the sparkling little knicknacks I love so well.”

  That was not quite true, Hebster remembered as he sat waiting for the communicator to buzz the news of his recent guests’ arrival in a safe lab. Something like ninety-five percent of Hebster Securities had been built out of Primey gadgetry extracted from them in various fancy deals, but the base of it all had been the small investment bank he had inherited from his father, back in the days of the Half-War—the days when the Aliens had first appeared on Earth.

  The fearfully intelligent dots swirling in their variously shaped multicolored bottles were completely outside the pale of human understanding. There had been no way at all to communicate with them for a time.

  A humorist had remarked back in those early days that the Aliens came not to bury man, not to conquer or enslave him. They had a truly dreadful mission—to ignore him!

  No one knew, even today, what part of the galaxy the Aliens came from. Or why. No one knew what the total of their small visiting population came to. Or how they operated their wide-open and completely silent spaceships. The few things that had been discovered about them on the occasions when they deigned to swoop down and examine some human enterprise, with the aloof amusement of the highly civilized tourist, had served to confirm a technological superiority over Man that strained and tore the capacity of his richest imagination. A sociological treatise Hebster had read recently suggested that they operated from concepts as far in advance of modern science as a meteorologist sowing a drought-struck area with dry ice was beyond the primitive agriculturist blowing a ram’s horn at the heavens in a frantic att
empt to wake the slumbering gods of rain.

  Prolonged, infinitely dangerous observation had revealed, for example, that the dots-in-bottles seemed to have developed past the need for prepared tools of any sort. They worked directly on the material itself, shaping it to need, evidently creating and destroying matter at will.

  Some humans had communicated with them—

  They didn’t stay human.

  Men with superb brains had looked into the whirring, flickering settlements established by the outsiders. A few had returned with tales of wonders they had realized dimly and not quite seen. Their descriptions always sounded as if their eyes had been turned off at the most crucial moments or a mental fuse had blown just this side of understanding.

  Others—such celebrities as a President of Earth, a three-time winner of the Nobel Prize, famous poets—had evidently broken through the fence somehow. These, however, were the ones who didn’t return. They stayed in the Alien settlements of the Gobi, the Sahara, the American Southwest. Barely able to fend for themselves, despite newly acquired and almost unbelievable powers, they shambled worshipfully around the outsiders, speaking, with weird writhings of larynx and nasal passage, what was evidently a human approximation of their masters’ language—a kind of pidgin Alien. Talking with a Primey, someone had said, was like a blind man trying to read a page of Braille originally written for an octopus.

  And that these bearded, bug-ridden, stinking derelicts, these chattering wrecks drunk and sodden on the logic of an entirely different life-form, were the absolute best of the human race didn’t help people’s egos any.

  Humans and Primeys despised each other almost from the first: humans for Primey subservience and helplessness in human terms, Primeys for human ignorance and ineptness in Alien terms. And, except when operating under Alien orders and through barely legal operators like Hebster, Primeys didn’t communicate with humans any more than their masters did.

  When institutionalized, they either gabble-honked themselves into an early grave or, losing patience suddenly, they might dissolve a path to freedom right through the walls of the asylum and any attendants who chanced to be in the way. Therefore the enthusiasm of sheriff and deputy, nurse and orderly, had waned considerably and the forcible incarceration of Primeys had almost ceased.

  Since the two groups were so far apart psychologically as to make mating between them impossible, the ragged miracle-workers had been honored with the status of a separate classification:

  Humanity Prime. Not better than humanity, not necessarily worse—but different, and dangerous.

  What made them that way? Hebster rolled his chair back and examined the hole in the floor from which the alarm spring had spiraled. Theseus had disintegrated it— how? With a thought? Telekinesis, say, applied to all the molecules of the metal simultaneously, making them move rapidly and at random. Or possibly he had merely moved the spring somewhere else. Where? In space? In hyperspace? In time? Hebster shook his head and pulled himself back to the efficiently smooth and sanely useful desk surface.

  “Mr. Hebster?” the communicator inquired abruptly, and he jumped a bit, “this is Margritt of General Lab 23B. Your Primeys just arrived. Regular check?”

  Regular check meant drawing them out on every conceivable technical subject by the nine specialists in the general laboratory. This involved firing questions at them with the rapidity of a police interrogation, getting them off balance and keeping them there in the hope that a useful and unexpected bit of scientific knowledge would drop.

  “Yes,” Hebster told him. “Regular check. But first let a textile man have a whack at them. In fact, let him take charge of the check.”

  A pause. “The only textile man in this section is Charlie Verus.”

  “Well?” Hebster asked in mild irritation. “Why put it like that? He’s competent, I hope. What does Personnel say about him?”

  “Personnel says he’s competent.”

  “Then there you are. Look, Margritt, I have the SIC running around my building with blood in its enormous eye. I don’t have time to muse over your departmental feuds. Put Verus on.”

  “Yes, Mr. Hebster. Hey, Bert! Get Charlie Verus. Him.”

  Hebster shook his head and chuckled. These technicians! Verus was probably brilliant and nasty.

  The box crackled again: “Mr. Hebster? Mr. Verus.” The voice expressed boredom to the point of obvious affectation. But the man was probably good despite his neuroses. Hebster Securities, Inc., had a first-rate personnel department.

  “Verus? Those Primeys, I want you to take charge of the check. One of them knows how to make a synthetic fabric with the drape of silk. Get that first and then go after anything else they have.”

  “Primeys, Mr. Hebster?”

  “I said Primeys, Mr. Verus. You are a textile technician, please to remember, and not the straight or ping-pong half of a comedy routine. Get humping. I want a report on that synthetic fabric by tomorrow. Work all night if you have to.”

  “Before we do, Mr. Hebster, you might be interested in a small piece of information. There is already in existence a synthetic which falls better than silk—”

  “I know,” his employer told him shortly. “Cellulose acetate. Unfortunately, it has a few disadvantages: low melting point, tends to crack; separate and somewhat inferior dyestuffs have to be used for it; poor chemical resistance. Am I right?”

  There was no immediate answer, but Hebster could feel the dazed nod. He went on. “Now, we also have protein fibers. They dye well and fall well, have the thermoconductivity control necessary for wearing apparel, but don’t have the tensile strength of synthetic fabrics. An artificial protein fiber might be the answer: it would drape as well as silk, might be we could use the acid dyestuffs we use on silk which result in shades that dazzle female customers and cause them to fling wide their pocketbooks. There are a lot of ifs in that, I know, but one of those Primeys said something about a synthetic with the drape of silk, and I don’t think he’d be sane enough to be referring to cellulose acetate. Nor nylon, orlon, vinyl chloride, or anything else we already have and use.”

  “You’ve looked into textile problems, Mr. Hebster.”

  “I have. I’ve looked into everything to which there are big gobs of money attached.

  And now suppose you go look into those Primeys. Several million women are waiting breathlessly for the secrets concealed in their beards. Do you think, Verus, that with the personal and scientific background I’ve just given you, it’s possible you might now get around to doing the job you are paid to do?”

  “Um-m-m. Yes.”

  Hebster walked to the office closet and got his hat and coat. He liked working under pressure; he liked to see people jump up straight whenever he barked. And now, he liked the prospect of relaxing.

  He grimaced at the webfoam chair that Larry had used. No point in having it resquirted. Have a new one made.

  “I’ll be at the University,” he told Ruth on his way out. “You can reach me through Professor Kleimbocher. But don’t, unless it’s very important. He gets unpleasantly annoyed when he’s interrupted.”

  She nodded. Then, very hesitantly: “Those two men—Yost and Funatti—from the Special Investigating Commission? They said no one would be allowed to leave the building.”

  “Did they now?” he chuckled. “I think they were angry. They’ve been that way before. But unless and until they can hang something on me—And Ruth, tell my bodyguard to go home, except for the man with the Primeys. He’s to check with me, wherever I am, every two hours.”

  He ambled out, being careful to smile benevolently at every third executive and fifth typist in the large office. A private elevator and entrance were all very well for an occasional crisis, but Hebster liked to taste his successes in as much public as possible.

  It would be good to see Kleimbocher again. He had a good deal of faith in the linguistic approach; grants from his corporation had tripled the size of the University’s philology department. After all,
the basic problem between man and Primey as well as man and Alien was one of communication. Any attempt to learn their science, to adjust their mental processes and logic into safer human channels, would have to be preceded by understanding.

  It was up to Kleimbocher to find that understanding, not him. “I’m Hebster,” he thought. “I employ the people who solve problems. And then I make money off them.”

  Somebody got in front of him. Somebody else took his arm. “I’m Hebster,” he repeated automatically, but out loud. “Algernon Hebster.”

  “Exactly the Hebster we want,” Funatti said, holding tightly on to his arm. “You don’t mind coming along with us?”

  “Is this an arrest?” Hebster asked Yost, who now moved aside to let him pass. Yost was touching his holstered weapon with dancing fingertips.

  The SIC man shrugged. “Why ask such questions?” he countered. “Just come along and be sociable, kind of. People want to talk to you.”

  He allowed himself to be dragged through the lobby ornate with murals by radical painters and nodded appreciation at the doorman who, staring right through his captors, said enthusiastically, “Good afternoon, Mr. Hebster.” He made himself fairly comfortable on the back seat of the dark-green SIC car, a late-model Hebster Mono-wheel.

  “Surprised to see you minus your bodyguard,” Yost, who was driving, remarked over his shoulder.

  “Oh, I gave them the day off.”

  “As soon as you were through with the Primeys? No,” Funatti admitted, “we never did find out where you cached them. That’s one big building you own, mister. And the UM Special Investigating Commission is notoriously understaffed.”

  “Not forgetting it’s also notoriously underpaid,” Yost broke in.

  “I couldn’t forget that if I tried,” Funatti assured him. “You know, Mr. Hebster, I wouldn’t have sent my bodyguard off if I’d been in your shoes. Right now there’s something about five times as dangerous as Primeys after you. I mean Humanity Firsters.”