There were two pieces of furniture, a chair and an old scarred wooden desk. On that wooden desk young Nathan Palmer took down a deposition from Robert Dastrow.
His other two partners listened in amazement as he described the make and the car and how he could tell the ball bearings in the steering system were not properly aligned.
"Genius," said Arnold Schwartz, who recognized mathematical excellence.
"Interesting," said Genaro Rizzuto. "but, will it hold up in court?"
As a test all three of them went at Robert Dastrow for two hours, trying to break him. But when it came to the workings of a mechanical object, Robert was not only at home, he was king. He even explained how some engineers might try to defend the structure of the automobile. And he refuted those defenses for the three lawyers.
At the end, Palmer, Rizzuto, and Schwartz were numb from talk of valves, ball bearings, balance, and structural design. Robert was fresh as a daisy and still talking.
What they learned from this young Midwest engineer who didn't have a job was that they would put the manufacturer on trial on behalf of the plaintiff.
The auto company took one look at Dastrow's deposition, passed it to their engineers, and the following morning not only agreed to the largest out-of-court settlement in the history of the industry, but promptly hired Palmer, Rizzuto on a large retainer. This meant that the firm and its technical support, namely its star witness, would never be able to act against them again.
The old desk went into a glass case, and Robert Dastrow received a personal retainer from the law firm of a hundred thousand dollars a year. If Robert had any residual moral qualms, they died after his first really good date. Of course the date had been arranged by a dating service in Los Angeles and the beautiful young woman seemed to smile at anything and everything, but she was a woman. She was beautiful. And Robert Dastrow was no longer poor or lonely.
The second thing he did after establishing human companionship of sorts was to build a machine shop in the basement of his new home back home in Grand Island. Unfortunately Grand Island did not have dating services, since in their lack of sophistication they called women providing companionship for money a form of prostitution.
But before he could get his machine shop running, he was visited by the three young lawyers. They were all desperate. Mr. Palmer had just come back from his honeymoon, which had ended in divorce. Mr. Rizzuto had spent a week in Las Vegas and now his income for the next three years was owed to people who collected either their money or pieces of the debtor's body. And Schwartz, violently adamant about the stupidity of the American investor and how idiots ruined the stock market, had just lost his home, everything in it, and his last extra pair of shoes.
"Golly, how'd you fellas spend so much money so quickly?" laughed Robert.
"That's not the point," said Schwartz. "The point is how we can make more."
"The point is how we can make you even richer," said Palmer. "How would you like to buy your own linear accelerator? How would you like your own atomic clock? How would you like anything in the world you fancy just to tinker with?"
"A bimetric deep-sea evaluator?" asked Robert.
All three young lawyers nodded, although none of them knew what it was. Palmer had read about the linear accelerator in a magazine on the flight to Grand Island from Los Angeles. He knew it had something to do with atoms. He knew it was expensive. He knew it might interest a nerd like Dastrow. He was, it turned out, very right about this.
"Well, there's no such thing as a bimetric evaluator," laughed Robert, slapping his knee.
"Whatever there is you want, you can get. What we need is for you to follow accidents with us and find the ones where a major rich company is at fault," said Palmer.
"Not the best use of your time, gentlemen. Best use of your time is knowing where the accidents will happen. "
"You thought about this already?" asked Palmer.
"Just now. As I see it, fellas, once there's an accident there sure is a lot of competition for the cases, and everyone really starts sort of even, don't you think?"
"Maybe," said Rizzuto. He didn't like the idea of this hayseed telling him his business.
"Why start even?" asked Dastrow.
"Why not start even? Are you saying we didn't go to top-notch law schools or something? Is that what you're saying?" asked Schwartz. "Because if you're saying that anybody from a mail-order college is-"
"Not sayin' that at all, sir," said Dastrow. "But let's not waste time. You want lawsuits you're going to get, and lawsuits you're going to win. You don't have all the clients you need or you wouldn't be chasing ambulances."
"We're not ambulance chasers," said Schwartz.
"We most certainly are," said Palmer, thinking about his divorce settlement. "Let's hear what you have to say."
"The way to work this best," said Dastrow, "is to begin with the inside track. Now, my happening by was an accident. The ball bearings being wrong was an accident. Accidents are not how things work well."
"What are you suggesting?" asked Palmer.
"These companies, big companies, don't really care how things work. They don't. I'd be a rich man if they did. I wouldn't have been working in a crummy messenger job. Now, if I told you I didn't hold this against them, I would be the biggest liar in the world. I hate them. I hate them with all my heart. With all my soul. I hate them deep in the marrow of my bones. I want them to pay for it."
"Just retribution," said Rizzuto.
"A cause to make the world safer for all mankind," said Schwartz, his voice ringing with emotion. That would be a good line for Rizzuto to sum up with somewhere.
"Go ahead," said Palmer.
"What say we predict the accidents because we know exactly how the things are not going to work?"
"How do we know that?" asked Palmer.
"Leave those little mechanical details to me. You don't want to know that. You just want to know how the accidents are going to happen and be prepared before they do. And this time don't take some silly retainer from an auto company so you can't sue them again. "
"The man makes sense," said Schwartz.
"He's going to turn company negligence against them. The big bastards of the world are going to have to pay the little guy."
"How are you going to do it?" asked Palmer.
"That's not the question," said Dastrow. "The question is how are you going to pay me a million dollars in advance?"
"Impossible," said Schwartz. "Even I couldn't figure out how to leverage that much."
"You're sucking blood from the veins of your friends and allies," said Rizzuto.
"You'll get it," said Palmer.
The three lawyers left Grand Island muttering among themselves but with a new respect for Robert Dastrow. No one was calling him a hayseed anymore. In fact, when he came up with his first multiple accident and the money began to flow in, the word "genius" just naturally attended their descriptions of him.
Robert's first project was what would become known in legal circles as the venerable bumper-tank cases. To a layman it would seem impossible that a major auto company would design a car in which the rear bumper contained the most explosive element in the entire vehicle.
To Robert it was easy. He insinuated himself into the professional circles of the car designers and came up with better solutions to their problems. Robert Dastrow simply showed that if the rear bumper were to double as the gas tank, the car would have the distinctive expensive design of the "bubble back" and be three hundred dollars cheaper to make, and to boot, there would be more room inside the car. Cheaper, roomier, prettier, the little cars went out into the market and sold like firecrackers. That was also the way they blew up.