“They sent a child, did they?” said Noel Constant. The visitor was not offended. He turned the gibe to his own advantage, using it in an image of himself that was chilling indeed. “A child with a heart of stone and a mind as quick as a mongoose, Mr. Constant,” he said. “I have also been to Harvard Business School.”
“That may be so,” said Constant, “but I don’t think you can hurt me. I don’t owe the Federal Government a dime.”
The callow visitor nodded. “I know,” he said. “I found everything in apple-pie order.”
The young man looked around the room. He wasn’t surprised by its squalor. He was worldly enough to have expected something diseased.
“I’ve been over your income-tax reports for the past two years,” he said, “and, by my calculations, you are the luckiest man who ever lived.”
“Lucky?” said Noel Constant.
“I think so,” said the young visitor. “Don’t you think so? For instance – what does ELCO Hoist Company manufacture?”
“ELCO Hoist?” said Noel Constant blankly.
“You owned fifty-three per cent of it for a period of two months,” said the young visitor.
“Why – hoists – things for lifting various articles,” said Noel Constant stuffily. “And various allied products.”
The young visitor’s smile made cat’s whiskers under his nose. “For your information,” he said, “ELCO Hoist Company was a name given by the Government in the last war to a top-secret laboratory that was developing underwater listening gear. After the war, it was sold’ to private enterprise, and the name was never changed – since the work was still top secret, and the only customer was still the Government.
“Suppose you tell me,” said the young visitor, “what it was you learned about Indiana Novelty that made you think it was a shrewd investment? Did you think they made little party poppers with paper hats inside?”
“I have to answer these questions for the Bureau of Internal Revenue?” said Noel Constant. “I have to describe every company I owned in detail, or I can’t keep the money?”
“I was simply asking for my own curiosity. From your reaction, I gather that you haven’t the remotest idea what Indiana Novelty does. For your information, Indiana Novelty manufactures nothing, but holds certain key patents on tire-recapping machinery.”
“Suppose we get down to the Bureau of Internal Revenue business,” said Noel Constant curtly.
“I’m no longer with the Bureau,” said the young visitor. “I resigned my one hundred-and-fourteen-dollar-a-week job this morning in order to take a job making two thousand dollars a week.”
“Working for whom?” said Noel Constant.
“Working for you,” said the young man. He stood, held out his hand. “Ransom K. Fern is the name,” he said.
“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.
Miss Waters’ volume, while fuddled as to business details, contains the better account of the chambermaid Florence Whitehill’s discovery that she was pregnant by Noel Constant, and her discovery that Noel Constant was a multi-multi-millionaire.
Noel Constant married the chambermaid,, gave her a mansion and a checking account with a million dollars in it. He told her to name the child Malachi if it was a boy, and Prudence if it was a girl. He asked her to please keep coming to see him once every ten days in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton Hotel, but not to bring the baby.
Gomburg’s book, while first-rate on business details, suffers from Gomburg’s central thesis, to the effect that Magnum Opus was a product of a complex of inabilities to love. Reading between the lines of Gomburg’s book, it is increasingly clear that Gomburg is himself unloved and unable to love.
Neither Miss Waters nor Gomburg, incidentally, discovered Noel Constant’s investment method. Ransom K. Fern never discovered it either, though he tried hard enough.
The only person Noel Constant ever told was his son, Malachi, on Malachi’s twenty-first birthday. That birthday party of two took place in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton. It was the first time father and son had ever met.
Malachi had come to see Noel by invitation.
Human emotions being what they are, young Malachi Constant paid more attention to a detail in the room’s furnishings than he did to the secret of how to make millions or even billions of dollars.
The money-making secret was so simple-minded to begin with, that it didn’t require much attention. The most complicated part of it had to do with the manner in which young Malachi was to pick up the torch of Magnum Opus when Noel had, at long last, laid it down. Young Malachi was to ask Ransom K. Fern for a chronological list of the investments of Magnum Opus, and, reading down the margin, young Malachi would learn just how far otd Noel had gone in the Bible, and where young Malachi should begin.