“We turned around and came home,” said Beatrice proudly. Her eyes glittered, and she nodded abruptly. “That’s the way to treat roller coasters,” she said.
She stalked out of Skip’s Museum, went to the foyer to await the arrival of Kazak.
In a moment, she felt the electric presence of her husband behind her.
“Bea – ” he said, “if I seem indifferent to your misfortunes, it’s only because I know how well things are going to turn out in the end. If it seems crude of me not to hate the idea of your pairing off with Constant, it’s only an humble admission on my part that he’s going to make you a far better husband than I ever was or will be.
“Look forward to being really in love for the first time, Bea,” said Rumford. “Look forward to behaving aristocratically without any outward proofs of your aristocracy. Look forward to having nothing but the dignity and intelligence and tenderness that God gave you – look forward to taking those materials and nothing else, and making something exquisite with them.”
Rumfoord groaned tinnily. He was becoming insubstantial. “Oh, God – ” he said, “you talk about roller coasters –
“Stop and think sometime about the roller coaster I’m on. Some day on Titan, it will be revealed to you just how ruthlessly I’ve been used, and by whom, and to what disgustingly paltry ends.”
Kazak now flung himself into the house, flews flapping. He landed skidding on the polished floor.
He ran in place, trying to make a right-angle turn in Beatrice’s direction. Faster and faster he ran, and still he could get no traction.
He became translucent.
He began to shrink, to fizz crazily on the foyer floor like a ping-pong ball in a frying pan
Then he disappeared.
There was no dog any more.
Without looking behind, Beatrice knew that her husband had disappeared, too.
“Kazak?” she said faintly. She snapped her fingers, as though to attract a dog. Her fingers were too weak to make a sound.
“Nice doggy,” she whispered.
CHAPTER THREE
UNITED HOTCAKE PREFERRED
“Son – they say there isn’t any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose.”
– NOEL CONSTANT
Magnum Opus, the Los Angeles Corporation that managed Malachi Constant’s financial affairs, was founded by Malachi’s father. It had a thirty-one-story building for its home. While Magnum Opus owned the whole building, it used only the top three floors, renting out the rest to corporations it controlled.
Some of these corporations, having been sold recently by Magnum Opus, were moving out. Others, having been bought recently by Magnum Opus, were moving in.
Among the tenants were Galactic Spacecraft, MoonMist Tobacco, Fandango Petroleum, Lennox Mono – rail, Fry-Kwik, Sani-Maid Pharmaceuticals, Lewis and Marvin Sulfur, Dupree Electronics, Universal Piezoelectric, Psychokinesis Unlimited, Ed Muir Associates, Max-Mor Machine Tools, Wilkinson Paint and Varnish, American Levitation, Flo-Fast, King O’Leisure Shirts, and the Emblem Supreme Casualty and Life Assurance Company of California.
The Magnum Opus Building was a slender, prismatic, twelve-sided shaft, faced on all twelve sides with blue-green glass that shaded to rose at the base. The twelve sides were said by the architect to represent the twelve great religions of the world. So far, no one had asked the architect to name them.
That was lucky, because he couldn’t have done it.
There was a private heliport on top.
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.”
This philosophy did not sadden him. It did not make him brood.
It made him heartlessly watchful.
It helped in business, too – for it let Fern assume automatically that the other fellow was far weaker and. far more bored than he seemed.
Sometimes, too, people with strong stomachs, found Fern’s murmured asides funny.
His situation, working for Noel Constant and then Malachi, conspired nicely to make almost anything he might say bitterly funny – for he was superior to Constant p�re and fils in every respect but one, and the respect excepted was the only one that really mattered. The Constants – ignorant, vulgar, and brash – had copious quantities of dumb luck.
Or had had up to now.
Malachi Constant had still to get it through his head that his luck was gone – every bit of it. He had still to get it through his head, despite the hideous news Fern had given him on the telephone.