Pay Dirt

GOOD AS GOLD (281 pp.)--Alfred Toombs--Crowell ($3.50).

Dum spiro, spero--while I breathe, I hope--is young John Henry Johnson's motto. What he hopes for, he tells his astonished Congressman Jack Fairweather, is some of the gold in Fort Knox. Impossible, cluck-clucks Fairweather. and just what would he do with it if he got it. The answer convinces the congressman that he has been catering to the screwball vote: "I've developed a process for changing gold into dirt."

Gangling John Henry is a goodhearted scientist who has discovered a mildly radioactive substance called Taurum while experimenting with gold at an atomic pile. Taurum turns into a crop multiplying wonder drug when applied to the soil. And John Henry, in search of more gold to convert, is soon in a head-whirling spin on the Washington merry-go-around. Author Alfred (Raising a Riot) Toombs's hot-weather farce hilariously ribs and roams the nation's capital, from cocktail binges to congressional investigations. The underlying moral, if there is one, is that the national sense of humor is a standard of sanity to which all Americans may profitably repair.

Amicus Humani Generis. When a little Taurum turns the White House putting green into a creeping shoulder-high jungle, Congressman Fairweather has some doubts about John Henry's sanity, but none about his product. At the city's main psychiatric clinic, the "chief head-candler" assures the congressman that John Henry's Rorschach test is "interesting, but not alarming." The congressman then points out to the young scientist that there are millions to be made out of his pay dirt. But John Henry is interested in no quid pro quo, prefers to be "an amicus humani generis--a friend of the human race," and wants to give Taurum to the world to conquer hunger.

The pro-Taurum forces soon include as engaging a set of oddballs as ever evaded a Saroyan play. There is Bill Kilk, "the twelfth-richest man in the country," who manufactures "KwiK, The Lightnin' LaKsative" and "Hairum-Skarum (takes the bristles off women's legs)." There is Merry Bell, Washington's hostess with the mostest billingsgate on the tip of her Bryn Mawr tongue. There is the wily "Eye." a private detective who flunked his FBI physical "because of dirty fingernails." and acts as a special investigator for the "Committee on the Disposition of Useless Documents." And there is Millionaire Kilk's man Friday, whose English is by way of Harry Lev as he invokes the Roosevelt "Nude Eel," makes an "important lung-distant call" and regards any setback for John Henry as "a terrible shot to th' boy's nerves cistern." Among them, this unlikely crew make Taurum Topic A all over the globe. The Moslem Brotherhood warns that "Israeli plotters [are] at the bottom of the whole thing," the Russians claim they invented the precious gold dust 30 years ago, and a Quai d'Orsay spokesman begs the Americans to "consider the effect of their decision upon the soul of France."

Fairweather's Friends. The anti-Tau-rum faction mobilizes under its natural leader, Washington's leading witch-hunter, Senator Jason Ransom. When an over-Taurumed African violet is left by accident in Ransom's car. and turns into a "huge writhing mass," the Senator, envisaging a "Red assassin," empties his revolver into the back-seat brush. Soon he is alerting his colleagues, "I can hardly believe the unbelievable extent of this conspiracy," and grabbing scare headlines, e.g., "RANSOM SAYS REDS PLAN ATTACK ON U.S. CURRENCY."

At this point, young love, Keystone-cop chases and a burlesque of the Army-McCarthy hearings threaten to run away with Author Toombs's little joke. He pads it out with jabs at bureaucratese ("It's going to take front-office to front-office noodling to get this concretized"), and spurts of sly wit ("Since it was only 8 a.m., it was too early to have a drink, so we were forced to eat on an empty stomach"). After a few more slapsticky twists of the plot, John Henry and Fairweather's friends triumph over Senator Ransom's "Neanderthal bloc," and Fort Knox seems well on its way to becoming the biggest compost heap in the world.

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