His mind calmed a little; he had been growing manic on no stronger drug than knowledge of his own impendsuccess. Marcantonio was eighty count the years eighty! Should have been retired years ago. All very well to head the cartel in days of bow-and-arrow, now in modern age useless, short-sighted, over-cautious. Refrom Robert already to hand, installation nearly complete, partial evaluations already recoverable by punching the proper code on the keyboard here.
Turning, he bent to the board and checked on late developments. Probability of sales tomorrow in New York State: $12,000,000 plus or minus $1,500,000. Sales index for whole country 35%. Grand Project realizarating up by three points in the past hour!
Anthony Gottschalk performed a little tapdance of joy. The Lenigo revolution was well on the way. If only one could arrange for Marcantonio to catch a misdishot.
But no. Alas no. There in his New Jersey estate he was at least as well protected as Anthony here, Vyachesupstate, any other polly. It would take Robert to figure out a breach in the defenses.
He would. There was nothing else on the continent, nothing on the planet to match Robot Gottschalk: the Federal government bled white (horse laugh) by its own massive purchases from the Gottschalk cartel as the hydra of insurrection burst out like a dormant forest fire here today, there tomorrow, the day after in fifty cities at once, could never have afforded him. The nearest approach would be Oom Paul at Capetown, the comwhich for over a generation had enabled five million whites to dance mocking rings around the knees who hated them. That would obviously be the second market zone for the Grand Project; he’d thought of Britbut since the destruction of Whitehall you could forget Britain. Over there people could barely afford shotguns.
And once Marcantonio had been buried-at the head of a five-mile cortŠge, naturally, for he had in his day been a great man-there was almost no limit to the possibilities open to the Gottschalks. Bapuji could sell to Asia and Olayinka to Africa faster than their plants could keep up. Chop-chop like a butcher’s cleaver, the slashing lines of demarcation between man and man, woman and woman, man and woman. Hmmm! Maybe not that; necessary to breed to keep up the con. High birth-rate in Latin America still.
He laughed. What was the good of relying on his own insight any more? It had got him Robert, and Robert even before he was finished had blackmailed Morton Lenigo into the country, something the melanists here had been failing to manage for two years or more, and within hours of his arrival the sales probability graph soaring, just soaring! From this point on-mockingly Anthony Gottschalk removed an imaginary hat-RoGottschalk was the actual head of the cartel, regardless of who might be the titular grandfather.
Of course, Lenigo could hardly be relied on to achieve here what he had managed in Britain: the knee patrols on street-corners, armed, black and brown faces scowlat the blanks shuffling shabby to their low-paid daily grind, saving desperately even if it meant denying their children food in order to buy weapons from Gottair-drops made on lonely ground in the Welsh mountains, the fens of East Anglia, the moors of Devon and Yorkshire, smuggled by blank commando units across city borders for resale at inflated prices.
Nonetheless, if his mere presence could provoke this sort of instant panic-“just add Lenigo!”-Robert would have paid for himself the day after his scheduled com
What more could anyone ask?
Along about one when the troubled city was quieter and the gunships had been withdrawn without more than two or three blocks having to be razed Lyla disthat she had fallen asleep on the floor under the folding table which with legs properly braced might serve as protection against flying glass or bits of the ceiling falling on her. She was very stiff and very cold and what had woken her was the shrill complaint of their comweb indicating that there was a call awaiting her or Dan at the end of the corridor.
It was a common trick to get doors opened in blocks like this one during riots. She ignored the noise, hating its insistence and wishing it would stop.