THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON
THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON
CHAPTER ONE
“YOU’VE GOT TO BE A BELIEVER!”
George Strong snorted at his partner’s declaration. “Delos, why don’t you give up? You’ve been singing this tune for years. Maybe someday men will get to the Moon, though I doubt it. In any case, you and I will never live to see it. The loss of the power satellite washes the matter up for our generation.”
D. D. Harriman grunted. “We won’t see it if we sit on our fat behinds and don’t do anything to make it happen. But we can make it happen.”
“Question number one: how? Question number two: why?”
“‘Why?’ The man asks ‘why.’ George, isn’t there anything in your soul but discounts, and dividends? Didn’t you ever sit with a girl on a soft summer night and stare up at the Moon and wonder what was there?”
“Yeah, I did once. I caught a cold.”
Harriman asked the Almighty why he had been delivered into the hands of the Philistines. He then turned back to his partner. “I could tell you why, the real ‘why,’ but you wouldn’t understand me. You want to know why in terms of cash, don’t you? You want to know how Harriman & Strong and Harriman Enterprises can show a profit, don’t you?”
“Yes,” admitted Strong, “and don’t give me any guff about tourist trade and fabulous lunar jewels. I’ve had it.”
“You ask me to show figures on a brand-new type of enterprise, knowing I can’t. It’s like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to estimate how much money Curtiss-Wright Corporation would someday make out of building airplanes. I’ll put it another way, You didn’t want us to go into plastic houses, did you? If you had had your way we would still be back in Kansas City, subdividing cow pastures and showing rentals.”
Strong shrugged.
“How much has New World Homes made to date?”
Strong looked absent-minded while exercising the talent he brought to the partnership. “Uh . . . $172,946,004.62, after taxes, to the end of the last fiscal year. The running estimate to date is—”
“Never mind. What was our share in the take?”
“Well, uh, the partnership, exclusive of the piece you took personally and then sold to me later, has benefited from New World Homes during the same period by $1 3,010,437.20, ahead of personal taxes. Delos, this double taxation has got to stop. Penalizing thrift is a sure way to run this country straight into—”
“Forget it, forget it! How much have we made out of Skyblast Freight and Antipodes Transways?”
Strong told him.
“And yet I had to threaten you with bodily harm to get you to put up a dime to buy control of the injector patent. You said rockets were a passing fad.”
“We were lucky,” objected Strong. “You had no way of knowing that there would be a big uranium strike in Australia. Without it, the Skyways group would have left us in the red. For that matter New World Homes would have failed, too, if the roadtowns hadn’t come along and given us a market out from under local building codes.”
“Nuts on both points. Fast transportation will pay; it always has. As for New World, when ten million families need new houses and we can sell ‘em cheap, they’ll buy. They won’t let building codes stop them, not permanently. We gambled on a certainty. Think back, George: what ventures have we lost money on and what ones have paid off? Everyone of my crack-brain ideas has made money, hasn’t it? And the only times we’ve lost our ante was on conservative, blue-chip investments.”
“But we’ve made money on some conservative deals, too,” protested Strong.
“Not enough to pay for your yacht. Be fair about it, George; the Andes Development Company, the integrating pantograph patent, every one of my wildcat schemes I’ve had to drag you into—and every one of them paid.”
“I’ve had to sweat blood to make them pay,” Strong grumbled.
“That’s why we are partners. I get a wildcat by the tail; you harness him and put him to work. Now we go to the Moon—and you’ll make it pay.”