“I had a professor in the Harvard Business School,” said young Fern to Noel Constant, “who kept telling me that I was smart, but that I would have to find my boy, if I was going to be rich. He wouldn’t explain what he meant. He said I would catch on sooner or later. I asked him how I could go looking for my boy, and he suggested that I work for the Bureau of Internal Revenue for a year or so.
“When I went over your tax returns, Mr. Constant, it suddenly came to me what it was he meant. He meant I was shrewd and thorough, but I wasn’t remarkably lucky. I had to find somebody who had luck in an astonishing degree — and so I have.”
“Why should I pay you two thousand dollars a week?” said Noel Constant. “You see my facilities and my staff here, and you know what I’ve done with them.”
“Yes — ” said Fern, “and I can show you where you should have made two hundred million where you made only fifty-nine. You know absolutely nothing about corporate law or tax law — or even commonsense business procedure.”
Fern thereupon proved this to Noel Constant, father of Malachi — and Fern showed him an organizational plan that had the name Magnum Opus, Incorporated. It was a marvelous engine for doing violence to the spirit of thousands of laws without actually running afoul of so much as a city ordinance.
Noel Constant was so impressed by this monument to hypocrisy and sharp practice that he wanted to buy stock in it without even referring to his Bible.
“Mr. Constant, sir,” said young Fern, “don’t you understand? Magnum Opus is you, with you as chairman of the board, with me as president.
“Mr. Constant,” he said, “right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats — men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what’s really going on the way you do now.” He looked around the room. “How do you keep track now, by the way — writing with a burnt match on the margins of a telephone directory?”
“In my head,” said Noel Constant.
“There is one more advantage I have yet to point out,” said Fern. “Some day your luck is going to run out. And then you’re going to need the shrewdest, most thorough manager you can hire — or you’ll crash all the way back to pots and pans.”
“You’re hired,” said Noel Constant, father of Malachi.
“Now, where should we erect the building?” said Fern.
“I own this hotel, and this hotel owns the lot across the street,” said Noel Constant. “Build it on the lot across the Street.” He held up an index finger as crooked as a crankshaft. “There’s just one thing — ”
“Yes, sir?” said Fern.
“I’m not moving into it,” said Noel Constant. “I’m staying right here.”
Those who want more detailed histories of Magnum Opus, Inc., can go to their public libraries and ask for either Lavina Waters’ romantic Too Wild a Dream? or Crowther Gomburg’s harsh Primordial Scales.