Carter Beats the Devil (52 page)
Finally, as they backed to the end of the last pier, the one farthest from the mouth of the bay, they threw the truck doors open, and fastened the chains together with a ratcheting band, which Hollis connected to a dockside winch.
The rain made their labor that much more difficult. With great shouts of excitement, they sent the winch to work, careful that nothing slipped, and soon the crate went up overhead, and then outward, over the choppy green waters. Upstream were the marshlands of the slough, and downstream, dozens of piers with loading docks and men at work. The crate spun on its chain, which quickly beaded with raindrops.
“Let ’er go,” said Samuelson, and then the grappling hooks were removed, and the box plunged into the saltwater, a ring of spray blossoming as it broke the surface. It bobbed, gradually listing to the side.
The four men stood on the dock, all grinning madly, waiting for something interesting to happen. Samuelson had brought his umbrella, but the other three didn’t mind standing in the warm rain.
“I thought it was going to sink,” Hollis said.
“Customs crate,” Stutz responded. “Guess it’s airtight.”
Samuelson took out his revolver. He put a corner of the crate into his sites and fired one round that immediately sent splinters into the air.
“Sam!” O’Brien yelled, holding his ears.
“Holy cow, Sam!” Stutz’s jaw dropped.
“Well, it’s sinking now.”
“What if you hit him?”
“What if I did?”
Gradual, ascending laughter, the sounds of disbelief.
Carter hadn’t been hit. The bullet had simply clipped out an inch or so at the very corner of the crate. The port had recently been dredged, so the waters were deep but muddy. The tide was waning, the estuary emptying into the great San Francisco Bay, and as early pelicans dropped like meteorites, looking for fish, the crate began to find the current and drift into the channel. It was a slow drift, perhaps ten feet a minute. As the crate eased away, the men followed it.
When nothing had happened for enough time that they began to get bored, O’Brien remembered that as they were all members of the Legal Tenors, the Treasury Choir, he could start a round robin.
Oh what do we do with a drunken sailor
What shall we do with a drunken sailor
What shall we do with a drunken sailor
Ear-lie in the mor-ning?
Until noon, the Berkeley campus was quiet, as it was summer session. The intensive language workshops had ended a week ago, and so the only early morning activity was in the agricultural studies department,
where goats and lambs and cows were fed their breakfast, then taken to the Oxford Street pasture.
But after the campanile chimed twelve, trucks drove up Telegraph, through Sather Gate, and pulled up to the loading docks behind Wheeler Hall. Crews unloaded crates and sent them on their way to the classrooms and auditoriums, where they were unpacked for the poor soul who had rented his share of space.
Since the War, summers had been lucrative for the University of California, as its lecture halls were excellent venues for inventors to meet with investors. The university neither judged nor encouraged the men who sent in their twenty-five-dollar reservations, but did require a brief description of the marvel to be demonstrated. Occasionally, a clerk might feel genuine pity when yet another eager man was to display yet another perpetual motion machine, but the 1922 brochures proclaimed that “the University of California is committed to excellent thought, even the heterodox.” As this phrase encouraged checks to rain down like manna, the 1923 brochures highlighted it. Inventors were a paranoid lot, so the university published no schedules, and distributed no publicity, and every communication was stamped “confidential” in red ink, which seemed to please everyone.
That such precautions inevitably led to small audiences never seemed to bother the inventors, who relied exclusively on their own bizarre invitations. “Dear William Randolph Hearst,” one such read, “I am going to make you a fortune. How, you ask, well, I will tell you how. Euphonics!”
This afternoon, Wheeler Hall’s dozen classrooms hosted an engine powered by seawater, a grain harvester, a new type of newspaper printing press, several poorly designed automobile accessories, and a number of other production methods and devices, most of which had been presented in summer 1922 and the summer before that.
The inventors stood outside on Wheeler’s wide stone staircase. During the 4
P
.
M
. to 5
P
.
M
. break, they smoked cigarettes and feigned enthusiasm at seeing their colleagues again. Mostly, each wanted to know if anyone had stolen his mailing list of widows and relatives, and each in turn wanted to know if he himself were suspected of stealing anything.
While they talked, university workers carried in crate after crate stenciled with Ogden, Utah, shipping marks. This caused great mirth, as these belonged to a “newbie,” who had made all the mistakes they had once made: he brought far too much equipment, which meant paying extra workmen; he had made a stab at camaraderie early that morning by
asking them what their inventions were; he had volunteered, in front of all of them, that he had a fine invention called television; most amusingly, he had rented the
large
lecture hall, no doubt ready to fill it to the rafters with capitalists who would shower him with money.
The man with the grain harvester, who was a great wit, blew a smoke ring, and said, “Television? What a terrible thing to call it—the word’s half-Greek, half-Latin!” During the ensuing laughter, he went pale. “My God! Is that James Carter?”
To a man, the inventors turned to see, indeed, James Carter, vest stretched over his stomach, sauntering up the stairs in step with his partner Tom Crandall. They trailed a bespectacled Hebrew man who breezed past the group without a word.
“Which one of you got James Carter to come? And . . . that’s Grossman.” Passing through Sather Gate, Aggie Grossman of Bank of Italy, right-hand man of A. P. Giannini, waved an envelope before his sweating face.
To say that the small group fell into silence wouldn’t give proper respect to the rapid mental calculations each man made—who was worth the time of Grossman and Carter and . . . wasn’t that James Fagan from W. W. Crocker, and how many men from Borax Smith’s firm?—who were all these businessmen now coming up the steps? The man with the seawater engine recognized scientists from RCA’s San Francisco labs, but why was Colonel French from the Presidio here with two lieutenants?
Tiny raindrops began to fall, making dusty marks on the stairs. The inventors ground out their cigarettes and, as an afternoon downpour began, they followed the crowd and found to their horror that the lecture hall was filled to standing-room only.
In short, Farnsworth had rented exactly the right-sized venue to give his public lecture on television. By the time the campanile chimed five o’clock, Pem counted 110 people, which caused her to jump up and down behind the side curtain until she regained her composure. Philo for his part looked glum and pale. Few people in the world had ever heard Philo Farnsworth present his ideas, but those who had all made similar comments: before he spoke, he seemed bright, obviously, but nervous and ill-prepared, ready to be judged poorly.
He had lain the groundwork for this day a year ago, sitting in public libraries with issues of
Forbes
and the
Wall Street Journal
, copying out addresses of men who aided inventors. On a family trip to Washington, he had on a Sunday excused himself after church and traveled to the White House. Sunday was Harding’s afternoon to answer the door there
himself. Philo had vowed he would remember every detail of the visit, but all he could remember was a wilting bunch of daisies on the low, scuffed coffee table in front of the couch Harding had him sit in. Philo soon enough identified with those daisies—in high spirits, he had revealed his design to the President, who had reacted badly—he seemed to want the boy to limit the number of people who knew about it. Where was the glory in that? Philo had left the White House drooping, stoically accepting Harding’s proposed meeting with Borax Smith, but had all along wanted to debut television before as impressive an audience as possible. Harding’s death, shocking as it had been, freed him in good conscience to use the lecture hall he had reserved so long ago.
Still, he had delivered his invitations only this morning. He didn’t want anyone to get ahead of his research.
The worst of it, he thought, would be defending his theories to RCA’s men, who sat in the front row in a line, scowling. Also, his unorthodox ideas about television would take the military some time, he felt, to agree with.
However, there was actually something worse awaiting Philo. Two rows back sat a man in a white lab coat, a wild-eyed spectator who’d taken a seat early. He was not a scientist, but a Russian anarchist. He had been given a simple instruction: when Farnsworth had revealed enough about television, the anarchist was to shoot Farnsworth through the forehead, several times if he were so moved.
His presence was a coup for the military, in that foreign anarchists, like captive gorillas, were more discussed than actually seen. The anarchist’s name was unclear—currently, he preferred to be called “the Spider”—but he’d been a violent Luddite since the chlorine gas had killed his four brothers in the Brusilov Offensive. He’d come to the United States in 1920, as it was the center of a new kind of industrial behavior, consumption promoted as the road to happiness, that he found especially galling.
He expected to be arrested and tried for venomous letters he’d sent in summer of 1921, targeting Westinghouse, General Electric, and President Harding (whom he rather liked, but still, he was a symbol). The only result had been a visit from a dignified man who discussed philosophy with the Spider in a slow way of speaking he’d learned was called “Kentucky.” There were many people who felt the same way as the Spider did, the man explained. They should help each other.
They remained in touch and then, three weeks ago, the Kentucky man brought him to San Francisco and asked him to wait, as a terrible madman was going to meet Harding here. When the Spider was told
about television, he prepared to write a blistering letter, but then the Kentucky man showed him blueprints. Aeroplanes, with cameras in their bellies, could cruise over battlefields, sending images back to home bases, where generals could relax with their whiskeys.
So now the Spider sat, knee bouncing in anticipation, awaiting a single nod from his contacts at the other side of the room. Simultaneously, some of the corporate attendees, who had been caught unaware by Philo’s letter of invitation, looked at their watches uncomfortably. They, too, planned to steal television and patent it—that is, if television actually worked, which their researchers disputed. They had no specific interests in rubbing Farnsworth out. However, since so many RCA executives played tennis with officers high in the War Department, they gossiped like washerwomen. Not wanting to be left behind, they had tried all day long to arrange for some sort of frightening man, perhaps an associate of bootleggers, to attend the lecture, but they’d come up empty-handed.
The room buzzed with conversations. James, Tom, and Ledocq had seats toward the center of the lecture hall, and Ledocq kept switching his glasses to better see the audience or the space behind the podium. Ledocq asked, “Do you know anyone here?”
“I know most of these people. Rare to see them all in one room,” James replied.
“We are such small fry,” Tom said. Several rows down, someone waved at him. Tom waved back, smiling. “Is that John Cannell? I hate that man, he’s a total cretin.” He kept waving and smiling. “Looks like Charlie won’t make it.”
“He might be here,” James sighed. “Behind a pillar or with a false mustache or something.”
When Carter was five years old, his father had taken him to a vaudeville show, one act of which was an a cappella group of bullies who sang “Blow the Man Down” and “Pell Mell” and who would pick a boy out of the audience and toss him back and forth, miming the actions of the song. The boy they chose that afternoon had soiled himself with fright. Carter barely remembered this event, but he was always courteous to children whom he invited onstage. Also: he hated sea shanties.
So when he awoke in the packing crate, his ears rang, and he had the vague sense of a gun having been shot nearby. He heard muffled sounds of a quartet singing, “Tie him to the taffrail when she’s yard-arm under,”
and he worked his mouth to tell them to stop it immediately. But his mouth was dry, and he had trouble making his eyes focus, then he realized he was awake, but in absolute pitch darkness. Excruciatingly twisted up, he tried to straighten.
Simultaneous with his fingers touching the handcuffs on his wrists, he remembered being clocked in the head. A smell like turpentine had brought him down. His cheek was pressed against some fabric. Sailcloth. He moved his face along the cloth until he found the metal lip he expected. A mail sack. He took a deep breath though his nose. He smelled saltwater, the grimy sack, his own sweat. He was damp.