hands now: he went and rinsed them off. The stuff was supposed to be made of cellulose waste from the fermentation vats at the alcohol factory, dried and soaked with a low-grade plankton oil to keep it burning. Rumor had it that it was really made of dried and pressed fish guts from the processing plants, and he preferred this to the official version, true or not.
His miniature garden was doing well in the window box. He plucked the last of the sage and spread it out on the table to dry, then lifted the plastic sheeting to see how the onions were doing. They were coming along fine and would be ready for pickling soon. When he went to rinse off his hands in the sink he looked quizzically at his beard in the mirror.
“It needs trimming, Sol,” he told his image. “But the light is almost gone so it can wait until morning. Still, it wouldn’t hurt none to comb it before you dress for dinner.” He ran a comb through his beard a few times, then tossed the comb aside and went to dig a pair of shorts out of the wardrobe. They had started life many years earlier as a pair of Army suntan trousers, and since then had been cut down and patched until they bore little resemblance to the original garment. He was just pulling them on when someone knocked on the door. “Yeah,” he shouted, “who is it?”
“Alcover’s Electronics,” was the muffled answer.
“I thought you died or your place burned down,” Sol said, throwing the door open. “It’s only been two weeks since you said you would do a rush job on this set — which I paid for in advance.”
“That’s the way the electron hops,” the tall repairman said calmly, swinging his valise-sized toolbox onto the table. “You got a gassy tube, some tired components in that old set. So what can I do? They don’t make that tube any more, and if they did I couldn’t buy it, it would be on priority.” His hands were busy while he talked, hauling the TV down to the table and starting to unscrew the back. “So how do I fix the set? I have to go down to the radio breakers on Greenwich Street and spend a couple of hours shopping around. I can’t get the tube, so I get a couple of transistors and breadboard up a circuit that will do the same job. It’s not easy, I tell you.”
“My heart bleeds for you,” Sol said, watching suspiciously as the repairman took the back off the set and extracted a tube.
“Gassy,” the man said, looking sternly at the radio tube before he threw it into his toolbox. From the top tray he took a rectangle of thin plastic on which a number of small parts had been attached, and began to wire it into the TV circuit. “Everything’s makeshift,” he said. “I have to cannibalize old sets to keep older ones working. I even have to melt and draw my own solder. It’s a good thing that there must have been a couple of billion sets in this country, and a lot of the latest ones have solid state circuits.” He turned on the TV and music blared across the room. “That will be four D’s for labor.”
“Crook!” Sol said. “I already gave you thirty-five D’s…”
“That was for the parts, labor is extra. If you want the little luxuries of life you have to be prepared to pay for them.”
“The repairs I need,” Sol said, handing over the money. “The philosophy I do not. You’re a thief.”
“I prefer to think of myself as an electronic grave robber,” the man said, pocketing the bills. “If you want to see the thieves you should see what I pay to the radio breakers.” He shouldered his toolbox and left.
It was almost eight o’clock. Only a few minutes after the repairman had finished his job a key turned in the lock and Andy came in, tired and hot.
“Your chunk is really dragging,” Sol said.
“So would yours if you had a day like mine. Can’t you turn on a light, it’s black as soot in here.” He slumped to the chair by the window and dropped into it.
Sol switched on the small yellow bulb that hung in the middle of the room, then went to the refrigerator. “No Gibsons tonight, I’m rationing the vermouth until I can make some more. I got the coriander and orris root and the rest, but I have to dry some sage first, it’s no good without that.” He took out a frosted pitcher and closed the door. “But I put some water in to cool and cut it with some alky which will numb the tongue so you can’t taste the water, and will also help the nerves.”
“Lead me to it!” Andy sipped the drink and managed to produce a reluctant smile. “Sorry to take it out on you, but I had one hell of a day and there’s more to come.” He sniffed the air. “What’s that cooking on the stove?”
“An experiment in home economics — and it was free for the taking on the Welfare cards. You may not have noticed but our food budget is shot to pieces since the last price increase.” He opened a canister and showed Andy the granular brown substance inside. “It is a new miracle ingredient supplied by our benevolent government and called ener-G — and how’s
“Everything except flavor?”
“That’s about the size of it. I put it in with the oatmeal, I doubt if it can do any harm because at this moment I am beginning to hate oatmeal. This ener-G stuff is the product of the newest wonder of science, the plankton whale.”
“The
“I know you never open a book — but don’t you ever watch TV? They had an hour program on the thing. A conversion of an atomic submarine, cruises along just like a whale and sucks in plankton, all the microscopic sea things that you will be very surprised to find out the mighty whales live on. All three whales that’re left. The smallest life forms supporting the biggest, there’s a moral there someplace. Anyway — the plankton gets sucked in and hits a sieve and the water gets spit out and the plankton gets pressed into little dry bricks and stored in the sub until it is full up and can come back and unload. Then they futz around with the bricks of plankton and come up with ener-G.”
“Oh, Christ, I bet it tastes fishy.”
“No takers,” Sol sighed, then served up the oatmeal.
They ate in silence. The ener-G oatmeal wasn’t so bad as they had expected, but it wasn’t very good, either. As soon as he was finished Sol washed the taste of it out of his mouth with the alcohol-and-water mixture.
“What’s this you said about more work to come?” he asked. “They have you doing a double shift today?”
Andy went back to the window; there was a bit of air stirring the damp heat now that the sun had set. “Just about, I’m going on special duty for a while. You remember the murder case I told you about?”
“Big Mike, the gonif? Whoever chopped him did a service to the human race.”
“My feelings exactly. But he’s got political friends who are more interested in the case than we are. They have some connections, they pulled a few strings and the commissioner himself called the lieutenant and told him to get a man on the investigation full time and find the killer. It was my name on the report so I caught the assignment. And Grassy, oh, he is a sweet bastard, he didn’t tell me about it until I was signing out. He gave me the job then and a strong suggestion that I get on to it tonight. Like now,” he said, standing and stretching.
“It’ll be a good deal, won’t it?” Sol asked, stroking his beard. “An independent position, your own boss, working your own hours, being covered with glory.”
“That isn’t what I’ll be covered with unless I come up with an answer pretty fast. Everyone is watching and they are putting on the pressure. Grassy told me I had to find the killer soonest or I would be back in uniform on a beat in Shiptown.”
Andy went into his room and unlocked the padlock on the bottom drawer of the dresser. He had extra rounds of ammunition here, some private papers and equipment, including his issue flashlight. It was the squeeze-generator type and it worked up a good beam when he tested it.
“Where to now?” Sol asked when he came out. “Going to stake out the joint?”
“It’s a good thing you’re not a cop, Sol. With your knowledge of criminal investigation crime would run rampant in the city—”
“It’s not doing so bad, even without my help.”
“ — and we’d all be murdered in our beds. No stake out. I’m going to talk to the girl.”
“Now the case gets interesting. Am I allowed to ask what girl?”
“Kid name of Shirl. Really built. She was Big Mike’s girl friend, living with him, but she was out of the apartment when he got bumped.”
“Do you maybe need an assistant? I’m good at night work.”
