Free Hard-Boiled Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles) by Gene Doucette Page B

breath, and overall came across as a real goof.  But when you talked to him and saw his eyes light up, you realized he looked that way and dressed that way because he was too busy thinking about things nobody had ever thought of before to worry about anything else.
    One night he made his usual toast to unlimited energy, and I asked him as I always did what he was going on about, and for whatever reason—maybe he’d had just the right number of beers, or maybe he just couldn’t keep it to himself any longer—he answered the question.
    “Atomic power, Rocky,” he said.   “That’s what I’m talking about.” 
    Rocky was the name I was using.  It made more sense in the Twenties, I’ll be honest.
    “Atomic,” I repeated back.  “Like with the atom?”
    “I know a fella named Adam,” said the slightly less drunk guy sitting next to Al.  His name was Federico, and he wasn’t talking about me, he was talking about another Adam.  I hadn’t started using the name yet.
    “Not Adam, Freddie,” Al said.
    “I get you,” I said.  “Atom.  The building block of matter.”
    Al laughed.  “Yes, yes, if you are Democritus that would be correct.”
    I actually knew Democritus, but I wasn’t going to come out and say that.  I first heard the word—and the idea—of the atom from Democritus’s own lips.  I might have even been standing next to him when he invented the concept, I couldn’t remember.  There was lots of wine involved.
    “So, atoms aren’t the building block of matter, you’re saying.”
    “Blocks, you mean l ike bricks?” Federico offered.  “Hey everyone, Al figured out how to get energy out of bricks!”
    “What, is he eating ‘ em?” Someone shouted from the other end of the room.  Everyone laughed.
    Let me ba ck up and set the scene, because they don’t make many places like Jimmy’s any more.  This was a poorly lit dive bar that was just about exactly as seedy as possible in a time before enforced health inspections and fire codes.  The permanent cloud of smoke that hung over the room was so thick the bare bulb light fixtures had almost no chance.  There was sawdust on the floor that was mostly there so nobody slipped on spilled drinks, the walls were too thin to keep the cold from the winters out, and there were nights when the rats outnumbered the people.  Most importantly—and this was sort of nice—pretty much everybody there knew everybody else there at least well enough to borrow money from and call an asshole when such a thing was necessary.
    The general feeling about Al , among the patrons, was that he was a decent guy.  Maybe a little weird, and not the person you want next to you in a fight, but decent.  And clearly he was the smartest guy there.  This commanded a kind of respect that kept him out of most of the fisticuffs that might be considered ordinary in this sort of setting.  And if it didn’t—if someone decided to give him some trouble— I’d get involved, and by this time everyone there had a decent sense that it was a bad idea to get me involved.  I commanded respect too, but a different kind.
    “I am not eating bricks, thank you!” Al said, in response to what was some good-natured ribbing.  “All right, all right, I will explain.”
    “Everybody shut up,” Freddie said, “he’s gonna explain.”
    “But all of you have to keep this under your hats because it’s important but it is also secret.”
    There was a collective ooooooh from the room.  Nobody there could think of any reason a guy who worked at the university would need to keep secrets, important or otherwise, but because this was the most interesting thing going on that night—nobody was loudly mad at their wife or had a beef with a local boxer, a horse, or a sports team—we tried to humor him.  Sure, the war could pop up again as a topic of conversation at any time, but it was the topic everywhere, so nobody really wanted to bring it up if they didn’t have to.