A Good Old-Fashioned Future (8 page)

“Hello!” sang Tug, instantly in love.

“Good afternoon,” said the man, getting out of his pickup. “I’m Felix Quinonez.” He stuck out his hand and Tug eagerly grasped it.

“I’m Tug Mesoglea,” said Tug. “I handle the science, and my partner Revel Pullen over there handles the business. I think we’re leasing this property from you?”

“I think so, too,” said Quinonez, baring his strong teeth in a flashing smile. He let go of Tug’s hand, giving Tug a thoughtful look. An ambiguous look. Did Tug dare hope?

Now Revel came striding over. “Quinonez? I’m Revel Pullen. Did you bring the contract Lucy faxed you? Muy bueno, my man. Let’s sign the papers on the hood of your pickup, Texas style!”

The ceremony completed, Quinonez handed over the keys. “This is the key to the garage, this is for the padlock on the pipeline valve, and these here are for the locks on the stairways up onto the tanks. We’ve been having some trouble keeping kids out of here.”

“I can see that from the free paint-jobs you been getting,” said Revel, staring over at the graffiti-bedecked tanks. “But the rust I’m seeing is what worries me. The corrosion.”

“These tanks have been empty and out of use for quite a few years,” granted Quinonez. “But you weren’t planning on filling them, were you? As I explained to your assistant, the hazardous materials license for this site was revoked the day Fort Ord was closed.”

“I certainly
am
planning on filling these tanks,” said Revel, “or why the hell else would I be renting them? But the materials ain’t gonna be hazardous.”

“You’re dealing in beet-sugar?” inquired Quinonez.

“Never you mind what’s going in the tanks, Felix. Just show me around and get me up to speed on your valves
and pipelines.” He handed the garage key to Tug. “Here, Doc, scope out the building while Felix here shows me his system.”

“Thanks, Revel. But Felix, before you go off with him, just show me how the garage lock works,” said Tug. “I don’t want to set off an alarm or something.”

Revel watched disapprovingly while Tug walked over to the garage with Felix, chattering all the way.

“You must be very successful, Felix,” gushed Tug as the leathery-faced Quinonez coaxed the garage’s rusty lock open. Grasping for more topics to keep the conversation going, Tug glanced up at the garage’s weathered sign. “
Motorotive
, that’s a good word.”

“A cholo who worked for me made it up,” allowed Quinonez. “Do you know what
Max Nix We Fix
means?”

“Not really.”

“My Dad was in the army in the sixties. He was stationed in Germany, he had an easy deal. He was in the motor vehicle division, of course, and that was their slogan.
Max Nix
is German for ‘it doesn’t matter.’ ”

“How would you say
Max Nix
in Spanish?” inquired Tug. “I love Spanish.”

“No problema,”
grinned Felix. Tug felt that there was definitely a good vibration between them. Now the lock on the garage door squeaked open, and Felix held it open so that Tug could pass inside.

“The lights are over here,” said Felix, hitting a bank of switches. The cavernous garage was like a vast barn for elephants—there were thirty vehicle-repair bays on either side like stalls; each bay was big enough to have once held a huge green army truck.

“Hey, Quinonez,” came Revel’s holler. “I ain’t got all day!”

“Thanks so much, Felix,” said Tug, reaching out to the handsome older man for another handshake. “I’d love to see more of you.”

“Well, maybe you will,” said Felix softly. “I am not a married man.”

“That’s lovely,” breathed Tug. The two made full eye contact. No problema.

Later that afternoon, Tug and Revel settled into a top-floor suite of a Monterey seaside hotel. Tug poured a few buckets of hotel ice onto the artificial jellyfish in his trunk. Revel got back into the compulsive wheeler-dealer mode with his portable phone again, his demands becoming more unseemly and grandiose as he and Tug worked their way, inch by amber inch, through a fifth of Gentleman Jack.

At three in the morning, Tug crashed headlong into bed, his last conscious memory the clink and scrape of Revel razoring white powder on the suite’s glass-topped coffee-table. He’d hoped to dream that he was in the arms of Felix Quinonez, but instead he dreamed once again about debugging a jellyfish program. He woke with a terrible hangover.

Whatever substance Revel had snorted—it seemed unlikely to be anything so mundane and antiquated as mere cocaine—it didn’t seem to be bothering him next morning. Revel lustily ordered a big breakfast from room-service.

As Revel tipped the busboy lavishly and splashed California champagne into their beaker of orange juice, Tug staggered outside the suite to the balcony. The Monterey air was rank with kelp. Large immaculate seagulls slid and twisted along the sea-breeze updrafts at the hotel’s walls. In the distance to the north, a line of California seals sprawled on a rocky wharf like brown slugs on broken concrete. Dead tin-roofed canneries lined the shore to the south, some of them retrofitted into tourist gyp-joints and discos, others empty and at near-collapse.

Tug huffed at the sea air until the vise-grip loosened at his temples. The world was bright and chaotic and beautiful. He stumbled into the room, bolted down a champagne mimosa and three forkfuls of scrambled eggs.

“Well, Revel,” he said finally, “I’ve got to hand it to you. Quinonez Motorotive is ideal in every respect.”

“Oh, I’ve had Monterey in mind since the first time we met here at SIGUSC,” Revel admitted, propping one boot-socked foot on the tabletop. “I took to this place right away. This is my kind of town.” With his lean strangler’s mitts folded over his shallow chest, the young oilman looked surprisingly at peace, almost philosophical. “You ever read any John Steinbeck, Tug?”

“Steinbeck?”

“Yeah, the Nobel Prize-winning twentieth-century novelist.”

“I never figured you for a reading man, Revel.”

“I got into Steinbeck’s stuff when I first came to Monterey,” Revel said. “Now I’m a big fan of his. Great writer. He wrote a book set right here in Cannery Row … you ever read it? Well, it’s about all these drunks and whores living on the hillsides around here, some pretty interesting folks, and the hero’s this guy who’s kind of their mentor. He’s an ichthyologist who does abortions on the side. Not for the money though, just because it’s the 1940s and he likes to have lots of sex, and abortion happens to be this thing he can hack ’cause of his science background.… Y’see, Tug, in Steinbeck’s day, Cannery Row actually canned a hell of a lot of fish! Sardines. But all the sardines vanished by 1950. Some kind of eco-disaster thing; the sardines never came back at all, not to this day.” He laughed. “So you know what they sell in this town today? Steinbeck.”

“Yeah, I know,” said Tug. “It’s kind of a postmodern culture-industry museum-economy tourist thing.”

“Yeah. Cannery Row cans Steinbeck now. There’s Steinbeck novels, and tapes of the crappy movie adaptations, and Steinbeck beer-mugs, and Steinbeck key chains, Steinbeck bumper-stickers, Steinbeck iron-on patches, Steinbeck fridge-magnets … and below the counter, there’s Steinbeck blow-up plastic love-dolls so that the air-filled author of
Grapes of Wrath
can be subjected
to any number of unspeakable posthumous indignities.”

“You’re kidding about the love-dolls, right?”

“Heck no, dude! I think what we ought to do is buy one of ’em, blow it up, and throw it into a cooler full of Urschleim. What we’d get is this big Jell-O Steinbeck, see? Maybe it’d even
talk
! Like deliver a Nobel Prize oration or something. Except when you go to shake his hand, the hand just snaps off at the wrist like a jelly polyp, a kind of dough-lump of dead author flesh, and floats through the air till it hits some paper and starts writing sequels.…”

“What the hell was that stuff you snorted last night, Revel?”

“Bunch of letters and numbers, old son. Seems like they change ’em every time I score.”

Tug groaned as if in physical pain. “In other words you’re so fried, you can’t remember.”

Revel, jolted from his reverie, frowned. “Now, don’t go Neanderthal on me, Tug. That stuff is pure competitive edge. You wouldn’t act so shocked about it, if you’d spent some time in the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 lately. Smart drugs!” Revel coughed rackingly and laughed again. “The coolest thing about smart drugs is, that if they even barely work, you just
gotta
take ’em, no matter how square you are! Otherwise, the Japanese CEOs kick your ass!”

“I think it’s time to get some fresh air, Revel.”

“How right you are, hombre. We gotta settle in at Quinonez’s tank farm this morning. We’ve got a Niagara of Urschleim headed our way.” Revel glanced at his watch. “Fact is, the stuff oughta be rollin’ in a couple of hours from now. Let’s go on down and get ready to watch the tanks fill up.”

“What if one of the tanks splits open?”

“Then I expect we won’t use that particular tank no more.”

When Tug and Revel got to Quinonez Motorotive, they found several crates of newly delivered equipment
waiting for them. Tug was as excited as Christmas morning.

“Look, Revel, these two boxes are the industrial robots, that box is the supercomputer, and this one here is the laser-sintering device.”

“Yep,” said Revel. “And over here’s a drum of those piezoplastic beads and here’s a pallet of titaniplast sheets for your jellyfish tanks. You start gettin’ it all set up, Doc, while I check out the pipeline valves one more time.”

Tug unlimbered the robots first. They were built like short squat humanoids, and each came with a telerobotic interface that had the form of a virtual reality helmet. The idea was that you put on the helmet and watched through the robot’s eyes, meanwhile talking the robot through some repetitive task that you were going to want it to do. The task in this case was to build jellyfish tanks by lining some of the garage’s big truck bays with titaniplast—and to fill up the tanks with water.

The robot controls were of course trickier than Tug had anticipated, but after an hour or so he had one of them slaving away like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. He powered up the second robot and used it to bring in and set up the new computer and the laser-sintering assemblage. Then he crossloaded the first robot’s program onto the second robot, and it, too, got to work turning truck bays into aquaria.

Tug configured the new computer and did a remote login to his workstation back in Los Perros. In ten minutes he’d siphoned off copies of all the software he needed, and ghostly jellyfish were shimmering across the computer’s new screen. Tug went out and looked at the robots; they’d finished five aquaria now, and water was gushing into them from connections the busy robots had made to the Quinonez Motorotive watermain.

Tug opened the trunk of his car and began bringing in artificial jellyfish and throwing them into the new tanks. Meanwhile Revel was moving about on the big storage tanks, crawling all over them like an excited fly on fresh
meat. Spotting Tug, Revel whooped and waved from the top of a tank. “The slime’s comin’ soon,” hollered Revel. Tug waved back and returned to his computer.

Checking his e-mail, Tug saw that he’d finally gotten a coelenteratological monograph concerning one of the ctenophores he’d been most eager to model: the Venus’s-girdle, or
Cestus veneris
, a comb-jelly native to the Mediterranean, shaped like a wide, tapering belt covered with cilia. The Venus’s-girdle was a true ctenophore, and its water-combing cilia were said to diffract sunlight into gorgeous rainbows. It might be fun to wrap one of them around your waist for dress-up. Ctenophore, Inc. could make fashion accessories as well as toys! Smiling as he worked, Tug began transferring the report’s data to his design program.

The roar of the Urschleim coming through the pipeline was like a subway underground. Initially taking it for an earthquake, Tug ran outside and collided with the jubilant Revel.

“Here she comes, pardner!”

The nearest of the giant tanks boomed and shuddered as the slime began coursing into it. “So far, so good!” said Revel.

Tanks two and three filled up uneventfully, but a long vertical seam midway up on tank four began to gape open as the tank was filling. Scampering about like a meth-biker roughneck, Revel yanked at the pipeline valves and diverted the Urschleim flow from tank four into tanks five and six, which tidily absorbed the rest of the shipment.

As the roaring and booming of the pipeline delivery died down, the metal of tank four gave a dying shriek and ripped open from top to bottom. Floundering in vast chaotic motion, the sides of the great tank unrolled to fall outward like a snipped ribbon, tearing loose from the huge disk top, which glided forward some twenty yards like a giant Frisbee.

An acre or more of slime gushed out of the burst tank to flood the tank farm’s dry weedy soil. The thousands of
gallons of glistening Urschleim mounded up on the ground like a clear tapioca pudding.

Tug started running toward the spill, fearful for Revel’s safety. But, no, there was Revel, standing safe off to one side like a triumphant cockroach. “Come on, Tug!” he called. “Come look at this!” Tug kept running and Revel met him at the edge of the Urschleim spill.

“This is just like the spill at Ditheree!” exclaimed Revel. “But you’ll see, spillin’ Urschleim on the ground don’t mean a thing. You ready to start fillin’ orders, Tug?” His voice sounded tinny and high, like the voice of an indestructible cartoon character.

“The stuff is warm,” said Tug, leaning forward to feel the great knee-high pancake of Urschleim. His voice, too, had a high, quacking quality. Here and there fat bubbles of gas formed beneath the Urschleim and burst plopping holes in it. The huge Urschleim flapjack was giving off gas like a dough full of yeast. But the gas was helium, which is why their voices were high and—

“I just realized how the Urschleim makes helium,” squawked Tug. “Cold fusion! Let’s run back in the garage, Revel, and find out whether or not we’ve got radiation sickness. Come on. I mean it. Run!”

Back in the garage they caught their breath for a while. “Why would we have radiation sickness?” puffed Revel finally.