Hidden Variables (26 page)

"I dropped off the papers and left. It wasn't the sort of scene I wanted to tangle with. I'd seen Vic when he was angry, one day when he chewed me out for screwing up a telephone message he was supposed to get and didn't. What would he do if he thought his precious Ginny was playing the two-backed beast with Mahler? I didn't even want to think about it.

"That was all I knew of it for another couple of weeks. At least they kept away from the lab, and I was too busy with the work there to stick my nose in where it wasn't wanted, whatever those two were up to."

Jack paused. We all waited patiently while Dave examined his hand with excruciating care and at last played an apparently random card from it. I always feel that when Dave is stoned you can tell just what he will be like when he's a hundred years old. He gets slow, tremulous, and not quite all there.

We watched while George dropped the Queen of Spades on Dave's lead, and Jack nodded knowingly.

"Aye, you can go badly wrong if you don't watch what other people's hands are holding," he said. "That was Dieter Mahler's problem. He had his eye too much on Ginny, and he underestimated the way that Vic could work like a fiend at the lab and still keep his eye on her too. I didn't know it at first, but Dieter had set another lure for Vic Lakman, one that he expected would hold all his attention. The first I heard of it was late one afternoon, when they were sitting talking in the lab.

" 'It won't be expensive to make,' Mahler was saying. He was puffing on one of his Pittsburgh stogies, and he had unbent far enough to loosen his tie a little. 'You'll need an initial investment in equipment, then it will get cheap. And it will be a lot better than any of the polymers we use now. Not just twice as good—a
lot
better.'

"Vic Lakman was leaning across the bench towards him. He looked about twice as tall as Mahler, like a Viking god looming over a Nibelung dwarf. 'How good, Doctor?' he said. 'You're suggesting that I ought to invest a lot of money in new equipment, but how good will this new stuff be?'

"Dieter Mahler waved his cigar in a circular smoke pattern. 'A hundred times as good as what we have now, at the very least. Probably more like a thousand times better. I assure you, it will revolutionize fire-fighting. Invest in this now, and in five years time we'll be the only people in the business.'

"Lakman pulled a pad of paper over to him and began to scribble numbers. I don't think he saw his wife enter, or the quick look that passed between Ginny and Mahler. Nobody took much notice of me—low-priced lab technicians didn't seem to count in business or pleasure.

" 'No good,' said Lakman when he finally finished figuring. 'According to this estimate, I'd have to find a hundred and fifty thousand for a working prototype plant. I can't do that without something to show people. Sure you didn't drop a decimal point somewhere?'

"Mahler shrugged. 'What can I say? Error is always possible, and I can't prove I'm right unless we do some kind of small demonstration and make the new polymer. I could do that on a small scale for, oh, say five thousand. That would give us just a couple of pounds of it—but it would be enough to show off what it can do.'

"Lakman crumpled his sheet of calculations up into a ball and looked around the lab—right through me, as I said I didn't count for much. He looked at Mahler again, then from him to Ginny. Finally he nodded. 'All right. I can find five thousand. How soon will you be done if you begin today?'

" 'Two weeks,' said Mahler. Then, too cocky, he made what I thought might be a bad mistake. He added. 'I'll make this my top priority,' and he gave Ginny another quick look, one that was a good deal more direct and was probably meant to reassure her that one of his priorities wouldn't go any lower. She didn't blush, but not many women can do that after they reach thirty—even when they have a lot more to blush about.

"Neither Mahler nor Lakman was going to tell me anything, of course, but it was obvious enough for me to piece it together for myself. Mahler had dreamed up some new super-additive, something that would make water
really
slippery. With that super-slippery water, a fire-fighting unit would be able to pump maybe a hundred times as much water through a hose with no extra equipment."

"Now, just a minute, Jack," broke in George. He was looking pleased with himself. Just last week, Jack had told him that a story he had brought to be read was a piece of mindless flatulence. We don't pull punches in the group, but George thought that was going too far and he had been waiting to get even with Jack since then.

"You're making up this whole thing," he said. "What you just said is a pure physical impossibility. It's absolute nonsense. Water has inertia, like everything else. There's no way you could increase flow without overcoming the inertia, and that would mean completely new equipment to pump the water."

Jack looked at him gravely."You're quite right, George," he said. "I was overstating. It's not like me to exaggerate, and I'm glad you cut me off when I began to do it. What I meant was, all the work that you'd usually do against
frictional
forces would be avoided when you were pumping water through the hose. You would still have to accelerate the water, and if you were sending it up to a high floor you'd still have to give it enough speed to get it up there. Even so, Mahler's super-slippery water would make a huge difference—most of the problem with the high-velocity hoses comes from fighting the frictional losses—especially when you're using a very long hose.

"Let me go on, and I'll make sure I don't exaggerate anything else. After the meeting with Lakman, Mahler began to come into the lab every day and stay until after midnight. He had a private room in the back, and he locked it when he went in and when he came out. It was easy enough to see how things were going in the experiments from the look on his face when he came out for coffee or to go to the John. Sometimes he'd walk right past me as though I didn't exist, and on other days he'd come out with his cigar lit, and he'd stop and chat and puff away, and swell up with satisfaction like a contented little rooster.

"A couple of times Ginny was at the lab at lunch time, and she and Dieter went off to eat lunch together. They were circumspect enough, but Ginny was looking different these days. It's hard to say how, but she seemed kind of
sleeker
when she was with Mahler, and I almost expected her to rub up against his shoulder and purr.

"I felt sorry for Vic Lakman. He was working harder than ever, juggling his finances to squeeze out cash that he needed for the experiments, and all the time his wife was playing games behind his back. But he must have been a lot more aware of what was going on than I gave him credit for. Late one afternoon, when he was in the back room with Mahler, a fellow in a tweed jacket stopped by with a sealed envelope for him. He wouldn't leave it with me until Lakman called through from inside to tell him that it would be all right, and that he would pick it up in just a few minutes.

"Before Lakman came out, Ginny showed up. She was pale, and her hair was a mess—very unusual for her.

" 'Is someone in there with Dr. Mahler?' she asked.

" 'Mr. Lakman. Go on in, I'm sure they won't mind,' I said.

"She turned paler than ever. 'No, it's all right,' she said, then she turned and ran out.

" ' I said that she was pale, but she was nowhere as pale as Vic Lakman when he opened that envelope and read what was inside it. He crumpled the message and thrust it into his pocket as Mahler followed him out of the back room.

"Dieter seemed blind to Lakman's mood. He was bubbling over with excitement and high spirits.

" 'Tomorrow I'll be able to show you the whole thing on a larger scale,' he said. 'But I think you'll agree after that demonstration that we are there. How much did I say we had, five hundred and forty grams? I ought to make a note of that.'

"He pulled out a thin blue notebook, wallet size, opened it and scribbled something in it with an old-fashioned ink fountain pen. Then he turned to Lakman. 'Would you care to have a drink to celebrate?'

"I could hardly stand to look at Lakman's face, but Mahler didn't seem to notice anything. After a few seconds he repeated his question.

" 'No,' said Lakman at last. 'I'm not in the mood for that.' And he hurried off out without another word, leaving Mahler to puff on his reeking cigar and talk me—without too much trouble—into going over to a bar and having a few bourbons. Most of his mannerisms were European, but his time in the south had taught him a proper respect for good U.S. liquor."

Jack stopped talking and picked up his cards. He frowned at his hand, then looked over to Rich, who was keeping the scores. "How am I doing?"

"You're in last place with eighty-three. Followed by me and Dave with seventy-eight."

"And I'm leading with thirty-eight," said George happily. "No wonder you fall behind, Jack, when you talk so much."

Jack looked at him calmly. "Aye, that's probably true," he said, and passed three cards on to Rich.

"But what about Mahler and the Lakmans?" I said. I didn't know about George, but I wanted to hear the rest of it. The others muttered agreement with me.

Jack shrugged. "There's not too much more to tell. I left Mahler and went back to my apartment about nine o 'clock. Next morning, Vic Lakman came in to the lab about eight-thirty. He looked terrible, as though he hadn't slept a wink. Usually he was all business, but that morning he just seemed to want to sit around and chat to me. I thought to myself, poor bastard, he can't even think straight with what she's doing to him, and we chatted all morning about everything under the sun. I couldn't get my work done, either, but he was the boss and if he wanted to pay me to talk to him that was his option.

"We went and had lunch together, and we were still eating when the police arrived. Dieter Mahler was dead. He had been found by Ginny Lakman about noon, when she went down to the beach house for her morning swim—or whatever it was she enjoyed there when Dieter was alive.

"Mahler's head had been bashed in. According to the police surgeon, he had been dead only an hour or so when Ginny found him.

"They ruled her out early. First, she had almost collapsed when she found the body, and second, the police surgeon did not believe that any woman could have delivered the blow that killed Mahler. He had been hit so hard that his cervical vertebrae had been crushed as his head was driven downwards.

"Vic was ruled out, too, as soon as the police found he had been with me for the whole morning. I could swear to that, and anyway to leave the rear part of the lab we would have had to pass through three rooms full of people, plus a receptionist. After half an hour of answering questions about Mahler, and what he knew of his past, Vic was allowed to go home. He went to their house, where Ginny had been taken under sedation. I don't know what they said to each other there."

Jack paused to play a card. He seemed in no hurry to say more. I slapped down a card of the same suit and said, "Come on, that can't be the end of it! What happened next? You said you were almost a millionaire, but all you've told us about is an unsolved murder."

Rich was nodding agreement. "Give," he said—a moderately long speech for him so late in the evening.

Jack shrugged. "Well, that was the end of Mahler's experiments. Lakman never mentioned one word about super-slippery water to anyone else. I would have accepted the police verdict—Mahler's death was the act of some vagrant looking to rob him—if it hadn't been for a couple of odd reports.

"The first was the official description of Mahler's death. It had come while he was actually in the outside shower. They never did find the murder weapon, but the police said they were looking for the traditional 'blunt instrument', some kind of massive, padded club. The second thing was Mahler's blue notebook. The police had brought it back to the lab for identification. It had been found about thirty feet from the body, but they didn't seem to attach any significance to that.

"When I realized what must have happened, I went out to the beach house myself and had a good look round there. I found what I expected—but it wasn't evidence that you could ever offer in court."

Now we were all looking at Jack, with our mouths more or less gaping open.

"Come on, then," said George at last. "Don't leave us hanging. What had happened to Mahler?"

Jack played another card casually before he answered. "Just what you should have deduced, the way that I deduced it. I told you, Mahler was making super-slippery water—and he had succeeded. He had five hundred and forty grams of the additive, made the day before he was murdered. Enough to treat a couple of thousand gallons of water. It was locked in the lab, and that was off limits—but not to Vic Lakman. He had access to everything. And he'd seen a demonstration the same day as he was given real proof as to what Ginny and Mahler were up to.

"He wasn't a man to stand for that. Where he grew up, adultery was probably considered justifiable homicide. Mahler had to die."

"But you said Lakman had a perfect alibi," protested Dave. "You gave him one yourself."

"Of course I did." Jack picked up another trick and led a high club. "He
arranged
it so he'd have a perfect alibi. Isn't it obvious what he did? He went to the lab that night, took the sample of super-slippery water additive out of the lab, and went to the beach house. While Mahler was sleeping, he climbed up to the roof of the house and dumped the additive in the water tank, the rain-fed one that supplied the outside shower. The additive made the water flow a hundred times as easily—maybe a thousand times as easily, if Mahler's estimate was correct.

"Next morning, Mahler took his usual swim, then went into the outside shower and turned it on. A couple of hundred gallons of water—well over half a ton—came out of the shower head in a couple of seconds. It smashed Mahler, just as though a sixteen-hundred pound weight had been dropped down on him from ten feet up. That was the police's 'blunt instrument'—no wonder they never found it."

"But I still don't understand," said Dave. "You said that you found evidence. Why didn't you take it back and show it to the police?"