Winthrop stared at the door. Why had he waited? He thought a minute, then said, “I don’t know. Bravado or something.”
“Okay,” said the detective. The door slid open and they walked across the vestibule to the street. A few passersby watched curiously as Winthrop got into the back seat of the police car.
“I’m twenty four,” said Winthrop, as they drove through the streets to Police Headquarters.
“So?” said the detective.
“Seems like a hell of an age to stop at.”
“How old was your mother?” asked the cop.
Winthrop closed his eyes. “Do you hate me?”
“No,” said the cop.
Winthrop turned and looked at the cop. “I do,” he said.
“I hate my guts.”
Fluorocarbons Are Here to Stay!
What happened to the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company when it tried to tear down the all fluoryl plastic City Hall is enough to make a man with a heart of stone laugh.
“Lewiston, Massachusetts. Population, 6,023, census of 1960. Main industry, the production of fluoryl plastics. Founded 1798 by Emmanuel Lewis, American farmer of English stock. Opportunities for new businesses, especially in the service trades. Main tourist attraction, City Hall constructed in 1958 completely of fluoryl plastics, as advertisement of town’s main industry.” (“Guide to American Cities”, 1963, Wolkin, Ehrmbach and Company, New York, 1963.)
The City Council of Lewiston decided, after long deliberation, to build a new City Hall. The present one, while drawing tourists, was also drawing trouble. There were constant traffic jams in front of the building; broken penknives littered the lawn, left behind by souvenir hunters who had made unsuccessful attempts at chipping off a piece of wall. Besides, the conservative element in the town was loudly in opposition to, “the City Fathers meeting in a three-story publicity stunt.”
Replacing a City Hall isn’t, normally, too impossibly difficult a task. All it involves is the contracting of an architect (who listens to everything you want and then goes ahead and does what he wants), the opening of bids for the construction of the new City Hall (with Cousin Jamie assured of the job, of course, but that isn’t admitted publicly), and the tearing down of the old City Hall to make way for the new one.
Tear down the old City Hall. In the words of the Bard, there’s the rub, and quite a rub it is.
Perhaps you haven’t heard of the new fluoryl plastics. They are compounded of fluorocarbons, a combination of fluorine and carbon. The process involved is a simple, if puzzling, one. A hydrogen-fluorine compound is placed in a vat with a hydrocarbon; a few volts of electricity are sent through the vat, and what’s left is fluorocarbon and free hydrogen. To date, no one’s been able to explain the whys and wherefores. The only thing sure is that it happens.
In the early fifties, non-burnable paints were made of these fluorocarbons, among other things, and experimentation was begun on a plastic made of the substance. The result: fluoryl plastic.
Fluoryl plastic is indestructible, in the only sense of the word. It won’t burn, won’t crumble, won’t decay, can’t be broken into fragments, and will not leave the original shape it was molded in, no matter what is done to it. It is, in the language of the wondering scientists, completely stable.
The City Hall in question was constructed entirely of this plastic. The outside walls were gleaming white outdoor fluoryl plastic, impervious to the elements; the inside walls were plastics of quieter colors, but no less resistant. The floors and ceilings were formed by sturdy lengths of fluoryl plastic painted with fluoryl paint to look like wood. The roof of the building, the foundation, all were fluoryl. Even the seams of the building were sealed by a fluoryl cement.
This, then, is the building the City Council planned so nonchalantly to tear down.
A wrecking crew — the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company — was called in and put to work. The first weapon they brought to bear was a heavy iron ball, attached by a cable to a derrick, with which the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company demolished walls. The first time they swung this outsize eight-ball at one of the walls of the City Hall, there was a terrible noise; the ball came ricocheting back from the unmarred wall and crunched into the arm of the derrick, doing to it what had been heretofore been done only to walls.
When the foreman of the crew found out, as he did shortly, he fired the operator for negligence, reported the damage to the office, and led his men indoors for some hand-to-hand demolition.
The office sent somebody out to remove the dilapidated derrick and replace it with a fresh contender; but the foreman and his men just didn’t have any success at all with the City Hall.
Not that they didn’t try hard enough. They stomped into the place, up the three flights of wide ebony fluoryl plastic stairs to the top floor, and attacked a wall.
It was the first wall in their experience that had ever defended itself. One of the men raised a heavy axe above his head and crashed the edge of it into the wall. Before he knew what was going on, the axe was going back the way it had come, was bringing him with it, and driving him all the way across the hall — until the axe hit the opposite wall and bounded off to one side. Then the man hit the wall and bounded off to the other side.
Somebody else slammed the wall at the same time with a sledge hammer. Before he could take it up with the union, the hammer had rebounded, sped through his spread legs, and had jackknifed him down and through after it.
It was the same thing everywhere. Axes and hammers of all kinds were bouncing off the walls, as though someone were trying to break a steel girder with a tennis ball. After about an hour of unrewarding effort, the walls didn’t have a mark on them. They were still there — and that was something which had never happened in the entire two-hundred-and-six year history of the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company.
The company was irked, and rightfully so. Their men, their most experienced hands, were threatening angrily to quit; and their reputation was flying away on the wings of Mercury — or fluorine, rather. So they went before the City Council, which was holding its sessions in the one local theater, the Paramount, and asked just what the City Fathers meant to do about this.
The City Fathers hadn’t the slightest idea, and said so. They pointed out to the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company that it was their job to tear buildings down and not in the sphere of business of the City Council. They also suggested that the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company get to work pretty damn fast, and get that building down, because they had already engaged the contractor to begin building the new City Hall on the same site come June, which was only two months away.
The representatives of the company left the Paramount Theatre figuratively tearing their hair, but more determined than ever that the City Hall, indestructible or not, was going to be torn down if it took every man and every penny the Smith Wrecking and Salvage Company could scrape together to do it. There’s such a thing as honor, you know.
Experts were called in, and they muddled around for a while, looking at the walls of the City Hall through magnifying glasses; inspecting samples of fluoryl plastics under microscopes; and muttering through their Van Dykes. They finally decided that there wasn’t a way in the world to tear that building down. They said as much, pocketed their pay, and left.