“But you’re bein’ way too generous wit dis ting.”
“Nope, it’s going to cost you, maybe more than you’ll want to pay.”
“Like what?”
“Like if you want in, you’ve got to stop using that God damned phony Hamtramck accent! The damned thing drives me crazy! From now on, you’ve got to speak like a normal human being, or our whole deal is off!”
“Oh. Well, if you feel that strongly about it, okay, I’ll speak Midwest Standard whenever I’m around you. But if it bothered you so much, why didn’t you ever say anything?”
* * *
The next two months were “interesting times.”
At our lawyer’s urging, we decided that we’d be better off with a corporate form of ownership rather than a simple partnership. Soon, we were The Western Isles, Ltd., with half the stock in each of our names. Adam was chairman of the board and treasurer, while I was president and CEO. I kept a million in my personal account, Adam kept a million in gold, and we threw everything else each of us owned into the corporation treasury.
Our lawyer’s bill came to twenty percent of what he’d saved for us, a huge sum, but considering that we wouldn’t have gotten anything at all without him, we considered it money well spent. We were both surprised that Greenberg wasn’t interested in buying any stock in our new corporation, and being on the board of directors, even after, having sworn him to secrecy, we told him the whole true story.
“You are passing up the opportunity of a lifetime,” Adam told him.
“I’m still aghast at your newfound diction, Adam, but no. I work best as an individual, not as a member of a group. But thanks for the offer, anyway.”
So, we put him on a retainer as our corporate attorney, and let it go at that. Personally, I think that he thought we were both more than a little crazy, and that no such island could possibly exist.
Shirley, my old office girl, accountant, and receptionist jumped at the chance to come back and work for us. She didn’t care whether the islands existed or not, she said, and she claimed that she already knew that we were both crazy. She said she’d known that for years. Mostly, she just wanted to be part of the team again, and was downright antsy to get out of Chrysler Corporation, where she’d been working for the last year or so. Her husband, who also used to work for me, felt the same way, and while we didn’t need a machinist just now, you can always use an intelligent and honest man, so we hired him anyway. All this despite the fact that we were moving the office to San Diego, and before we told her that we were doubling her salary.
We gave Shirley a checkbook and told her to rent us a warehouse with a nice office suite near the San Diego docks, and a couple of big apartments near them for Adam and me. She was given a long list of things to buy once we had a place to put them, and was told to look around for a small, used ocean-going freighter, as well. It’s great to have people that you trust. It’s awkward and then some to have to work with those that you don’t dare trust.
When you need to get a lot of things done, you have to start working on your long lead time items first. The thing that we needed to do that would take the most time was to design and build a machine to scrape the coral and waterlogged featherrock from the bottom of the Western Islands. Having such a machine working would show the duke that we were seriously concerned with the long-term welfare of his people.
We spent a week looking for a company that could build us an underwater, remote-controlled, inverted bulldozer, until we finally found the outfit that makes those underwater remote-controlled submarines that are used for deep-sea exploration and salvage. What we wanted was bigger than anything they’d ever built before, but we figured that they knew enough about the special engineering problems that are faced in deep, high-pressure water to handle our job.
We faced a problem in that we couldn’t tell them exactly what we wanted to do with the machine we were asking for. We had to keep secret the fact that the Western Isles existed. Public disclosure would be socially, medically, and politically disastrous for the islanders. It would also be financially disastrous for Adam and me, and would destroy any hope we might have of reconciliation with the powers that be on the Western Islands.
The people at Modern Oceanographics couldn’t help being curious when all we could tell them was what the dozer had to do, and not where it would be used or why it was needed.
Finally, Adam said, “Look, if you want us to tell you lies, just say so. Otherwise, please shut up about it.”
In the end, they agreed to stop asking why, and we agreed to give them the design and build contract for what we needed.
Adam and I are machinery designers, and it would have been fun to do the design job ourselves, but in design work, the fun jobs are those where you are doing something different from what you have done before. That is to say, where you don’t quite know what you are doing. Making something that works properly requires that you do know what you’re doing. Situated between fun and accomplishment is education, and educating yourself with only mother nature for a teacher is always a very expensive and time-consuming proposition.
Even so, one of us, usually Adam, flew out to New England about once a week to keep an eye on what was happening, until we were ready to go back to the Western Isles. By then, the design was complete, but the dozer itself wouldn’t be completed for another three months. Also, by then the dozer was no longer a dozer. It was now a submarine with caterpillar treads on the roof and a set of vertical milling cutters in front.
As Murphy’s Law required, we were three weeks getting our Westronese agricultural samples through customs, and after two weeks we had to put Greenberg on the case, but eventually we were successful.
Shirley and her husband got going on the three crates, the four books, and the electronic version of Thomas Register, trying to match each item up with a company or two that might have some use for it. Soon, they were going international in their company search.
We started negotiations with dozens of outfits, and had sent samples to six of them before we shipped out. Not that being on shipboard would stop us from negotiating anything, what with modern communications and all. There was no significant income from all this yet, but it would come.
In the meantime, we amassed canned meat and grains, enough to feed twelve thousand people for a year.
We bought an estimated two-year supply of commercial fertilizers.
We bought samples of small, Japanese-built farm machinery, suitable for working small plots of land.
We bought samples of hand tools and gardening equipment of a hundred different types. Indeed, we bought enough hardware of all kinds to open a fair-sized store, which was just what we planned to do.
We bought lumber, steel, and glass.
When the cost of silver coins proved to be much higher than the cost of silver, we had our own coins made, slugs, really, but in the denominations in use in the Western Isles. Copper pennies, on the other hand, were cheaper than the cost of copper slugs, thanks to the strange ways of the U.S. Government.
We bought diesel generators sufficient to electrify about a quarter of the island, and wiring and lights enough for all the regularly traveled tunnels.
We bought fuel enough to run those generators for a year.
We bought televisions, VCRs, and radios. And a big projection system, for auditorium-style viewing.
We bought compressors, hoses, and SCUBA gear for fifty men.
We bought a small but complete machine shop, with a small electric smelter and a modern forge, to fix anything that broke, and to make anything that we might have forgotten.
We bought a cellular, digital phone system, with two hundred handsets. And a satellite communication system to tie into it.
We bought more navigation, communication, and remote sensing equipment than we had on the old Brick Royal.
The biggest, long lead time items like generators and machine tools were often bought secondhand, but most of the rest was new, with factory warranties.
And we had a ball doing it, spending much of our newfound wealth.
We found and hired a medical doctor and her nurse, two women with experience in mass immunizations in faraway lands. We were vague about where we told them we were going, but we let them buy what they felt they needed to take care of twelve thousand people.