They liked his talk, but they loved the spray of sparks and the scabs of dead metal flying. They were astonished to see iron bars soften and drip like tar under the jet of blue flame.
The welding torch was one of Father's toys. There were others — his Thunderbox and Atom-smasher, and even his simpler ones, like the Beaver, which machined and threaded pipes — a hand-operated jaw of his own making with a toothy mouth set off by clamps. They were toys to him, but magic to the others. When he took a rusty pipe, reamed it, bent it, gave it threads, and fitted it with so many elbows it looked like a crankshaft, everyone gathered to watch him. Then he was a sorcerer in his iron mask, transforming a hunk of scrap iron into a symmetrical part for the plumbing that was the stomach and intestines of the plant. He claimed that even with this basic equipment, he could make the simplest rod or pipe into the tiniest computer circuit.
"I could make microchips out of the thickest iron brick around. I could make dumb metal talk. That's what computer circuits are — words and paragraphs in a primitive language. You don't think of computers as primitive," he said — he was speaking directly to Mr. Harkins—"but they are. They're mechanical savages."
He said he was making a monster. "I'm Doctor Frankenstein!" he howled through his welder's mask. He called one set of pipes its lungs, and another its poop shaft, and two tanks, "a pair of kidneys." He always spoke of the plant as "he" — "He needs a gizzard today," or "This will fit straight onto his liver," or "How's this for his gullet?"
Harkins and Peaselee laughed at this and asked Father if his monster had a name.
Father said, "Tell them, Charlie."
I remembered.
"Fat Boy," I said.
Everyone whispered the name.
Jerry and the twins were surprised that I knew something they didn't — not only its name but its purpose, how it worked, and what it would look like when it was done. They showed me some respect and for a while stopped calling me "Crummo" and "Spackoid."
Even Mother was a little curious about how I came to know so much. I told her that I had seen the scale model. I remembered the morning Father and I had loaded the little Worm Tub onto the pickup truck and driven past the scarecrow to give Polski a demonstration — Father happy, then Father fuming, and the wooden chest gulping and producing a disk of ice in a tumbler. I remembered more than that — the rubber seal in Northampton, and the policeman, and Father saying, "No one ever thinks of leaving this country. But I do, every day!" And the Monkey House. And "It's a disgrace."
That was all far away, but seeing this towering windowless building at the edge of the clearing, I understood why we had come here — to build Fat Boy, to make ice.
This was the distant empty place that Father had always spoken about. Here he could make whatever he pleased and not have to explain why to anyone. There was no Polski here to say "Vumble, vumble." Father said, "You look at Jeronimo and you can't tell what century it is. This is part of your original planet, with people to match. And you're wondering why I gave that missionary the bum's rush?"
Father had found his wilderness.
But the people were afraid of Fat Boy. It started with Francis Lungley. He said he heard noises in it at night. Mr. Maywit said it had a smell, not a machine smell but something like tiger breath. "They's bats inside," Ma Kennywick said, which was true. "He got twenty-two eyes at night," Mr. Haddy said, which was not true. They all watched it anxiously, as if it were a dangerous monster. No one would go inside unless Father went first, but Father had a habit of singing inside, and this frightened everyone. Mr. Harkins said one morning that it was gone. We ran out of the house and saw it was there. He said, "It just come back." The Zambus still heard noises in it. They were voices. Witches, they said.
Father told them to calm down.
"This isn't something to be afraid of," he said. "It isn't new. It isn't even an invention." But they were still afraid.
"It's a marvel, but it's not magic. People call me an inventor. I'm not an inventor. Look, what am I doing here?"
"Spearmints," Mr. Maywit said. He had got the word from Mr. Haddy.
"I'll tell you what I'm doing — what anyone who invents anything is doing. I'm magnifying."
Hammering the shoulders of a boiler, talking as he worked, Father said that most invention was either adaptation or magnification.
"Take the human body," he said. That contained all the physics and chemistry we needed to know. The best inventions were based on human anatomy. He himself had two patents on ideas he had plagiarized from the body — his Self-Sealing Tank and his Metal Muscle. He said there was no better piece of engineering than the ball-and-socket joint in the human hip. Computer technology was just a clumsy way of making a brain, but the central nervous system was a million times more complicated.
"Insulation? Look at fatty tissue!" You had to study natural things. Anyone who took a good look at an alligator or a hicatee could make an armored vehicle. The natural world showed man what was possible. In a world without birds there would be no airplanes. "Airplanes are just magnified sparrows — they're crascos with leg room."
The Zambus stared at Father, and the others listened twitchily to this man who the harder he worked the more he talked.
"What's a savage?" he said. "It's someone who doesn't bother to look around and see that he can change the world."
Everyone looked around and said this was so.
Father went on to say that savagery was seeing and not believing you could do it yourself, and that that was a fearful condition. The man who saw a bird and made it into a god, because he could not imagine flying himself, was a savage of the most basic kind. There were tribes of people who did not have the sense to build huts. They went around naked and caught double pneumonia. And yet they lived in the same neighborhood as birds that made nests and jack rabbits that dug holes. So these people were savages of utter worthlessness who did not have the imagination to come in out of the rain.
"I'm not saying all inventions are good. But you notice dangerous inventions are always unnatural inventions. You want an example? I'll give you the best one I know. Cheese spread that you squirt out of an aerosol can onto your sandwich. That's about as low as you can go."
Ma Kennywick's laugh went heck-heck, and Mr. Haddy said he had never heard of cheese squirting out of a can.
"Like shaving cream," Father said. "Comes out like Reddi-wip. Disgusting. The ozone layer? It eats it up. And there's four things wrong with it — the processed cheese itself, the squirt, the can, and the sandwich."
He was still hammering the boiler.
He said, "I never made anything that did not exist before in a similar form. I just chose something, or part of something, and made it bigger — like my valves and my Metal Muscle and my Self-Sealer. I got the idea from human anatomy — heart valves, striated muscle, stomach lining. Listen, I made gas tanks punctureproof! But it was just a question of scale and application, and — let's face it — improvement. I mean, doing a slightly better job than God."
Whenever Father mentioned God, the people in Jeronimo glanced at the sky and looked very guilty and ashamed, and squinted as if they expected thunder. Father saw this and changed the subject.
"People talk about the invention of the wheel. What's so wonderful about the wheel? It's nothing compared to ball bearings, but there are ball bearings in nature — you've got a rudimentary one in each hip! The development of lenses? All optical inventions are plagiarisms — of the human eye — though I admit the human eye is pretty inferior by comparison."