The Door Into Summer (6 page)

I started drumming on the table. I could just see myself as chief engineer of an outfit like that. They probably wouldn’t even let me have a drafting table and if I picked up a soldering gun, the union would pull a strike. I might as well have stayed in the Army and tried to make general.

But I didn’t interrupt. Point (c) was that we couldn’t do this on pennies; it would take millions. Mannix Enterprises would put up the dough—what it amounted to was that we would sell out to Mannix, lock, stock, and Flexible Frank, and become a daughter corporation. Miles would stay on as division manager and I would stay on as chief research engineer, but the free old days would be gone; we’d both be hired hands.

“Is that all?” I said.

“Mmm…yes. Let’s discuss it and take a vote.”

“There ought to be something in there granting us the right to sit in front of the cabin at night and sing spirituals.”

“This is no joke, Dan. This is how it’s got to be.”

“I wasn’t joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet. Okay, is it my turn?”

“Go ahead.”

I put up a counterproposal, one that had been growing in my mind. I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime. With more war-surplus buildings being moved in and a night shift contemplated I could see the time coming when I would get no peace to create, even though we turned down this utterly unpalatable plan to rub shoulders with General Motors and Consolidated. I certainly was not twins; I couldn’t be both inventor and production manager.

So I proposed that we get smaller instead of bigger—license Hired Girl and Window Willie, let someone else build and sell them while we raked in the royalties. When Flexible Frank was ready we would license him too. If Mannix wanted the licenses and would outbid the market, swell! Meantime, we’d change our name to Davis & Gentry Research Corporation and hold it down to just the three of us, with a machinist or two to help me jackleg new gadgets. Miles and Belle could sit back and count the money as it rolled in.

Miles shook his head slowly. “No, Dan. Licensing would make us some money, granted. But not nearly the money we would make if we did it ourselves.”

“Confound it, Miles, we wouldn’t be doing it ourselves; that’s just the point. We’d be selling our souls to the Mannix people. As for money, how much do you want? You can use only one yacht or one swimming pool at a time…and you’ll have both before the year is out if you want them.”

“I don’t want them.”

“What
do
you want?”

He looked up. “Dan, you want to invent things. This plan lets you do so, with all the facilities and all the help and all the expense money in the world. Me, I want to run a big business. A
big
business. I’ve got the talent for it.” He glanced at Belle. “I don’t want to spend my life sitting out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert acting as business manager to one lonely inventor.”

I stared at him. “You didn’t talk that way at Sandia. You want out, Pappy? Belle and I would hate to see you go…but if that is the way you feel, I guess I could mortgage the place or something and buy you out. I wouldn’t want any man to feel tied down.” I was shocked to my heels, but if old Miles was restless I had no right to hold him to my pattern.

“No, I don’t want out; I want us to grow. You heard my proposal. It’s a formal motion for action by the corporation. I so move.”

I guess I looked puzzled. “You insist on doing it the hard way? Okay, Belle, the vote is ‘no.’ Record it. But I won’t put up my counterproposal tonight. We’ll talk it over and exchange views. I want you to be happy, Miles.”

Miles said stubbornly, “Let’s do this properly. Roll call, Belle.”

“Very well, sir. Miles Gentry, voting stock shares number—” She read off the serial numbers. “How say you?”

“Aye.”

She wrote in her book.

“Daniel B. Davis, voting stock shares number—” She read off a string of telephone numbers again; I didn’t listen to the formality. “How say you?”

“No. And that settles it. I’m sorry, Miles.”

“Belle S. Darkin,” she went on, “voting shares number—” She recited figures again. “I vote ‘aye.’ ”

My mouth dropped open, then I managed to stop gasping and say, “But, baby, you can’t do that! Those are your shares, sure, but you know perfectly well that—”

“Announce the tally,” Miles growled.

“The ‘ayes’ have it. The proposal is carried.”

“Record it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The next few minutes were confused. First I yelled at her, then I reasoned with her, then I snarled and told her that what she had done was not honest—true, I had assigned the stock to her but she knew as well as I did that I always voted it, that I had had no intention of parting with control of the company, that it was an engagement present, pure and simple. Hell, I had even paid the income tax on it last April. If she could pull a stunt like this when we were engaged, what was our marriage going to be like?

She looked right at me and her face was utterly strange to me. “Dan Davis, if you think we are still engaged after the way you have talked to me, you are even stupider than I’ve always known you were.” She turned to Gentry. “Will you take me home, Miles?”

“Certainly, my dear.”

I started to say something, then shut up and stalked out of there without my hat. It was high time to leave, or I would probably have killed Miles, since I couldn’t touch Belle.

I didn’t sleep, of course. About 4
A.M.
I got out of bed, made phone calls, agreed to pay more than it was worth, and by five-thirty was in front of the plant with a pickup truck. I went to the gate, intending to unlock it and drive the truck to the loading dock so that I could run Flexible Frank over the tailgate—Frank weighed four hundred pounds.

There was a new padlock on the gate.

I shinnied over, cutting myself on barbed wire. Once inside, the gate would give me no trouble, as there were a hundred tools in the shop capable of coping with a padlock.

But the lock on the front door had been changed too.

I was looking at it, deciding whether it was easier to break a window with a tire iron, or get the jack out of the truck and brace it between the doorframe and the knob, when somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Hands up!”

I didn’t put my hands up but I turned around. A middle-aged man was pointing a hogleg at me big enough to bombard a city. “Who the devil are you?”

“Who are
you?”

“I’m Dan Davis, chief engineer of this outfit.”

“Oh.” He relaxed a little but still aimed the field mortar at me. “Yeah, you match the description. But if you have any identification on you, better let me see it.”

“Why should I? I asked who
you
are?”

“Me? Nobody you’d know. Name of Joe Todd, with the Desert Protective & Patrol Company. Private license. You ought to know who we are; we’ve had you folks as clients for the night patrol for months. But tonight I’m on as special guard.”

“You are? Then if they gave you a key to the place, use it. I want to get in. And quit pointing that blunderbuss at me.”

He still kept it leveled at me. “I couldn’t rightly do that, Mr. Davis. First place, I don’t have a key. Second place, I had particular orders about you. You aren’t to go in. I’ll let you out the gate.”

“I want the gate opened, all right, but I’m going in.” I looked around for a rock to break a window.

“Please, Mr. Davis…”

“Huh?”

“I’d hate to see you insist, I really would. Because I couldn’t chance shooting you in the legs; I ain’t a very good shot. I’d have to shoot you in the belly. I’ve got soft-nosed bullets in this iron; it’ud be pretty messy.”

I suppose that was what changed my mind, though I would like to think it was something else; i.e., when I looked again through the window I saw that Flexible Frank was not where I had left him.

As he let me out the gate Todd handed me an envelope. “They said to give this to you if you showed up.”

I read it in the cab of the truck. It said:

18
November
1970

Dear Mr. Davis,

At a regular meeting of the board of directors, held this date, it was voted to terminate all your connection (other than as stockholder) with the corporation, as permitted under paragraph three of your contract. It is requested that you stay off company property. Your personal papers and belongings will be forwarded to you by safe means.

The board wishes to thank you for your services and regrets the differences in policy opinion which have forced this step on us.

Sincerely yours, Miles Gentry Chairman of the Board and General Manager by B. S. Darkin, Sec’y-Treasurer

I read it twice before I recalled that I had never had any contract with the corporation under which to invoke paragraph three or any other paragraph.

Later that day a bonded messenger delivered a package to the motel where I kept my clean underwear. It contained my hat, my desk pen, my other slide rule, a lot of books and personal correspondence, and a number of documents. But it did not contain my notes and drawings for Flexible Frank.

Some of the documents were very interesting. My “contract,” for example—sure enough, paragraph three let them fire me without notice subject to three months’ salary. But paragraph seven was even more interesting. It was the latest form of the yellow-dog clause, one in which the employee agrees to refrain from engaging in a competing occupation for five years by letting his former employers pay him cash to option his services on a first-refusal basis; i.e., I could go back to work any time I wanted to just by going, hat in hand, and asking Miles and Belle for a job—maybe that was why they sent the hat back.

But for five long years I could not work on household appliances without asking them first. I would rather have cut my throat.

There were copies of assignments of all patents, duly registered, from me to Hired Girl, Inc., for Hired Girl and Window Willie and a couple of minor things. (Flexible Frank, of course, had never been patented—well, I didn’t
think
he had been patented; I found out the truth later.)

But I had never assigned any patents, I hadn’t even formally licensed their use to Hired Girl, Inc.; the corporation was my own creature and there hadn’t seemed to be any hurry about it.

The last three items were my stock-shares certificate (those I had not given to Belle), a certified check, and a letter explaining each item of the check—accumulated “salary” less drawing-account disbursements, three months’ extra salary in lieu of notice, option money to invoke “paragraph seven”…and a thousand-dollar bonus to express “appreciation of services rendered.” That last was real sweet of them.

While I reread that amazing collection I had time to realize that I had probably not been too bright to sign everything that Belle put in front of me. There was no possible doubt that the signatures were mine.

I steadied down enough the next day to talk it over with a lawyer, a very smart and money-hungry lawyer, one who didn’t mind kicking and clapper-clawing and biting in the clinches. At first he was anxious to take it on a contingent-fee basis. But after he finished looking over my exhibits and listening to the details he sat back and laced his fingers over his belly and looked sour. “Dan, I’m going to give you some advice and it’s not going to cost you anything.”

“Well?”

“Do nothing. You haven’t got a prayer.”

“But you said—”

“I know what I said. They rooked you. But how can you prove it? They were too smart to steal your stock or cut you off without a penny. They gave you exactly the deal you could have reasonably expected if everything had been kosher and you had quit, or had been fired over—as they express it—a difference of policy opinion. They gave you everything you had coming to you…and a measly thousand to boot, just to show there are no hard feelings.”

“But I didn’t
have
a contract! And I
never
assigned those patents!”

“These papers say you did. You admit that’s your signature. Can you prove what you say by anyone else?”

I thought about it. I certainly could not. Not even Jake Schmidt knew anything that went on in the front office. The only witnesses I had were… Miles and Belle.

“Now about that stock assignment,” he went on, “that’s the one chance to break the logjam. If you—”

“But that is the only transaction in the whole stack that really
is
legitimate. I signed over that stock to her.”

“Yes, but why? You say that you gave it to her as an engagement present in expectation of marriage. Never mind how she voted it; that’s beside the point. If you can prove that it was given as a betrothal gift in full expectation of marriage, and that she knew it when she accepted it, you can force her either to marry you or to disgorge.
McNulty vs. Rhodes
. Then you’re in control again and you kick them out. Can you prove it?”

“Damn it, I don’t want to marry her now. I wouldn’t have her.”

“That’s your problem. But one thing at a time. Have you any witnesses or any evidence, letters or anything, which would tend to show that she accepted it, understanding that you were giving it to her as your future wife?”

I thought. Sure, I had witnesses…the same old two, Miles and Belle.

“You see? With nothing but your word against both of theirs, plus a pile of written evidence, you not only won’t get anywhere, but you might wind up committed to a Napoleon factory with a diagnosis of paranoia. My advice to you is to get a job in some other line…or at the very most go ahead and buck their yellow-dog contract by setting up a competitive business—I’d like to see that phraseology tested, as long as I didn’t have to fight it myself. But don’t charge them with conspiracy. They’ll win, then they’ll sue you and clean you out of what they let you keep.” He stood up.