Warren Murphy: Return Engagement

"Why do you ask?" said Dorinda's mother.

"Because Ferris said he wasn't one."

"Of course not. He goes to church with us, doesn't he?"

"But his mother is, though."

Mrs. Dommichi dropped her coffee. Dr. Dommichi coughed violently.

"When did he tell you this?" asked Dr. Dommichi casually.

"After," said Dorinda, buttering a muffin.

"After what'?"

"After we ascended the new plateau of intimacy." Ferris D'Orr noticed a definite coolness in the Dommichi family's attitude toward him the next time he happened to drop in at suppertime. At first, he thought it was something he had said, but when they stopped inviting him on the weekly family boat outings, he knew he was in deep trouble.

He asked Dorinda what was wrong one night while she was resisting his attempts to unclasp her bra.

"My dad says you're a Jew."

Ferris stopped. "You told him!"

"Of course."

"But that was a secret. Our secret."

"Isn't that what secrets are for, to tell other people?"

"I'm not a Jew. My mother is a Jew. My father was a Catholic. I was raised Catholic. Even after my father died, I stayed Catholic. Despite my mother's nagging."

"My father says a Jew is a Jew."

"What else does he say?" asked Ferris dejectedly, giving up on Dorinda's snow-white brassiere.

"He says that I shouldn't count on marrying you."

"Damn," said Ferris D'Orr, realizing his meal ticket was slipping out of his fingers.

Despite that, Dorinda's family had invited him to Thanksgiving dinner. It was a typical Italian Thanksgiving, with a lot of wine, garlic bread, homemade ravioli, and linguine in clam sauce. And as an afterthought, a very small turkey. You didn't eat much turkey with all that pasta. Ferris suspected that Dorinda had to throw a tantrum to wangle the invitation.

His suspicions were confirmed when, instead of seating him at the family table next to Dorinda, her parents, and the seven Dommichi children, he got stuck in a satellite table with a gaggle of cousins.

Ferris made the best of it. He was there for the food, mostly. And so he struck up a conversation with a short-haired cousin not many years older than he.

"Ferris D'Orr," he had said, sizing up the man.

"Johnny Testa. Happy to meet you." He had the polite air of'an Eagle Scout about him. In fact, Ferris found him too nice. Maybe the guy is a priest or a seminary student, Ferris thought.

"You from around here?"

"Originally. I'm on leave at the moment from the Navy."

"Oh yeah? Submarines and aircraft carriers and that stuff."

"Actually, I only get out on the water when Uncle Dom invites the family out on his sloop. I'm with the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington. I'm a metallurgist,"

"You work with metal?" said Ferris, recognizing half of the word. "Like a welder?"

The Navy man laughed good-naturedly.

"No, not exactly. My team is experimenting with titanium applications. It's a metal," he added, seeing Ferris' blank look.

"What's so great about titanium?" asked Ferris, tasting a rubbery substance that he realized, too late, was squid.

"Titanium is a crucial defense metal. We use it for critical parts of aircraft, submarines, satellites, surgical implants, and other high-tech applications. On the one hand, it's great. It will withstand corrosion, stress, and high-speed punishment. But it can't be worked the way steel or iron is worked. You have to form it in cold state and then machine it. It's expensive, and you lose a lot of it in the process. They call that the 'buy-to-fly' ratio. How much titanium do you have to buy to make that aircraft part? Usually the ratio is 1.5 to 1, which means you lose one-third ofthe metal in fabrication."

"You're really into this stuff?" said Ferris.

"Titanium has other problems. Its melting temperature is too high. Makes it tough to weld-you have to do it in an inert-gas chamber-and practically impossible to forge. When it reaches its melting point, it absorbs nitrogen, causing embrittlement."

"That makes it no good, right?" asked Ferris D'Orr, who thought he was catching on.

"Right. Exactly."

"So what do you do?"

"We're trying to find a way to make titanium take ordinary welding. If we can weld it, we can build aircraft from titanium. Right now, we can only use it for the most critical machine parts."

"Anybody see any pork?" Ferris said loudly, looking in Dr. Dommichi's direction. "Boy, I could really go for some juicy pork chops right about now. Yum yum, my favorite."

The head table pointedly ignored him and he settled for a pasta dish he didn't recognize.

"The metallurgist who can figure it out will make billions," Johnny Testa continued.

"Billions? Maybe that guy will be you," Ferris suggested, secretly hoping it would not be.

"If I succeed, the Navy will get the money. I'll just get the credit."

"That's kinda unfair."

Johnny shook his head. "I won't crack it. All I'm doing is taking high-speed camera films of welding checks. We analyze the way the solder droplets fly off the titanium forms. The real breakthrough will be in solving the hot-forging problem. They're years away from real progress."

"How many ears?"

"Five, maybe ten."

"How many years does it take to become a metallurgist'?"

"Four. But it's been done in less."

"Can you be a metallurgist without joining the Navy?"

"Absolutely. I'll bet some private firm pulls off this coup. Those are the boys who'll make the bucks."

"Where do you go to learn this stuff?" asked Ferris D'Orr, who right then and there was motivated into a career decision.

"I went to MIT."

"That's in Boston, isn't it?"

"Near Boston, anyway."

"Can you be more exact?" asked Ferris D'Orr, scribbling furiously on his linen napkin. "And spell 'metallurgy' for me, will ya?"

The next day Ferris D'Orr broke off with the lovely Dorinda and started hitting the textbooks with a vengeance. He had two years of high school left and he was going to make the best of them. In his spare time he read all he could about metallurgy so that when he got to MIT he'd have a head start. With his luck, some joker was going to beat him to all those billions of dollars.

But no one did. Ferris got to MIT and completed the four-year metallurgy degree in three years. In his senior year, working entirely on his own, he discovered a method of annealing bronze that experts speculated was similar to the method once known to the ancient Egyptians, but now lost. Ferris immediately fell into a top position with Titanic Titanium Technologies of Virginia, one of the most important defense-industry metallurgy firms.

That had been five years ago, thought Ferris D'Orr as he stepped from his car. In those five years he had risen to the position of vice-president of exotic-metals applications at Titanic Titanium. All that time, he pursued his goal in his personal lab. He kept plugging away during the superplastic forming scare, which drastically simplified titanium forming. He had squeaked through the revolution in bonding titanium with spaceage plastics, and the quartz-lamp forging experiments. Still the industry had not solved the ultimate problem of forging titanium.

This morning, Ferris D'Orr thought to himself, he was about to render all those advancements obsolete. "Good morning, Mr. D'Orr," said the security guard.

"Good morning, uh, Goldstein," said Ferris, squinting at the guard's nametag. He made a mental note to have the man fired. He didn't like Jews. They reminded him of his mother.

Ferris D'Orr slipped his plastic keycard into the proper slot and the security door buzzed open, then clicked shut behind him.

In his private laboratory, Ferris got to work. He was excited. This was the day. Or maybe tomorrow would be. He wasn't sure, but he knew he was close. Very close.