The shadow and flutter of Constant’s helicopter settling to the heliport seemed to many of the people below to be like the shadow and flutter of the Bright Angel of Death. It seemed that way because of the stock-market crash, because money and jobs were so scarce —
And it seemed especially that way to them because the things that had crashed the hardest, that had pulled everything down with them, were the enterprises of Malachi Constant.
Constant was flying his own helicopter, since all his servants had quit the night before. Constant was flying it badly. He set it down with a crash that sent shivers through the building.
He was arriving for a conference with Ransom K. Fern, President of Magnum Opus.
Fern waited for Constant on the thirty-first floor — a single, vast room that was Constant’s office.
The office was spookily furnished, since none of the furniture had legs. Everything was suspended magnetically at the proper height. The tables and the desk and the bar and the couches were floating slabs. The chairs were tilted, floating bowls. And most eerie of all, pencils and pads were scattered at random through the air, ready to be snatched by anyone who had an idea worth writing down.
The carpet was as green as grass for. the simple reason that it was grass — living grass as lush as any putting green.
Malachi Constant sank from the heliport deck to his office in a private elevator. When the elevator door whispered open, Constant was startled by the legless furnishings, by the floating pencils and pads. He had not been in his office for eight weeks. Somebody had refurnished the place.
Ransom K. Fern, aging President of Magnum Opus, stood at a floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the city. He wore his black Homburg hat and his black Chesterfield coat. He carried his whangee walking stick at port arms. He was exceedingly thin — always had been.
“A butt like two beebees,” Malachi Constant’s father Noel had said of Fern. “Ransom K. Fern is like a camel who has burned up both his humps, and now he’s burning up everything else but his hair and eyeballs.”
According to figures released by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Fern was the highest-paid executive in the country. He had a salary of a flat million dollars a year — plus stock-option plans and cost-of-living adjustments.
He had joined Magnum Opus when he was twenty-two years old. He was sixty now.
“Some — somebody’s changed all the furniture,” said Constant.
“Yes,” said Fern, still looking out over the city, “somebody changed it.”
“You?” said Constant.
Fern sniffed, took his time about answering. “I thought we ought to demonstrate our loyalty to some of our own products.”
“I — I never saw anything like it,” said Constant. “No legs — just floating in air.”
“Magnetism, you know,” said Fern.
“Why — why I think it looks wonderful, now that I’m getting used to it,” said Constant. “And some company we own makes this stuff?”
“American Levitation Company,” said Fern. “You said to buy it, so we bought it.”
Ransom K. Fern turned away from the window. His face was a troubling combination of youth and age. There was no sign in the face of any intermediate stages in the aging process, no hint of the man of thirty or forty or fifty who had been left behind. Only adolescence and the age of sixty were represented. It was as though a seventeen-year-old had been withered and bleached by a blast of heat.
Fern read two books a day. It has been said that Aristotle was the last man to be familiar with the whole of his own culture. Ransom K. Fern had made an impressive attempt to equal Aristotle’s achievement. He had been somewhat less successful than Aristotle in perceiving patterns in what he knew.
The intellectual mountain had labored to produce a philosophical mouse — and Fern was the first to admit that it was a mouse, and a mangy mouse at that. As Fern expressed the philosophy conversationally, in its simplest terms:
“You go up to a man, and you say, ‘How are things going, Joe?’ And he says, ‘Oh, fine, fine — couldn’t be better.’ And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much.”