Inventions

This story was inspired by a character I play-acted back in 1972-73, at age 7-8.

Let me just say, by way of introduction, that unpaid internships suck.

It's one thing to have just graduated — cum laude, no less — with a bachelor's in chemical engineering from a real, accredited university. It's quite another to be able to find work. Between the time I chose my major and the time I graduated, the job market for junior chemical engineers tanked. I'd scoured the job fairs and signed up for every job-hunting site I could find, with no luck. The few companies that were hiring wanted someone with experience, education level be damned.

So, in desperation, I took a paper flyer pinned to the chem department's bulletin board that read, "Lab assistant wanted. Chem eng preferred. Expect no perks beyond my presence."

Well, experience was experience, or so I thought at the time. Maybe the last sentence on the flyer should have tipped me off as to what I was getting myself into. Maybe I should have listened to the alarm bells going off in my head. But instead, I just shot off an eagerly-worded e-mail to the address on the flyer — the same e-mail I'd sent to every prospective employer — and waited for a reply.

Much to my amazement, I got a reply less than ten minutes later. It gave an address and a time and said, "Knock twice, wait 2 seconds, then knock twice again." And that was all.

I shrugged. I didn't exactly have a lot of job hunting experience back then. Maybe this was what employers normally did? The time was in less than three hours, so I went home, put on one of those fancy job-interview shirts that had buttons down the front, twiddled my thumbs until half an hour before the appointed time, and then headed to the address.

I got there ten minutes ahead of time. The address turned out to be in one of the shabbiest parts of town. The area gave off a vibe of petty theft and street gangs. Nothing was happening at the time, but I still got the impression that if I'd parked a car on the street, I'd return to find its hubcaps missing, if not its wheels. The building at the address itself was a concrete fortress of a mini-warehouse. It had only one visible door, at the top of two concrete steps, which was completely unmarked. This had to be a mistake. The only kind of "lab" which wouldn't look out-of-place in this neighborhood would be a meth lab, and that would be in the basement of somebody's old run-down house, not this concrete bunker. The building in front me might have been an automobile body shop in the best of times, or the hangout of a fence for thieves in the worst.

Okay, I figured I might as well get this over with. My would-be employer had obviously sent me the wrong address, or had missed a crucial detail in the address that would distinguish it from a near-identical one. I'd just eliminate that possibility right now. I knocked twice on the door, waited two seconds, and then knocked twice again.

The door flew open almost instantly. That startled me enough. The head that thrust out the open door nearly made me lose my footing on the steps. There was nothing particularly striking about his features, nor did the man's face give off any hint of anger or insanity. But his eyes stared at me keenly and intensely, from atop an almost-smirk. "You're early," he blurted, then grabbed my collar and yanked me inside before I could react.

"So," the man said, slamming the door shut behind me. "You're a chem eng grad?" His words came out rapid-fire, but without any hint of worry or urgency.

"Um, yeah," I said, still trying to regain my bearings. I glanced around at my new surroundings. I guessed the room was pretty big, but I couldn't see all the way to the far walls. There was too much equipment in the way, most of which was utterly unrecognizable.

"Good," he said. He turned to stand beside me and started leading me through the labyrinth of parts that littered the floor and tables. "One thing I've never had a nack for was producing the compounds I need in high volume. Batteries, backflow burners, rockets, glime ignitors — all of 'em eat up oodles of reagents. Right now, in fact, I need at least fifty pounds potassium nitrate, and I've only got five."

I frowned. "Saltpeter? That's usually made from ammonium nitrate and caustic potash. But it's so cheap, and available from so many sources — you could just buy fifty pounds of stump remover at a hardware store."

He smirked, but the smirk was gone an instant later, as though it had been an involuntary tic. "Why buy it when you can make it yourself?" He stopped in front of a table along one wall, laden with a cacophony of glass tubing. A mercifully familiar-looking hooded vent perched above the table and ran all the way to the ceiling. "So," he looked at me, "What should I call you?"

"Um . . . Sam?"

"Okay, Sam, here's the chem station. Raw materials should be somewhere close by. Hop to it!"

He turned away, as though he were about to dive back in to one of the many piles of mysterious somethings around the . . . the lab? The warehouse? The secret government research facility? What was this place?

"Um, wait," I said. I fumbled for a poignant question, but all that came out was "Who are you?"

His brow knitted as though he felt genuinely hurt. "You don't know who I am?"

"Uh . . ." Now I really felt nervous.

He jabbed a hand into one of his many pants pockets and whipped out a business card. I read as I took it from him: "Inventions?"

"That's me," he said.

That threw me for another loop. When I'd seen "Inventions" on his card, I'd thought that was his line of work. Or maybe the name of his company. But his own name? "Mister Inventions?" I asked. "Or . . ." I shook my head. "Is Inventions your first name, or your last name?"

"Both," he said. "Or neither. It's a one word name, like Cher or Pelé. Now come on, chop chop!" He clapped his hands twice, pointing at the chemistry equipment. "That glime ignitor ain't gonna fuel itself!"

Okay, I thought. Calm your nerves. It's just like you practiced in chem lab. I took a deep breath and started in. Not half a minute later, from wherever in this building Mr. Inventions had sequestered himself, there arose a mighty din of clattering, dinging, and . . . whooshing? What the hell was he up to? Was this what every chemical engineer had to get used to? I made a mental note to get some earplugs at my earliest opportunity, then pushed the noise out of my mind as best I could and tried to concentrate.

After about half an hour, I settled into a sort of rhythm. I finally felt comfortable enough to sit back and take a longer look at this giant lab. Despite the jumbles of seemingly disorganized parts, there did seem to be a kind of pattern to it. There were cleared corridors wide enough to walk through single-file between each heap. The lighting seemed to be the standard cold-white of a fluorescent-lit machine room, but the light fixtures overhead were . . . were those fluorescents? Arc lamps? LEDs? Halogens? They didn't look like any lights I'd ever seen. I swore one of them was shaped like a klein bottle. I scanned the far walls, and found a few pieces of safety equipment, probably the minimum required by law. There was one lone fire extinguisher, an emergency eyewash station that was disturbingly far away from my chemical table, and what looked at first like a glass-encased fire alarm, except it was too big. Stenciled on the glass of that glass-covered box, in letters big enough to read from half way across the room, were the words: "IN CASE OF SKELETON MONSTER, BREAK GLASS."

Skeleton monster? I snorted, shook my head, and returned my attention to the reactions on my benchtop.

The background banging stopped for a few ominous seconds, and then Mr. Inventions tapped me on the shoulder from behind. I practically jumped out of my skin in surprise. "Done!" he announced when I'd whirled to face him. He was draped in thin steel cabling and had something strapped to his back. "Let's go outside and try out my latest."

Before I knew what had happened, I was standing with him in an alleyway behind the warehouse. With his left hand, he pointed skyward; I followed his finger to the top of an enormous TV transmitter antenna nearby. It had to be hundreds of feet tall. "Hold on tight around my shoulders," he said. I did. He continued, "I don't want'cha to fall."

Fall? I suddenly realized he was fiddling with the controls on his backpack. It looked like two streamlined cylinders, with — oh, crap! "You," I barked out, "You invented a rocket pack?!"

"No, of course not," he shook his head. "Rocket packs have been around since the nineteen fifties."

I breathed a quick sigh of relief.

"I'm only using the rocket pack for initial altitude," he said, and launched the two of us into the air before I could let go.

The jolt off the ground, the deafening roar, the rocket exhaust whooshing by so close to my legs it nearly burned my pants — it was all over in less than four seconds, and suddenly I found myself clinging to an insane man, hurtling upward in freefall, over a hundred feet above the ground.

His right arm jerked upward and outward, and I realized he was wearing or holding something with his right hand. It looked vaguely like the grappling-hook gun from the Batman movies. He took careful aim at the top of the TV transmitter, still high above us, our upward speed slowing with each passing second. Then, he pressed a stud, or pulled a trigger, or for all I knew maybe he issued a command by mental telepathy — but the grappling hook shot forward, and the cabling around his body uncoiled and followed it. It snagged itself perfectly into the structure of the TV transmitter in the distance, and an instant later, the two of us jolted upward just as hard as we had with those rockets a moment earlier.

I mean, that cable pulled us up hard. How the hell had the jolt not yanked his right arm out of its socket? Then I noticed that the cabling wasn't just for the grappling line. It ran back and forth across his arm in such a way that it distributed the load across his entire body. It was like a grappling line cradle, nestling him in safety as it hoisted him skyward.

I didn't have a cradle of my own, of course. My arms and legs, wrapped around him, were the only things that kept me from falling to my doom. I thought, briefly, about looking into OSHA regulations when this was all over, but panic soon returned. We ground to a stop only a few short feet below his grappling point on the tower, and swayed gently in the wind.

His voice returned over the wind. "And this is what was missing from the grappling hooks in the comics. Support. Okay, time to come back down."

He disengaged — or cut — the cable, and we plummeted earthward. The scream that escaped my throat was entirely automatic. As the air whooshed past us louder and louder, the ground got closer and closer. I could barely make out his words against the wind noise: "Soft landing!"

Once again, I felt jolted upward and the deafening roar of the rockets returned. He hadn't burned off the entire fuel supply from his rocket pack on the way up! We slowed as we fell 'til we clattered to the ground at a nice, gentle ten miles per hour or so. I had lousy footing and fell straight onto my butt, but I was alive, and unhurt.

I could only get up as far as my hands and knees. I was panting like mad and shaking with fear. "You," I said as soon as I caught my breath, "You could have warned me!"

"Would you have gone with me if I had?" Inventions replied.

"No," I said, "Of course not!"

"Well, there you go. You would've missed out." He turned and went back into the lab building, trailing thin steel cabling behind.

And as I watched him go, God help me, I got to me feet and followed in after him.

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