Citizen of the Galaxy by Robert A. Heinlein

Still, it was nice to be important. Most of his life he had been nobody, and at best he had been very junior.

If only Pop could see him now! — surrounded by lavish furnishings, a barber to trim his hair while he worked (Pop used to cut it under a bowl), a secretary to anticipate his wishes, and dozens of people eager to help. But Pop’s face in this dream was wearing Pop’s reproving expression; Thorby wondered what he had done wrong, and dug harder into the mess of figures.

Eventually a pattern began to emerge. The business was Rudbek & Associates, Ltd. So far as Thorby could tell this firm did nothing. It was chartered as a private Investment trust and just owned things. Most of what Thorby would own, when his parents’ wills were proved, was stock in this company. Nor would he own it all; he felt almost poverty-stricken when he discovered that mother and father together held only eighteen percent of many thousand shares.

Then he found out about “voting” and “non-voting; the shares coming to him were eighteen-fortieths of the voting shares; the remainder was split between relatives and non-relatives.

Rudbek & Assocs. owned stock in other companies — and here it got complicated. Galactic Enterprises, Galactic Acceptance Corporation, Galactic Transport, Interstellar Metals, Three Planets Fiscal (which operated on twenty-seven planets), Havermeyer Laboratories (which ran barge lines and bakeries as well as research stations) — the list looked endless. These corporations, trusts, cartels, and banking houses seemed as tangled as spaghetti. Thorby learned that he owned (through his parents) an interest in a company called “Honace Bros., Pty.” through a chain of six companies — 18% of 31% of 43% of 19% of 44% of 27%, a share so microscopic that he lost track. But his parents owned directly seven per cent of Honace Brothers — with the result that his indirect interest of one-twentieth of one per cent controlled it utterly but paid little return, whereas seven per cent owned directly did not control — but paid one hundred and forty times as much.

It began to dawn on him that control and ownership were only slightly related; he had always thought of “ownership” and “control” as being the same thing; you owned a thing, a begging bowl, or a uniform jacket — of course you controlled it!

The converging, diverging, and crossing of corporations and companies confused and disgusted him. It was as complex as a firecontrol computer without a computer’s cool logic. He tried to draw a chart and could not make it work. The ownership of each entity was tangled in common stocks, preferred stocks, bonds, senior and junior issues, securities with odd names and unknown functions; sometimes one company owned a piece of another directly and another piece through a third, or two companies might each own a little of the other, or sometimes a company owned part of itself in a tail-swallowing fashion. It didn’t make sense.

This wasn’t “business” — what the People did was business . . . buy, sell, make a profit But this was a silly game with wild rules.

Something else fretted him. He had not known that Rudbek built spaceships. Galactic Enterprises controlled Galactic Transport, which built ships in one of its many divisions. When he realized it he felt a glow of pride, then discovered gnawing uneasiness — something Colonel Brisby had said . . . something Pop had proved: that the “largest” or it might have been “one of the largest” builders of starships was mixed up in the slave trade.

He told himself he was being silly — this beautiful office was about as far from the dirty business of slave traffic as anything could be. But as he was dropping to sleep one night he came wide awake with the black, ironic thought that one of those slave ships in whose stinking holds he had ridden might have been, at that very time, the property of the scabby, frightened slave he was then.

It was a nightmare notion; he pushed it away. But it took the fun out of what he was doing.

One afternoon he sat studying a long memorandum from the legal department — a summary, so it said, of Rudbek & Assocs.’ interests — and found that he had dragged to a halt. It seemed as if the writer had gone out of his way to confuse things. It would have been as intelligible in ancient Chinese — more so; Sargonese included many Mandarin words.

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