“It will be ridiculously expensive, Delos. And you don’t even know that you will ever get to the Moon, much less that it will be worth anything after you get there.”
“We’ll get there! It’ll be more expensive not to establish these claims. Anyhow it need not be very expensive; the proper use of bribe money is a homoeopathic art—you use it as a catalyst. Back in the middle of the last century four men went from California to Washington with $40,000; it was all they had. A few weeks later they were broke-but Congress had awarded them a billion dollars’ worth of railroad right of way. The trick is not to run up the market.”
Strong shook his head. “Your title wouldn’t be any good anyhow. The Moon doesn’t stay in one place; it passes over owned land certainly—but so does a migrating goose.”
“And nobody has title to a migrating bird. I get your point—but the Moon always stays over that one belt. If you move a boulder in your garden, do you lose title to it? Is it still real estate? Do the title laws still stand? This is like that group of real estate cases involving wandering islands in the Mississippi, George—the land moved as the river cut new channels, but somebody always owned it. In this case I plan to see to it that we are the ‘somebody.’”
Strong puckered his brow. “I seem to recall that some of those island-andriparian cases were decided one way and some another.”
“We’ll pick the decisions that suit us. That’s why lawyers’ wives have mink coats. Come on, George; let’s get busy.”
“On what?”
“Raising the money.”
“Oh.” Strong looked relieved. “I thought you were planning to use our money.”
“I am. But it won’t be nearly enough. We’ll use our money for the senior financing to get things moving; in the meantime we’ve got to work out ways to keep the money rolling in.” He pressed a switch at his desk; the face of Saul Kamens, their legal chief of staff, sprang out at him. “Hey, Saul, can you slide in for a p0w-wow?”
“WThatever it is, just tell them ‘no,’” answered the attorney. “I’ll fix it.”
“Good. Now come on in—they’re moving Hell and I’ve got an option on the first ten loads.”
Kamens showed up in his own good time. Some minutes later Harriman had explained his notion for claiming the Moon ahead of setting foot on it. “Besides those dummy corporations,” he went on, “we need an agency that can receive contributions without having to admit any financial interest on the part of the contributor—like the National Geographic Society.”
Kamens shook his head. “You can’t buy the National Geographic Society.”
“Damn it, who said we were going to? We’ll set up our own.”
“That’s what I started to say.”
“Good. As I see it, we need at least one tax-free, non-profit corporation headed up by the right people-we’ll hang on to voting control, of course. We’ll probably need more than one; we’ll set them up as we need them. And we’ve got to have at least one new ordinary corporation, not tax-free— but it won’t show a profit until we are ready. The idea is to let the nonprofit corporations have all of the prestige and all of the publicity—and the other gets all of the profits, if and when. We swap assets around between corporations, always for perfectly valid reasons, so that the non-profit corporations pay the expenses as we go along. Come to think about it, we had better have at least two ordinary corporations, so that we can let one of them go through bankruptcy if we find it necessary to shake out the water. That’s the general sketch. Get busy and fix it up so that it’s legal, will you?”
Kamens said, “You know, Delos, it would be a lot more honest if you did it at the point of a gun.”
“A lawyer talks to me of honesty! Never mind, Saul; I’m not actually going to cheat anyone-”
“Humph!”
“—and I’m just going to make a trip to the Moon. That’s what everybody will be paying for; that’s what they’ll get. Now fix it up so that it’s legal, that’s a good boy.”