John D. MacDonald
That Mess Last Year
This is Bud Lide’s story and I heard it in a Third Avenue bar and it is pretty obvious that Bud will never put it in his terse journalese because he, as much as anyone, wants to avoid one of those quilted cells that they give you for writing about that sort of thing.
We were in a booth, four of us, and it was that afternoon last week when little Jimmy Derider swung on Walker, the City Editor, and was tossed out. Bud Lide, who had been out west for several months doing something or other, sat and listened while the conversation turned from Jimmy Derider and became general — the topic being all of the people in the world who are small, weak, afraid and ineffectual. Jimmy was one of those. After fifteen years of being bullied by Walker, he had finally made a weak attempt to punch Walker’s face in.
One of the things that none of us mentioned was the way Bud Lide was drinking. He had been drinking ever since he got back from his extended stay in the mesa country. It worried the rest of us and we had the idea that by ignoring him, he’d be helped to fight his way up out of his alcoholic haze.
Bud Lide is maybe forty — a gaunt dark man with hollow cheeks, deep-set eyes, stringy limbs and a perpetual slouch. He does a lot of special assignment work.
Anyway, in the middle of our little talk, Bud Lide came up for air and said, “You fellows better be thankful that you’ve never seen what happens when one of the little guys of this world gets unlimited power.”
“Like Hitler?” I asked.
“No. I mean unlimited physical power. Individual power.”
“That doesn’t make sense, Bud,” Joe said. “If a man is a weakling, how’s he going to get unlimited physical power? It’s a contradiction of terms.”
Bud drained the rest of his drink and yelled for a refill. He put his sharp elbows on the table and looked around at us, his deep-set eyes glowing in a way that made me uncomfortable.
“Any of you guys ever hear of Los Ojos, New Mexico?” he asked.
“Some place where they got government projects,” Danny said. “Secret stuff.”
“That’s the place,” Lide said. “Stay away from that spot, boys. I wish I had. You go out there now and right in the middle of town you’ll find boulders too big to fit through the streets. The population is a lot smaller than it was a year ago. Everybody in town has a look in their eye like they got bodies home in the closet. It’s that kind of a place now. And all because one of the little guy gets muscles.”
“Tell us about it, Bud,” Joe said.
He sighed. “Sure, I’ll tell you. I’m safe telling you. You won’t believe me. You’re too smart. You’re all big city boys. You don’t go for fairy tales.”
He took a big gulp of his fresh drink. “About eight months ago the publisher of the sheet I work for is having a drink with a pal in D.C. and gets a telegram that something big will pop on a secret research project called Walrus, which is being handled by a science shark named Dr. Garson Partridge. The publisher tells the managing editor to subtract one good reporter and send him out to Los Ojos to be on the spot when the news breaks. I am the guy they send.
“You know how it is out there in New Mexico. The sun is a mile wide and it hangs about three hundred feet in the air and everything is white and it is like living inside a bake-oven. Everything is built of dried mud and the women look like they got skin made of nice brown corduroy. The men they got those big hats and the soft voices and out of every beer joint comes noises of cowboys moaning with guitar music — juke box stuff, courtesy Hollywood.
“I like going out as there is a local dolly who is getting those forever ideas about me, and a change is always a good thing, and lately the subways have been giving me a headache. I find a room in town for a twenty bribe on the side which goes on the expense account. The same day I find that the lab where this Walrus arrangement is going on is two miles outside of town up kind of a little notch in the rocks. It has barbed wire around it and maybe twenty people work in there all under the orders of this Doc Partridge. My orders are to smell around these twenty people and find out what goes on, so when the news breaks I’ll know what to expect and maybe I can give the sheet a little warning so that the head can be locked up anyway.
“For three days I tramp around trying to be agreeable to a tall dark dolly named Katherine, who works there and, from all the return play I get, I can be one of those tumbleweeds. She is stacked and she walks it around good and, even though my interest is somewhat more than professional, I get no place. When she does happen to notice me, the board says Tilt and the lights go out.
“While I am considering methods of attack on this tall dark and lush dish I notice another citizen who gets the same reaction I do and when I shake the dazzle out of my eyes and take a good look, I see the little guy also is one of the twenty.
“That makes it simple. I buy a bottle and entice him to my room and get him loaded by talking about how we both think this Katherine is the most wonderful thing walking around on wonderful legs. It seems the little guy is named Joe McGee, though it maybe should have been Hector Truelove. His is a stalwart five three, maybe a hundred and twenty and pale as the underside of a hoptoad. I never before saw such a pallid skin. On his temples you can see the little blue veins under his hide. He is half bald, and has scruffy brown hair like what the cat claws out of the mattress.
“After three rough jolts out of my bottle he opens up like a book called „Forever Amber“ and soon I know all. It seems he is what is called a lab technician and he is on civil service and spent the war in Washington and he has adored Katherine, who can spot him half a head and twenty pounds, for maybe a year. She has no time for him, as she prefers another lab technician, one with muscles.
“I prime him in my delicate fashion to let me know what goes on with this Operation Walrus project, and in a bored way he says that it is an idea of Partridge’s whereby you take a certain space and give it a big jolt of some special kind of electricity and it upsets the time stream or something and knocks the area where you point it back to yesterday or maybe the day before.
“It is a defense against atomic bombs because you jolt the area where the bomb is back to the day before yesterday and it isn’t there any more. You figure out where it comes from and send something up there to explode it and then you let the area fit back into the normal time stream and boom, you knock it off before it does damage. Joe McGee looks at me with his sad little blue eyes and says it is something even Partridge doesn’t know a lot about. It is discovered by accident and they are getting set to try it on a laboratory scale.
“He acts so mysterious that I pump him until he tells me that, in order to impress this Katherine, he has volunteered to step into the laboratory area they are going to jolt back to the day before yesterday and he has signed all the Government releases and Partridge has told him he is a very brave man but his Katherine still looks at him with nothing but indifference, and that is why he is drinking. I find out that the experiment goes on in three days, at eight o’clock in the morning.
“When he finally passes out, I get him down into my rented car and take him on out to the project area and leave him on the doorstep, so to speak. That same night I write a letter to the managing editor and I am about to mail it when I think how silly I look if this Joe McGee is kidding me. I don’t send it. You can’t tell what these pale little guys will do for a laugh.
“I loaf around and at eight in the morning on the right day, I am sitting in the rented car parked on the shoulder staring out toward the white buildings which have a nasty glare in the sun, even at eight in the morning. I don’t know what I expect to see, but when you are on a newspaper, you always take the long chances.