Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) (2 page)

This isn’t to say I understood
all that he told us either, but I came a little closer than most.

“So the C here, that’s what again?  The speed of light?”  A guy named Vinnie
, who I was pretty sure broke other people’s fingers for a living, was the one asking.  He was holding up a napkin with Einstein’s equation written on it, and shouting from the other side of the bar.  For most of the evening Al had been jotting things down on napkins and passing them around because we were short on blackboards.

“That’s right, Vin,” Al confirmed.  His mini-lecture had already gone past Einstein, but
I might have been the only one clear on that.

“Light has a speed?  How come?”

“It just does.  And it’s a big number.”

“Like what, in miles per hour?”

“Yes, like in miles per hour.”

“
Hey, that’s a good question,” a Polish longshoreman named Henryk said.

“I’m nearly positive it isn’t,” Al said.

“No, no, hear me out.”  He grabbed the napkin from Vinnie.  “So I get this.  Mass is the size of a thing, right?  And the speed of light is a really large number, so what you’re saying is you add the mass and the speed of light together, plus the two, and that’s an even bigger number, and that’s how much energy there is in this lump of mass.”

Al had been all the way up to chain reactions, but at this question he was about ready to cry.

“You almost have it, Henny,” I said.  “Except when you put the numbers together like that you’re multiplying them and not adding them.  And the two means it’s square.  Right, Al?”

“Yes, Rocky, thank you.”

“What is a square?”

“A thing with four corners, Hen!” someone shouted from in back.

“C squared means it’s C times C, so the whole thing on the right is Mass times the speed of light times the speed of light.  So it’s a
really
big number.”

Al jumped in.  “The point being, to break the bond of an atomic nucleus is to convert a portion
of the mass contained therein to energy, and the energy being released is tremendous.  Does this make sense?”

Henryk
and Vinnie were both nodding like it really did make sense.  “So here is the good question,” Hennie said.  “Does it release even more energy in Europe?”

“No,” Al said.  “Why would it?”

“Because they use kilometers there!  A kilometer is smaller than a mile, so the speed of light in kilometers per hour would be an even
bigger
number.”

*   *   *

After that, Al pretty much gave up trying to explain the idea of free energy to the guys at the bar, other than me.  I was always eager to hear more, and I understood most of the ideas he was bouncing around pretty well when he kept the math out of it, which he tried to do. 

We developed this conversational ap
proach where he’d explain something in a way I could understand, and then he’d have to stop and try to prove what he said was a real thing.  I didn’t need the proof, but he seemed to think it was important, which meant writing stuff down on more napkins.  When he was done he’d hand me the napkin, I’d nod a few times, and either throw it away or hand it off to anyone else who looked curious.  There was no way we were going to grasp the point he was making on those napkins, but it made him feel better to draw it out.  Plus I think three or four of the times he was explaining something to me he ended up figuring out a thing he hadn’t understood before, so I like to think I was helping. 

I’m usually a huge fan of science.  There have been some times when
I’ve been dubious, like when someone doing something scientific decides to lock me up, and then I’m not so pleased.  But that doesn’t happen often, and since basically every last creature comfort modern people now take for granted came from someone performing an act of science, overall I’m pretty happy with what’s come out of the discipline. I’m not even talking about the big inventions like cars and television and radio.  Sure, those are great, but after the wheel I think the modern world was founded on indoor plumbing and flush toilets, and someone had to invent those too.

I was pretty positive t
he things Al had been talking about were even more important than toilets.  I knew next to nothing about electricity, but I knew there were power plants in the world that produced that electricity.  What he was describing sounded a lot like an improvement on anything already going on, which is what you’d think too if someone said they could power a city just by stacking a certain kind of metal in the right order.  So I kept on digging for more details, and he kept giving them to me, up until the day he told me he couldn’t any more.

But before he got to that, he had to tell me about the girl he’d just met.  That these two things came together did not escape my attention.

“You have to meet her, Rocky.  She’s something else,” Al said.  “I mean it, she’s a straight knockout.”

“Is she now.”

“I know you’re thinking a guy who looks like me doesn’t land a knockout, but my Lu-Lu, she loves me for my brains.”

“That’s something you’ve got plenty of.  Lu-Lu?”  I
was pretty sure my buddy’s standards were low when it came to attractiveness in women, only because he wasn’t what I’d call handsome, so he was right about my skepticism.  I also wondered if, with a name like that, the girl was Asian.

“It’s Lucy. 
She likes it when I call her Lu-Lu.  She’s gonna come round, so you can meet her.”

“Here?  You should think about bringing her someplace nice.  Someplace clean, maybe.  Even the rats think twice about this bar.”
  Bringing a girl he thought was pretty into a barroom full of guys who didn’t know what tact was, was a bad idea, but I didn’t say that.

“I’m telling you, it’s love.  I want you to meet her.  I told her about you.”

“Now why would you do something like that?”

He laughed.  “She wants to
meet
you
, Rock, because you’re my good friend, isn’t that how these things work?”

I didn’t think it actually
was
how these things usually worked, and to support my side of a dispute on that point I could turn to any other guy there and ask them if they ever thought about bringing their wives or girlfriends around.  The answer would have been no, because this was the kind of place men came to behave like men, which was to say they behaved here in ways that made you wonder how the species ever managed to reproduce. 

“Sure, sure,” I said, “of course, bring her by.  I’d be happy to meet her.”

“Good, cuz it’s already set.  She’s gonna be here Saturday.  It’ll be a blast.  Don’t worry, Rock, I know what you’re thinking, but she can handle herself.  Oh, and before I forget: all that stuff about… you know?”  He leaned over the bar to whisper:  “The atomic stuff.”

“
Yeah, I was about to ask you about that.  How’s things?”

“
You had best not ask me any more.”

“So it’s not going well?”

He got a little red in the face, which was a peculiar reaction.  “No, it’s going… We can’t
talk
about it, you and me.  Not any more.  Look, Rock, I know I can trust you, okay?  But some guys got in a little trouble for saying too much to the wrong people about… all of that.  And now, I mean
right now
, it’s becoming kind of a big deal.  A couple of fellas came by the other day, made me sign a bunch of papers.”

“Are you in some kind of trouble
?”

“Me?  No, no, no trouble.”  The way he said it made me think the exact opposite was true.  “I just have to… I mean, now that we… Aw hell.”  He grabbed my hands and squeezed them tightly, like we were about to get engaged or something.  “
I can’t talk about it Rocky, but things have changed, you get me?  You can’t tell anybody about this stuff.”

I nodded.  “I’ll keep
a lid on it, Al, don’t worry.”

“I know you w
ill,” he said, releasing my hands and clapping me on the shoulder.  “You’re a straight-up guy.”

“I try to be.  So who were the guys?”

“The guys?”

“The ones with the papers you had to sign.”

“Oh them.  Don’t worry about it.  They won’t bother you.  Don’t even know about you.”

I did worry
.  Worry seemed like an extremely healthy reaction.

Maybe it was more than worry.  That’s the kind of word you hear when a concern is unfounded, and this felt like the kind of concern based on reliable historical precedent.  Specifically, when I felt like this I was usually right, and that thing—call it an instinct, I guess—has kept me alive for a really long time
. 

I knew something was wrong, is my point. 
I wanted to know what those papers were for and who made Al sign them and what would have happened to him if he
hadn’t
signed them.  Then I wondered when men with papers were going to show up for me, and exactly how much trouble that was going to be for me when it happened, and if I should leave town before it came to that.  But Al wasn’t talking about anything other than his Lu-Lu after that, so I couldn’t press him.  Instead, I drank a lot of alcohol, which was another thing that’s kept me alive this long.

Then came Saturday.

Al showed up at the bar at his usual time, took his usual seat and had his usual beer, and acted like nothing special, so I was thinking the whole thing was off.  I was a little relieved about that, but I couldn’t have told you why.

It wasn’t until he was in his third beer, sometime past eleve
n o’clock, that Lucy breezed in and instantly confounded my expectations regarding what a woman who would date Al would look like.

She was a knockout all right.

Lucy had long, straight red hair under a sporty fedora, a sharp skirt suit with a hemline that didn’t make it past her knee and a slit that, if you were looking for it, you’d be alarmed to discover went more than halfway up the thigh.  She had on three-inch heels that managed to look practical and a little whorish at the same time.  Her round face seemed to have been constructed specifically to draw attention to a cat-like pair of emerald green eyes and an adorable button nose.

It was like seeing a unicorn in a dog kennel, because t
his was more than just a pretty girl.  People who had no business doing so would write poetry for this kind of woman.  Men would leave their wives for her, and if she asked nicely, wives might leave their men for her too.  She could start wars and wreck ships and end careers just by smiling at the right people.  She was trouble.  I knew right away what kind of trouble.

*   *   *

Succubi get a bad rap.

We live in a world where people who don’t know bet
ter call things “demon”.  It’s annoying because there really are demons, but they don’t look like succubi or incubi or vampires or anything else.  They look like demons, which is to say they’re big and ugly and violent, and also not actually associated with any hypothetical hell you might ascribe to. 

These are all just different species, and it’s really simple, and if mankind would just get past the idea of magic (and maybe of heaven and hell but to each his own) they would get along better with the other things they happen to share the world with.

So here’s the truth.  Your average succubus
loves
sex, but not as much as they love being adored.  In that sense they’re like any of us, except that succubi are really good at both—the sex and the being adored—to a degree that might
seem
supernatural. 

I
f you spend enough time with a succubus who finds you interesting, you’re going to be ready to give up everything else you’ve got going on in order to spend as much time as you possibly can with her, and that might seem like a spell or something, but there’s nothing demonic or magical about it.  It’s an obsession, and it can get unhealthy, but that’s all. 

I should know.  I’ve probably spent more time with this species than any man who ever lived, and while I have certainly been tempted to give up everything for one or two of them, I never did, and I was always ready to walk away if I
had to.

Sure, it helps to be immortal
; I can outlive a succubus if one turns out to be too tough to walk away from.  Succubi have a longer lifespan than humans, and they tend to look about twenty-five for somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy-five years, so outliving them does involve a commitment, but it can be done.

*   *   *

“Evening, boys!” Lucy announced from the threshold.  “How ‘bout letting a girl through?”

Being a Saturday night, the place was pretty packed.  Not jammed by the standards of any of the big b
ars and clubs downtown, but well occupied for the dive it was.  I counted three other women in the place when she walked in—one of them was a hefty dame who worked the docks, had a girlfriend of her own, and nobody actually thought of as a woman—but when Lucy showed up it felt we were looking at a girl for the first time in our lives.