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, Moon-Mist 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 pére 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.

    "Gee," said Constant ingenuously, "the more I look at this furniture, the more I like it. This stuff should sell like hotcakes." There was something pathetic and repellent about Malachi Constant's talking business. It had been the same with his father. Old Noel Constant had never known anything about business, and neither had his son — and what little charm the Constants had evaporated the instant they pretended that their successes depended on their knowing their elbows from third base.

    There was something obscene about a billionaire's being optimistic and aggressive and cunning.

    "If you ask me," said Constant, "that was a pretty sound investment — a company that makes furniture like this."

    "United Hotcake preferred," said Fern. United Hotcake preferred was a favorite joke of his. Whenever people came to him, begging for investment advice that would double their money in six weeks, he advised them gravely to invest in this fictitious stock. Some people actually tried to follow his advice.

    "Sitting on an American Levitation couch is harder than standing up in a birchbark canoe," said Fern dryly. "Throw yourself into one of these so-called chairs, and it will bounce you off the wall like a stone Out of a slingshot. Sit on the edge of your desk, and it will waltz you around the room like a Wright brother at Kitty Hawk."

    Constant touched his desk ever so lightly. It shuddered nervously.

    "Well — they still haven't got all of the bugs out of it, that's all," said Constant.

    "Truer words were never spoken," said Fern.

    Constant now made a plea that he had never had to make before. "A guy is entitled to a mistake now and then," he said.

    "Now and then?" said Fern, raising his eyebrows. "For three months you have made nothing but wrong decisions, and you've done what I would have said was impossible. You've succeeded in more than wiping out the results of almost forty years of inspired guessing."

    Ransom K. Fern took a pencil from the air and broke it in two. "Magnum Opus is no more. You and I are the last two people in the building. Everyone else has been paid off and sent home."

    He bowed and moved toward the door. "The switchboard has been arranged so that all incoming calls will come directly to your desk here. And when you leave, Mr. Constant, sir, remember to turn out the lights and lock the front door."

    A history of Magnum Opus, Inc., is perhaps in order at this point.

    Magnum Opus began as an idea in the head of a Yankee traveling salesman of copper-bottomed cookware. That Yankee was Noel Constant, a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was the father of Malachi.

    The father of Noel, in turn, was Sylvanus Constant, a loom fixer in the New Bedford Mills of the Nattaweena Division of the Grand Republic Woolen Company. He was an anarchist, though he never got into any trouble about it, except with his wife.

    The family could trace its line back through an illegitimacy to Benjamin Constant, who was a tribune under Napoleon from 1799 to 1801, and a lover of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Stael-Holstein, wife of the then Swedish ambassador to France.

    One night in Los Angeles, at any rate, Noel Constant got it into his head to become a speculator. He was thirty-nine at the time, single, physically and morally unattractive, and a business failure. The idea of becoming a speculator came to him as he sat all alone on a narrow bed in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton Hotel.

    The most valuable corporate structure ever to be owned by one man could not have had humbler headquarters in the beginning. Room 223 of the Wilburhampton was eleven feet long and eight feet wide, and had neither telephone nor desk.

    What it did have was a bed, a three-drawer dresser, old newspapers lining the drawers, and, in the bottom drawer, a Gideon Bible. The newspaper page that lined the middle drawer was a page of stock-market quotations from fourteen years before.

    There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive?

    The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks water from the springs of the bed.

    This comes very close to describing the genesis of Magnum Opus. The materials with which Noel Constant built his fortune were hardly more nourishing in themselves than calendar dates and bedsprings.

    Magnum Opus was built with a pen, a check book, some check-sized Government envelopes, a Gideon Bible, and a bank balance of eight thousand, two hundred and twelve dollars.

    The bank balance was Noel Constant's share in the estate of his anarchist father. The estate had consisted principally of Government bonds.

    And Noel Constant had an investment program. It was simplicity itself. The Bible would be his investment counselor.

    There are those who have concluded, after studying Noel Constant's investment pattern, that he was either a genius or had a superb system of industrial spies.

    He invariably picked the stock market's most brilliant performers days or hours before their performances began. In twelve months, rarely leaving Room 223 in the Wilburhampton Hotel, he increased his fortune to a million and a quarter.

    Noel Constant did it without genius and without spies.

    His system was so idiotically simple that some people can't understand it, no matter how often it is explained. The people who can't understand it are people who have to believe, for their own peace of mind, that tremendous wealth can be produced only by tremendous cleverness.

    This was Noel Constant's system:

    He took the Gideon Bible that was in his room, and he started with the first sentence in Genesis,

    The first sentence in Genesis, as some people may know, is: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Noel Constant wrote the sentence in capital letters, put periods between the letters, divided the letters into pairs, rendering the sentence as follows: "I.N., T.H., E.B., E.G., I.N., N.I., N.G., G.O., D.C., R.E., A.T., E.D., T.H., E.H., E.A., V.E., N.A., N.D., T.H., E.E., A.R., T.H."

    And then he looked for corporations with those initials, and bought shares in them. His rule at the beginning was that he would own shares in only one corporation at a time, would invest his whole nest-egg in it, and would sell the instant the value of his shares had doubled.

    His very first investment was International Nitrate. After that came Trowbridge Helicopter, Electra Bakeries, Eternity Granite, Indiana Novelty, Norwich Iron, National Gelatin, Granada Oil, Del-Mar Creations, Richmond Electroplating,' Anderson Trailer, and Eagle Duplicating.

    His program for the next twelve months was this: Trowbridge Helicopter again, ELCO Hoist, Engineering Associates, Vickery Electronics, National Alum, National Dredging, Trowbridge Helicopter again.

    The third time he bought Trowbridge Helicopter, he didn't buy a piece of it. He bought the whole thing — lock, stock, and barrel.

    Two days after that, the company landed a long-term Government contract for intercontinental ballistic missiles, a contract that made the company worth, conservatively, fifty-nine million dollars. Noel Constant had bought the company for twenty-two million.

    The only executive decision he ever made relative to the company was contained in an order written on a picture postcard of the Wilburhampton Hotel. The card was addressed to the president of the company, telling him to change the name of the company to Galactic Spacecraft, Inc., since the company had long since outgrown both Trowbridges and helicopters.

    Small as this exercise of authority was, it was significant, for it showed that Constant had at last become interested in something he owned. And, though his holdings in the firm had more than doubled in value, he did not sell them all. He sold only forty-nine per cent of them.

    Thereafter, he continued to take the advice of his Gideon Bible, but he kept big pieces of any firm he really liked.

    During his first two years in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton, Noel Constant had only one visitor. That visitor did not know he was rich. His one visitor was a chambermaid named Florence Whitehill, who spent one night out of ten with him for a small, flat fee.

    Florence, like everyone else in the Wilburhampton, believed him when he said he was a trader in stamps. Personal hygiene was not Noel Constant's strongest Suit. It was easy to believe that his work brought him into regular contact with mucilage.

    The only people who knew how rich he was were employees of the Bureau of Internal Revenue and of the august accounting firm of Clough and Higgins.

    Then, after two years, Noel Constant received his second visitor in Room 223.

    The second visitor was a thin and watchful blue-eyed man of twenty-two. He engaged Noel Constant's serious attention by announcing that he was from the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue.

    Constant invited the young man into his room, motioned for him to sit on the bed. He himself remained standing.

    "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.

    The detail in the furnishings of Room 223 that interested young Malachi so was a photograph of himself. It was a photograph of himself at the age of three — a photograph of a sweet, pleasant, game little boy on an ocean beach.

    It was thumbtacked to the wall.

    It was the only picture in the room.

    Old Noel saw young Malachi looking at the picture, and was confused and embarrassed by the whole thing about fathers and sons. He ransacked his mind for something good to. say, and found almost nothing.

    "My father gave me only two pieces of advice," he said, "and only one of them has stood the test of time. They were: 'Don't touch your principal,' and 'Keep the liquor bottle out of the bedroom.'" His embarrassment and confusion were now too great to be borne. "Good-by," he said abruptly.

    "Good-by?" said young Malachi, startled. He moved toward the door.

    "Keep the liquor bottle out of the bedroom," said the old man, and he turned his back.

    "Yes, sir, I will," said young Malachi. "Good-by, sir," he said, and he left.

    That was the first and last time that Malachi Constant ever saw his father.

    His father lived for five more years, and the Bible never played him false.

    Noel Constant died just as he reached the end of this sentence: "And God made two great lights: the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night: he made the stars also."

    His last investment was in Sonnyboy Oil at 17 1/4.

    The son took over where the father had left off, though Malachi Constant did not move into Room 223 in the Wilburhampton.

    And, for five years, the luck of the son was as sensational as the luck of the father had been.

    And now, suddenly, Magnum Opus lay in ruins.

    There in his office, with the floating furniture and the grass carpet, Malachi Constant still could not believe that his luck had run out.

    "Nothing left?" he said faintly. He managed to smile at Ransom K. Fern. "Come on, guy — I mean there's got to be something left."

    "I thought so, too, at ten o'clock this morning," said Fern. "I was congratulating myself on having buttressed Magnum Opus against any conceivable blow. We were weathering the depression quite nicely — yes, and your mistakes, too.

    "And then, at ten-fifteen, I was visited by a lawyer who was apparently at your party last night. You, apparently, were giving away oil wells last night, and the lawyer was thoughtful enough to draw up documents which, if signed by you, would be binding. They were signed by you. You gave away five hundred and thirty-one producing oil wells last night, which wiped out Fandango Petroleum.

    "At eleven," said Fern, "the President of the United States announced that Galactic Spacecraft, which we had sold, was receiving a three-billion contract for the New Age of Space.

    "At eleven-thirty," said Fern, "I was given a copy of The Journal of the American Medical Association, which was marked by our public relations director, 'FYI.' These three letters, as you would know if you had ever spent any time in your office, mean 'for your information.' I turned to the page referred to, and learned, for my information, that MoonMist Cigarettes were not a cause but the principal cause of sterility in both sexes wherever MoonMist cigarettes were sold. This fact was discovered not by human beings but by a computing machine. Whenever data about cigarette smoking was fed into it, the machine grew tremendously excited, and no one could figure out why. The machine was obviously trying to tell its operators something. It did everything it could to express itself, and finally managed to get its operators to ask it the right questions.

    "The right questions had to do with the relationship of MoonMist Cigarettes to human reproduction. The relationship was this:

    "People who smoked MoonMist Cigarettes couldn't have children, even if they wanted them," said Fern.

    "Doubtless," said Fern, "there are gigolos and party girls and New Yorkers who are grateful for this relief from biology. In the opinion of the Legal Department of Magnum Opus, before that department was liquidated, however, there are several million persons who can sue successfully — on the grounds that Moon-Mist Cigarettes did them out of something rather valuable. Pleasure in depth, indeed.

    "There are approximately ten million ex-smokers of MoonMist in this country," said Fern, "all sterile. If one in ten sues you for damages beyond price, sues you for the modest sum of five thousand dollars — the bill will be five billion dollars, excluding legal fees. And you haven't got five billion dollars. Since the stock-market crash and your acquisition of such properties as American Levitation, you aren't worth even five hundred million.

    "MoonMist Tobacco," said Fern, "that's you. Magnum Opus," said Fern, "that's you, too. All the things you are are going to be sued and sued successfully. And, while the litigants may not be able to get blood from turnips, they can certainly ruin the turnips in the process of trying."

    Fern bowed again. "I now perform my last official duty, which is to inform you that your father wrote you a letter which was to be given to you only if your luck turned for the worse. My instructions were to place that letter under the pillow in Room 223 in the Wilburhampton, if your luck ever really turned sour. I placed the letter under the pillow an hour ago.

    "And I will now, as an humble and loyal corporate servant, ask you for one small favor," said Fern. "If the letter seems to cast the vaguest light on what life might be about, I would appreciate your telephoning me at home."

    Ransom K. Fern saluted by touching the shaft of his cane to his Homburg hat. "Good-by, Mr. Magnum Opus, Jr. Good-by."

    The Wilburhampton Hotel was a frumpish, three-story Tudor structure across the street from the Magnum Opus Building, standing in relation to that build- jug like an unmade bed at the feet of the Archangel Gabriel. Pine slats were tacked to the stucco exterior of the hotel, simulating half-timbered construction. The backbone of the roof had been broken intentionally, simulating great age. The eaves were plump and low, tucked under, simulated thatch. The windows were tiny, with diamond-shaped panes.

    The hotel's small cocktail lounge was known as the Hear Ye Room.

    In the Hear Ye Room were three people — a bartender and two customers. The two customers were a thin woman and a fat man — both seemingly old. Nobody in the Wilburhampton had ever seen them before, but it already seemed as though they had been sitting in the Hear Ye Room for years. Their protective coloration was perfect, for they looked half-timbered and broken-backed and thatched and little-windowed, too.

    They claimed to be pensioned-off teachers from the same high school in the Middle West. The fat man introduced himself as George M. Helmholtz, a former bandmaster. The thin woman introduced herself as Roberta Wiley, a former teacher of algebra.

    They had obviously discovered the consolations of alcohol and cynicism late in life. They never ordered the same drink twice, were avid to know what was in this bottle and what was in that one — to know what a golden dawn punch was, and a Helen Twelvetrees, and a plui d'or, and a merry widow fizz.

    The bartender knew they weren't alcoholics. He was familiar with the type, and loved the type: they were simply two Saturday Evening Post characters at the end of the road.

    When they weren't asking questions about the different things to drink, they were indistinguishable from millions of other American barflies on the first day of the New Age of Space. They sat solidly on their barstools, staring straight ahead at the ranks of bottles. Their lips moved constantly — experimenting dismayingly with irrelevant grins and grimaces and sneers.

    Evangelist Bobby Denton's image of Earth as God's space ship was an apt one — particularly with reference to barflies. Helmholtz and Miss Wiley were behaving like pilot and co-pilot of an enormously pointless voyage through space that was expected to take forever. It was easy to believe that they had begun the voyage nattily, flushed with youth and technical training, and that the bottles before them were the instruments they had been watching for years and years and years.

    It was easy to believe that each day had found the space boy and the space girl microscopically more slovenly than the day before, until now, when they were the shame of the Pan-Galactic Space Service.

    Two buttons on Helmholtz's fly were open. There was shaving cream in his left ear. His socks did not match.

    Miss Wiley was a crazy-looking little old lady with a lantern jaw. She wore a frizzy black wig that looked as though it had been nailed to a farmer's barn door for years.

    "I see where the President has ordered a whole brand-new Age of Space to begin, to see if that won't help the unemployment picture some," said the bartender.

    "Uh, huh," said Helmholtz and Miss Wiley simultaneously.

    Only an observant and suspicious person would have noticed a false note in the behavior of the two: Helmholtz and Miss Wiley were too interested in time. For people who had nothing much to do and nowhere much to go, they were extraordinarily interested in their watches — Miss Wiley in her mannish wrist watch, Mr. Helmholtz in his gold pocket watch,

    The truth of the matter was that Helmholtz and Miss Wiley weren't retired school teachers at all. They were both males, both masters of disguise. They were crack agents for the Army of Mars, the eyes and ears for a Martian press gang that hovered in a flying saucer two hundred miles overhead,

    Malachi Constant didn't know it, but they were waiting for him.

    Helmholtz and Wiley did not accost Malachi Constant when he crossed the Street to the Wilburhampton. They gave no sign that he mattered to them. They let him cross the lobby and board the elevator without giving him a glance.

    They did, however, glance at their watches again — and an observant and suspicious person would have noticed that Miss Wiley pressed a button on her watch, starting a stopwatch hand on its twitching rounds.

    Helmholtz and Miss Wiley were not about to use violence on Malachi Constant. They had never used violence on anyone, and had still recruited fourteen thousand persons for Mars.

    Their usual technique was to dress like civil engineers and offer not-quite-bright men and women nine dollars an hour, tax free, plus food and shelter and transportation, to work on a secret Government project in a remote part of the world for three years. It was a joke between Helmholtz and Miss Wiley that they had never specified what government was organizing the project, and that no recruit had ever thought to ask.

    Ninety-nine per cent of the recruits were given amnesia upon arriving on Mars. Their memories were cleaned out by mental-health experts, and Martian. surgeons installed radio antennas in their skulls in order that the recruits might be radio-controlled.

    And then the recruits were given new names in the most haphazard fashion, and were assigned to the factories, the construction gangs, the administrative staff, or to the Army of Mars.

    The few recruits who were not treated in this way were those who demonstrated ardently that they would serve Mars heroically without being doctored at all. Those lucky few were welcomed into the secret circle of those in command.

    Secret agents Helmholtz and Wiley belonged to this circle. They were in full possession of their memories, and they were not radio-controlled. They adored their work, just as they were.

    "What's that there Slivovitz like?" Helmholtz asked the bartender, squinting at a dusty bottle on the bottom row. He had just finished a sloe gin rickey.

    "I didn't even know we had it," said the bartender. He put the bottle on the bar, tilting it away from himself so he could read the label. "Prune brandy," he said.

    "Believe I'll try that next," said Helmholtz.

    Ever since the death of Noel Constant, Room 223 in the Wilburhampton had been left empty — as a memorial.

    Malachi Constant now let himself into Room 223. He had not been in the room since the death of his father. He closed the door behind him, and found the letter under the pillow.

    Nothing in the room had been changed but the linen. The picture of Malachi as a little boy on the beach was still the only picture on the wall.

    The letter said:

    Dear Son: Something big and bad has happened to you or you wouldn't be reading this letter. I am writing this letter to tell you to calm down about the bad things and kind of look around and see if something good or something important anyway happened on account of we got so rich and then lost the boodle again. What I want you to try and find out is, is there anything special going on or is it all just as crazy as it looked to me?

    If I wasn't a very good father or a very good anything that was because I was as good as dead 'for a long time before I died. Nobody loved me and I wasn't very good at anything and I couldn't find any hobbies I liked and I was sick and tired of selling pots and pans and watching television so I was as good as dead and I was too far gone to ever come back.

    That is when I started the business with the Bible and you know what happened after that. It looked as though somebody or something wanted me to own the whole planet even though I was as good as dead. I kept my eyes open for some kind of signal that would tell me what it was all about but there wasn't any signal. I just went on getting richer and richer.

    And then your mother sent me that picture of you on the beach and the way you looked at me out of that picture made me think maybe you were what all the big money buildup was for. I decided I would die without ever seeing any sense to it and maybe you would be the one who would all of a sudden see everything clear as a bell. I tell you even a half-dead man hates to be alive and not be able to see any sense to it.

    The reason I told Ransom K. Fern to give you this letter only if your luck turned bad is that nobody thinks or notices anything as long as his luck is good. Why should he?

    So have a look around for me, boy. And if you go broke and somebody comes along with a crazy pro position my advice is to take it. You might just learn something when you're in a mood to learn something. The only thing I ever learned was that some people are lucky and other people aren't and not even a graduate of the Harvard Business School can say why.

Yours truly — your Pa

    There was a knock on the door of Room 223.

    The door opened before Constant could reply to the knock.

    Helmholtz and Miss Wiley let themselves in. They entered at precisely the right instant, having been advised by their superiors as to when, to the second, Malachi Constant would finish the letter. They had been told, too, precisely what to say to him.

    Miss Wiley removed her wig, revealing herself to be a scrawny man, and Helmholtz composed his features to reveal that he was fearless and used to command.

    "Mr. Constant," said Helmholtz, "I am here to inform you that the planet Mars is not only populated, but populated by a large and efficient and military and industrial society. It has been recruited from Earth, with the recruits being transferred to Mars by flying saucer. We are now prepared to offer you a direct lieutenant-colonelcy in the Army of Mars.

    "Your situation on Earth is hopeless. Your wife is a beast. Moreover, our intelligence informs us that here on Earth you will not only be made penniless by civil suits, but that you will be imprisoned for criminal negligence as well.

    "In addition to a pay scale and privileges well above those accorded lieutenant-colonels in Earthling armies, we can offer you immunity from all Earthling legal harassment, and an opportunity to see a new and interesting planet, and an opportunity to think about your native planet from a fresh and beautifully detached viewpoint."

    "If you accept the commission," said Miss Wiley, "raise your left hand and repeat after me — "

    On the following day, Malachi Constant's helicopter was found empty in the middle of the Mojave Desert. The footprints of a man led away from it for a distance of forty feet, then stopped.

    It was as though Malachi Constant had walked forty feet, and had then dissolved into thin air.

    On the following Tuesday, the space ship known as The Whale was rechristened The Rumfoord and was readied for firing.

    Beatrice Rumfoord smugly watched the ceremonies on a television set two thousand miles away. She was still in Newport. The Rumfoord was going to be fired in exactly one minute. If destiny was going to get Beatrice Rumfoord on board, it was going to have to do it in one hell of a hurry.

    Beatrice was feeling marvelous. She had proved so many good things. She had proved that she was mistress of her own fate, could say no whenever she pleased — and make it stick. She had proved that her husband's omniscient bullying was all a bluff — that he wasn't much better at forecasts than the United States Weather Bureau.

    She had, moreover, worked out a plan that would enable her to live in modest comfort for the rest of her days, and would, at the same time, give her husband the treatment he deserved. The next time he materialized, he would find the estate teeming with gawkers. Beatrice was going to charge them five dollars a head to come in through the Alice-in-Wonderland door.

    This was no pipe dream. She had discussed it with two supposed representatives of the mortgage-holders on the estate — and they were enthusiastic.

    They were with her now, watching the preparations for the firing of The Rumfoord on television. The television set was in the same room with the huge painting of Beatrice as an immaculate little girl in white, with a white pony all her own. Beatrice smiled up at the painting. The little girl had yet to get the least bit soiled.

    The television, announcer now began the last minute's countdown for the firing of The Rumfoord.

    During the countdown, Beatrice's mood was birdlike. She could not sit still and she could not keep quiet. Her restlessness was a result of happiness, not of suspense. It was a matter of indifference to her whether The Rumfoord was a fizzle or not.

    Her two visitors, on the other hand, seemed to take the firing very seriously — seemed to be praying for the success of the shot. They were a man and a woman, a Mr. George M. Helmholtz and his secretary, a Miss Roberta Wiley. Miss Wiley was a funny-looking little old thing, but very alert and witty.

    The rocket went up with a roar.

    It was a flawless shot.

    Helmholtz sat back and heaved a manly sigh of relief. Then he smiled and beat his thick thighs exuberantly. "By glory — " he said, "I'm proud to be an American — and proud to be living in the time I do."

    "Would you like something to drink?" said Beatrice.'

    "Thank you very much — " said Helmholtz, "but I daren't mix business with pleasure."

    "Isn't the business all over?" said Beatrice. "Haven't we discussed everything?"

    "Well — Miss Wiley and I had hoped to take an inventory of the larger buildings on the grounds," said Helmholtz, "but I'm afraid it's gotten quite dark. Are there floodlights?"

    Beatrice shook her head. "Sorry," she said.

    "Perhaps you have a powerful flashlight?" said Helmholtz.

    "I can probably get you a flashlight," said Beatrice, "but I don't think it's really necessary for you to go out there. I can tell you what all the buildings are." She rang for the butler, told him to bring a flashlight. "There's the tennis house, the greenhouse, the gardener's cottage, what used to be the gate house, the carriage house, the guest house, the tool shed, the bath house, the kennel, and the old water tower."

    "Which one is the new one?" said Helmholtz.

    "The new one?" said Beatrice.

    The butler returned with a flashlight, which Beatrice gave to Helmholtz.

    "The metal one," said Miss Wiley.

    "Metal?" said Beatrice puzzled. "There aren't any metal buildings. Maybe some of the weathered shingles have kind of a silvery look." She frowned. "Did somebody tell you there was a metal building here?"

    "We saw it when we came in," said Helmholtz. "Right by the path — in the undergrowth near the fountain," said Miss Wiley.

    "I can't imagine," said Beatrice.

    "Could we go out and have a look?" said Helmholtz.

    "Yes — of course," said Beatrice, rising.

    The party of three crossed the zodiac on the foyer floor, moved into the balmy dark.

    The flashlight beam danced before them. "Really — " said Beatrice, "I'm as curious to find out what it is as you are."

    "It looks like kind of a prefabricated thing made out of aluminum," said Miss Wiley.

    "It looks like a mushroom-shaped water tank or something," said Helmholtz, "only it is squatting right on the ground."

    "Really?" said Beatrice.

    "You know what I said it was, don't you?" said Miss Wiley.

    "No — " said Beatrice, "what did you say it was?"

    "I have to whisper," said Miss Wiley playfully, "or somebody will want to lock me up in the crazy house." She put her hand to her mouth, directing her loud whisper to Beatrice. "Flying saucer," she said.