“There will be no laws except the limitation of population to eleven hundred people, enough to permit cooperative interaction and cultural exchange but too few to breed serious conflict. If every person in the community performs a useful, vital service, no one will dare to risk his ill will for fear of losing that service. By narrowing choices, we create an interdependence that will profit all. As for those whose values or way of life are found to disturb the equilibrium of the community, they will suffer but one punishment: an invitation to depart, in peace.”
“It’s a point of view,” Forte confessed, “and I wish you all the luck in the world. But you still haven’t told me why you want to build your Big Rock Candy Mountain on my land.”
“You have a great deal of it, and for a hundred miles around it is currently going to waste. A decision of the Supreme Court of the State of Texas of 9 June 1871 gives us squatter’s rights to range land after thirty days of unopposed occupancy. It happens that we have been here for thirty-three days. But mind you, we’re not standing here on narrow legality. We will irrigate this land, farm it, and make it bloom. We will pay you any reasonable rent, or buy the land we need outright-whichever you prefer. But this is but one part of a greater overall plan, you see. As concerned Texans, we feel that great sprawling cities such as Houston, Dallas, and Fort Worth are an anachronism, a blight to the eye and soul, cesspools of crime and misery, and damned inefficient, too- you only have to think of how wasteful in time, gasoline, and frazzled nerves it is to commute two hours a day to work.
“So we want you to rent or sell to us our thirty square miles of land. But we want something else: that you let it be known that we are actually squatters who are temporarily protected from eviction by some obscure provision of the law. In two or three years we’ll have neat farms laid out, village buildings constructed, a school in operation, wells dug, and the business in which Brown will specialize-the manufacture of orthopedic devices that my wife and our staff of scientists have designed-organized and in production.
“We hope and expect that our success, especially if publicized by your Houston Herald and your other media, will excite the interest and envy of other groups of people united by a common objective. They will come and look, and go away to find ways to emulate us. Some may wish to start small industry, or computer-programming centers, or stock-fattening operations, or even fat farms. We believe that our plan will help drain the cities of their restless excess populations, create a multiplicity of small communities, each united by a common purpose, and restore a happy, healthy way of life to our people, who God knows deserve it after two Russian invasions.
“Each community will need to get started, though, and they will be able to justify their demand for land by our example. You, Ripley Forte, will personally be able to decide on the viability of each project and lay down conditions for its establishment. Each settlement will quickly develop its unique character. One may become wildly liberal, another politically conservative, a third a center for modern dance instruction, a fourth for handicrafts, a fifth for wine lovers who grow and sell their own product. People whose attitudes change or mature can vote with their feet, by moving to a community more congenial to their tastes. Some will fail, some will succeed. All will give Texans a wider range of choice and the chance to be a real person in a real community, not a faceless prole.”
“Good coffee,” Forte said noncommittally.
Hallelujah Brown waited.
“It’s none of my business,” said Forte, finally, “but there’s a personal question I’d like to ask.”
“Ask away.”
“How’d you come by the name Hallelujah?”
Brown laughed. “That was my mother’s doing. My folks had a farm about fifty miles from here, struggling to scrape a living out of sorrel-and-sagebrush country. Before I was born they had six girls, one after another. So when I came along-”
“Say no more, Professor Brown….But let me get this straight. You’re willing to buy thirty sections- 19,200 acres-from me, but you want it noised about that you’re squatters and we’re in litigation?”
“Right. That way our project will arouse the interest it will need to succeed. The old story of David versus Goliath. People will say, ‘If they can buck Ripley Forte and make a go of it, so can we.’ And I believe they can.”
“Well, Professor Brown,” Forte said, “I’ve bet on a lot of unlikely propositions, but this…”
“You bet your money, your reputation, and, they say, your life on bringing back the Alamo from the Antarctic. We’re willing to bet our money, our reputations, and our lives on Brown, Texas.”
Forte didn’t know whether Hallelujah Brown was any good as a physicist, but he’d have made a hell of a bond salesman. “You’re asking a lot on faith. But faith don’t buy farms. Not from Ripley Forte, anyway. How much do you people think this land is worth?”
“We’ve put aside $610,000 for land purchase. For land like this, we thought that should cover it.”
“Write the check.”
Hallelujah Brown took out a checkbook on the Fifth Third National Bank of Houston. His hand shook a little as he wrote.
Ripley Forte inspected the check, nodded, and put it in the pocket of his leather jacket. Ordinarily, he’d have put up an argument over such a bald attempt to con him out of his land. But Forte’s thoughts were less occupied with the Brownian Movement than they were with those Valerie Vincent was waiting to demonstrate. “Stake out the thirty sections you want, and I’ll have my men come out tomorrow to do the paperwork….And if Dr. Brown designs orthopedics like she bakes pie, I may ask to buy some stock in your company.”
On the Piper back to Houston, Forte pulled out the check and looked at it again. He shook his head, turned it over, and wrote on the back: “Pay to the order of Brown, Texas, Community School, /s/ Ripley Forte.”
He handed it over his shoulder to Blades, his secretary, and was about to request landing instructions from Houston Control when the radio sputtered, and he heard the voice of Yussef Mansour on the SSB.
“Ripley, this is Joe.”
“Where the hell are you, Joe?”
“On the Linno, getting some sun near a small island off the coast of Venezuela. It’s taken my fancy, and I’m thinking of buying it.”
“The sun, or Venezuela?”
“Whichever I Can cover with $640 million, actually.”
“An interesting sum. What did you do-bust open your piggy bank?”
“I hope you’re sitting down, Rip.”
“I am.”
“Well, Jennifer Red Cloud just sent me a check for the amount of our loans, with accrued interest. As of this morning she is sole owner of Raynes Oceanic Resources.”
“The hell you say!”
“On my honor as a Cub Scout,” said the little Lebanese financier, the caretaker of Forte’s billions.
“But who the devil would bail her out-and why?”
“Oh, the word is that it’s the Swiss, in order to mount an effort to develop new technology to contest our monopoly on iceberg delivery. I don’t believe it. It’s just too pat. Anyway, I’ll have my people look into it and let you know.”
“Do that. Forte out.”
The party was audible from a quarter of a mile away as Ripley Forte switched off the engines of the Piper tiltjet on the landing pad behind El Cabellejo Ranch. More muted were the sighs of Valerie Vincent as he emerged from the shower ten minutes later and slipped into the bed beside her.
She was worth his wait in gold. Forte, who had spent too many nights alone in primitive construction camps on the margins of civilization and beyond, had less experience with women than many men half his age. But that afternoon, and through the night into the next morning, he more than made up for several of those years of deprivation. She was the stuff of dreams, and Forte, like a starving man at a royal banquet, gorged himself on delicious fantasy. Never in his life, he told himself, had he experienced such an agony of ecstasy. Then why did he turn out the bathroom light, and pretend her hair was black and that the intoxicating fragrance that drowned his senses emanated from the wild, pulsating body of Jennifer Red Cloud?
8. IMPROMPTU
2 FEBRUARY 2009
Jennifer Red Cloud customarily sunbathed in the nude at her Jamaican residence on Montego Bay, but for this occasion she was swathed in a voluminous ankle-length terry-cloth robe, her long black hair plaited and coiled in a tight chignon. Her knees drawn up before her, she occupied a beach chair, protected from the early-morning sun by a large striped umbrella, reading ROR’s latest monthly operating report. The ex-marines who manned guard towers at intervals along the twin barbed-wire fences surrounding the estate were backed up today by Dobermans running free, for she had received instructions that no one-not even the household staff- was to witness the meeting.