Public-domain ebook
Be young again!
English422 downloads on Project GutenbergDownload EPUB
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #70562.
The opening · free to read
Feature Novel
Just about every confidence gag had been tried on old Vachti, except the Elixir of Youth. Only this was different--Professor Barr had a unique pitch on it, but Buck had the real goods!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Future combined with Science Fiction Stories July-August 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Me and a guy named Hermes Trismigestus take care of the situation when Jode gets in a very tight place. This guy Trismigestus is anyways a thousand years old, if he's alive anywhere, and I am sixteen, but we co-operate. The tight place is caused by Prof Henry Barr, who urgent regrets the matter later on, and by Mr. Vachti, who is an elderly bootlegger baron in the dear dead days; he still has bodyguards hanging around him bloodthirsty. If you think an old guy like Mr. Vachti can't figure in a tight place--he's got some tough-looking goons around and a yacht and a private island estate and other trimmings--all I got to say is you never met Mr. Vachti.
Old Jode gets into it because he thinks it will top off his career. Pride. He is the party who once worked a handkerchief-switch on Ma Mandelbaum, who I understand was the biggest lady fence in the world in her day, and wasn't to be swindled by an amateur. He also once sells a gold brick to the United States Mint in Denver, Colorado. And once he persuades the police department of a certain fair city that he is a Fed man with a tip-off on a bank robbery that is gonna take place. He has every cop in town ambushed around that bank that night, while he lurks inside with a tommy-gun, waiting for the bold bad burglars that never arrive. He acts much embarrassed next morning.
But a coupla days later the liquid assets of the bank turn up in the mail addressed to him, because he has spent those long hours packing them neat in Manilla envelopes and mailing them in the mail-slot that is in the bank for the convenience of depositors. But, still, Jode feels that taking Mr. Vachti over the hurdles will crown his career. Mr. Vachti was a very big shot once, when his business staff included not only income-tax men and tommy-gun experts, but also gentlemen who specialize in putting people in barrels of concrete and dumping them in the Chicago River.
I meet old Jode when I am thumbing a ride towards the Coast. I have beat it from what you might call home after my old man works me over with a chair for spending money I earn on a gas-engine for a model aeroplane instead of giving it to him to get drunk on. I am not making out so good at hitch-hiking, because, being sixteen and not looking any older, I hafta dodge truant officers everywhere. But I get by; I fix a car-radio for a guy at a fillin'-station while old Jode is having his gas-tank filled up, and the guy says swell and gives me a half a buck. The job I done would cost him twelve sixty at a regular repair-shop. I says, "I could do with a lift to Phoenix," but the guy isn't going that way. Then old Jode wheezes cordial that he is, so I climb in his car.
He is fat and old and has danglin' red wattles, and he looks like he is made of money and hasn't a care in the world. Outside of havin' the cops of sixteen or eighteen states passionate interested in his whereabouts, he doesn't have no worries, and lookin' like a million dollars is his business. But I don't know that then; he talks to me cordial, and we get on to science, a subject in which he is interested but don't know beans about.
With him asking questions, grunting and respectful, I tell him the theoretic perfect fuel for space-ships, and the difference between a rocket and a jet, and what the Doppler effect is, and what's the difference between Oak Ridge and Hansford, Wash. I'm not showing off, you know; I explain that I read a lot of science magazines and he'd ought to try them. Special the science-fiction ones. And I tell him I'm headed for the Coast to get a job in a radio-repair shop, like I had back home after school and Saturdays, and I'm going to save up and have a private experimental laboratory. I got some ideas--science-fiction ideas--that I think I can make work out actual.
Old Jode gets thoughtful. Later on when I know him better I will know what that means. Right then, though, when he beams and says he would like to play a joke on a friend, and I seem a handy young man with tools, I just say modest that I'm pretty fair. He makes me a proposition. He'll stake me to grub and hotel expenses and a suit of clothes, and say I'm his nephew, if I'll fix him a trick television cabinet with a movie sound projector inside so he can fool a friend into thinkin' he's got a long-distance receiver that'll pick up from anywhere. I can do that with my hands tied behind my back; I take him up quick. I improve the idea; I suggest color-film, which will look like three-color television in action.
Mr. Vachti don't have anything to do with this deal. Neither does the Prof, who at that time is fumbling happy with a swell idea that he don't know how good it is. This is Phoenix, Arizona. So old Jode buys the stuff I say is needed--he acts like he is made of money--and I put it together in the hotel-room he gets for me next to his. It's a swell hotel, the best in town, and I eat fancy grub that I don't know the names of, being you have to order it in French. When the job's finished I figure on thumbing my way further, but old Jode says perish the thought. He will put me on salary as his technical assistant.
He waddles around town, wheezing and busy, while I catch up on my science reading. I'm knee-deep in magazines when he comes tiptoeing into the room and says joyous that his joke worked and he's beating it before his friend gets wise. So we light out, and he chuckles happy all the way up to Sun Valley--which is considerable of a ride--where he says he would like to rest a few days. When I get to know him better I find out that he shows what was apparently three-color television to some sharp business men in Phoenix; they get together and pull a fast business deal on him, and swindle him excessive by paying him only twenty thousand bucks for all rights in a epoch-making discovery. Which when they find out they been stuck they can't say a word, because their methods are at least unethical if not illegal.
Old Jode soaks up sun and fancier grub than ever at Sun Valley, which is a very swank place indeed, but I get restless. Then one day he comes in chucklin' and says that he will have great fun with his friend the president of Western Power if I can contrive something that looks like it is a receiver of beamed or wireless power, and can it be done? I says it will be phoney but if he wants a laugh, okay. So I make a set with a coupla thyratron tubes and this and that and it looks just like a science-fiction illustration. But the power it delivers so impressive comes from storage-batteries built in the work-bench it's built on.
I would like to see him play his joke, but he says no. I sneak a look in the window, anyhow, and I get the picture. I don't hear the actual dealing, but Western Power pays him plenty for full ownership of the gadget, with the agreement that they are going to smash it right where it sets and try not to have bad dreams about what it would do to their business.
We leave Sun Valley with old Jode on top of the world and beaming at me affectionate. I have got wise, now, and I talk to him stern. He is upset, but he tells me the story of his life--he gets proud of it as he goes along--with all about how he pulls the handkerchief-switch on Ma Mandelbaum, and the gold brick on the Denver Mint, and all the rest. It is a very adventurous career he describes, and it even has glamour. Then he promises that if I stay on as his technical assistant I can have a private experimental laboratory of my own, and he will leave me in the clear in all dealings. So I settle down to planning what I'm gonna have and how I'm going to use it. I expect to set up my laboratory in Las Lagunas, where we are heading.
Las Lagunas is another swank place, with all the bills-of-fare in French and the prices lookin' like Army-Navy estimates. I send for lab-supply catalogs and start hunting for a place to set up shop. Then Jode--who has been circulating social, wheezing happy and contagious--says apprehensive that I better not plan on a lab here, because we may have to move. I ask why. He says he has met Mr. Vachti, and to top off his career he has got an ambition to put over a fast one on him. After that, he says, he will retire and devote the rest of his life to supervising my education.
I am not keen on having my education supervised, but Jode explains that Mr. Vachti is the one guy who has put it over on everybody, and nobody has ever put anything over on him. He is famous from prohibition days. He even beats the income-tax rap the Feds try to pin on him when they despair of linking him with missing persons they think are in barrels of concrete at the bottom of the Chicago River. Mr. Vachti is completely surrounded by lawyers and personal physicians; he is seventy and keeps his old bodyguards out of sentiment, wears dark spectacles, and has a most unpleasant hobby. He owns a yacht, an island, and several million dollars, but his hobby is getting people to try to swindle him and then sending them to jail. He is very respectable now, says Jode, and a good many artistic swindlers have worked on him, but he does not appreciate their artistry. It is a challenge, says old Jode. It will be something to remember in his declining years, Jode says, if he nicks Mr. Vachti for a roll and gets away with it. If I will postpone my laboratory until he is through with Mr. Vachti, he will buy me a eighteen-foot sailboat that I can have personal, and I can loaf around in it while business goes on.
I make the deal. The price of my laboratory is climbing as I think of more things I would like to have. I figure if Jode gets rich enough, maybe I can nick him for a small-sized cyclotron and have some fun. Meanwhile a sailboat won't be bad.
I get it. I do have fun. I have never heard of Hermes Trismigestus; I have never heard of Paracelsus, or Dr. Dee, or Dr. Faustus, or Nicolas Flamel, or any of those guys. I have never heard of Prof Henry Barr. But I learn to sail my boat pretty good and I am happy planning my laboratory.
But old Jode loses his carefree look; he gets absent-minded and fretful. One day he confides his woes to me. "I am afraid," he wheezes pathetic, "that I am losing my grip, Buck. I know Mr. Vachti well. We are on confidential terms. He thinks I am a retired banker, and he has confided to me all about his hobby, and tells me with grim amusement about the various sucker-baits he has been invited to fall for. And I cannot contrive a scheme to offer him! Every type of enterprise the mind of man can invent has been tried on him! The most refined of financial shenanigans have failed! He is on to everything!"
I say, "Yeah?" I would like to be helpful; that laboratory is going to cost money. A electron-telescope ain't cheap. I need for Jode to be prosperous to keep his promise.
The book keeps going
Keep reading, and see it illustrated
Reading is free forever. Sign up and watch scenes appear while you read.
Scenes Storieta drew for other classics.
