MODEL HACKED IN TUB; MYSTERY BOYFRIEND SOUGHT. He read that one all the way through, caught by a two-column photo of the blonde model for a hosiery account. And then he noticed that the cab wasn't moving. It was caught in a rock-solid traffic jam. The time was 10:05.
"Driver," he said.
The man turned around, soothing and scared. A fare was a fare; there was a depression on. "It's all right, mister. We'll be out of here in a minute. They turn off the Drive and that blocks the avenue for a couple of minutes, that's all. We'll be rolling in a minute."
They were rolling in a minute, but for a few seconds only. The cab inched agonizingly along while W. J. Born twisted the newspaper in his hands. At 10:13 he threw a bill at the driver and jumped from the cab.
Panting, he reached the library at 10:46 by his watch. By the time that the rest of the world was keeping on that day it was quitting-time in the midtown offices. He had bucked a stream of girls in surprisingly short skirts and surprisingly big hats all the way.
He got lost in the marble immensities of the library and his own panic.
When he found the newspaper room his watch said 11:03. W. J. Born panted to the girl at the desk: "File of the Stock Exchange Journal for 1975,1976 and 1977."
"We have the microfilms for 1975 and 1976, sir, and loose copies for this year."
"Tell me," he said, "what year for the big crash? That's what I want to look up."
"That's 1975, sir. Shall I get you that?"
"Wait," he said. "Do you happen to remember the month?"
"I think it was March or August or something like that, sir."
"Get me the whole file, please," he said. Nineteen seventy-five. His year—his real year. Would he have a month? A week? Or—?
"Sign this card, mister," the girl was saying patiently. "There's a reading machine, you just go sit there and I'll bring you the spool."
He scribbled his name and went to the machine, the only one vacant in a row of a dozen. The time on his watch was 11:05. He had fifty minutes.
The girl dawdled over cards at her desk and chatted with a good-looking young page with a stack of books while sweat began to pop from Bern's brow. At last she disappeared into the stacks behind her desk.
Born waited. And waited. And waited. Eleven-ten. Eleven-fifteen.
Eleven-twenty.
An H-bomb would be out of his league.
His ulcer stabbed him as the girl appeared again, daintily carrying a spool of 35-millimeter film between thumb and forefinger, smiling brightly at Born. "Here we are," she said, and inserted the spool in the machine and snapped a switch. Nothing happened.
"Oh, darn," she said. "The light's out. I told the electrician."
Born wanted to scream and then to explain, which would have been just as foolish.
"There's a free reader," she pointed down the line. W. J. Bern's knees tottered as they walked to it. He looked at his watch—11:27. Twenty-eight minutes to go. The ground-glass screen lit up with a shadow of the familiar format; January 1st, 1975. "You just turn the crank," she said, and showed him. The shadows spun past on the screen at dizzying speed, and she went back to her desk.
Born cranked the film up to April 1975, the month he had left 91
minutes ago, and to the sixteenth day of April, the very day he had left.
The shadow on the ground glass was the same paper he had seen that morning: synthetics surge to new vienna peak.
Trembling he cranked into a vision of the future; the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975.
Three-inch type screamed: securities crash in global crisis: banks close; clients storm brokerages!
Suddenly he was calm, knowing the future and safe from its blows. He rose from the reader and strode firmly into the marble halls. Everything was all right now. Twenty-six minutes was time enough to get back to the machine. He'd have a jump of several hours on the market; his own money would be safe as houses; he could get his personal clients off the hook.
He got a cab with miraculous ease and rolled straight to the loft building in the West Seventies without hindrance. At 11:50 by his watch he was closing the door of the phone booth in the dusty, musty-smelling lab.
At 11:54 he noticed an abrupt change in the sunlight that filtered through the dirt-streaked windows and stepped calmly out. It was April 16th, 1975, again. Loring was sound asleep beside a gas hotplate on which coffee simmered. W. J. Born turned off the gas and went downstairs softly. Loring was a screwy, insolent, insecure young man, but by his genius he had enabled W. J. Born to harvest his fortune at the golden moment of perfection.
Back in his office he called his floor broker and said firmly: "Cronin, get this straight. I want you to sell every share of stock and every bond in my personal account immediately, at the market, and to require certified checks in payment."
Cronin asked forthrightly: "Chief, have you gone crazy?"
"I have not. Don't waste a moment, and report regularly to me. Get your boys to work. Drop everything else."
Born had a light, bland lunch sent in and refused to see anybody or take any calls except from the floor broker. Cronin kept reporting that the dumping was going right along, that Mr. Born must be crazy; that the unheard-of demand for certified checks was causing alarm, and finally, at the close, that Mr. Born's wishes were being carried out. Born told him to get the checks to him immediately.
They arrived in an hour, drawn on a dozen New York banks. W. J. Born called in a dozen senior messengers, and dealt out the checks, one bank to a messenger. He told them to withdraw the cash, rent safe-deposit boxes of the necessary sizes in those banks where he did not already have boxes, and deposit the cash.
He then phoned the banks to confirm the weird arrangement. He was on first-name terms with at least one vice president in each bank, which helped enormously.
W. J. Born leaned back, a happy man. Let the smash come. He turned on his flashboard for the first time that day. The New York closing was sharply off. Chicago was worse. San Francisco was shaky —as he watched, the flashing figures on the composite price index at San Francisco began to drop. In five minutes it was a screaming nosedive into the pit. The closing bell stopped it short of catastrophe.
W. J. Born went out to dinner after phoning his wife that he would not be home. He returned to the office and watched a board in one of the outer rooms that carried Tokyo Exchange through the night hours, and congratulated himself as the figures told a tale of panic and rain. The dominoes were toppling, toppling, toppling.
He went to his club for the night and woke early, eating alone in an almost-deserted breakfast room. The ticker in the lobby sputtered a good morning as he drew on his gloves against the chilly April dawn. He stopped to watch. The ticker began spewing a tale of disaster on the great bourses of Europe, and Mr. Born walked to his office. Brokers a-plenty were arriving early, muttering in little crowds in the lobby and elevators.
"What do you make of it, Born?" one of them asked.
"What goes up must come down," he said. "I'm safely out."
"So I hear," the man told him, with a look that Born decided was envious.
Vienna, Milan, Paris, and London were telling their sorry story on the boards in the customers' rooms. There were a few clients silting up the place already, and the night staff had been busy taking orders by phone for the opening. They all were to sell at the market.
W. J. Born grinned at one of the night men and cracked a rare joke:
"Want to buy a brokerage house, Willard?"
Willard glanced at the board and said: "No thanks, Mr. Born. But it was nice of you to keep me in mind."
Most of the staff drifted in early; the sense of crisis was heavy in the air.
Born instructed his staff to do what they could for his personal clients first, and holed up in his office.
The opening bell was the signal for hell to break loose. The tickers never had the ghost of a chance of keeping up with the crash, unquestionably the biggest and steepest in the history o
f finance. Born got some pleasure out of the fact that his boys' promptness had cut the losses of his personal clients a little. A very important banker called in midmorning to ask Born into a billion-dollar pool that would shore up the market by a show of confidence. Born said no, knowing that no show of confidence would keep Moon Mining and Smelting from opening at 27 on September llth, 1977. The banker hung up abruptly.
Miss Illig asked: "Do you want to see Mr. Loring? He's here."
"Send him in."
Loring was deathly pale, with a copy of the Journal rolled up in his fist.
"I need some money," he said.
W. J. Born shook his head. "You see what's going on," he said. "Money's tight. I've enjoyed our association, Loring, but I think it's time to end it.
You've had a quarter of a million dollars clear; I make no claims on your process—"
"It's gone," Loring said hoarsely. "I haven't paid for the damn equipment—not ten cents on the dollar yet. I've been playing the market. I lost a hundred and fifty thousand on soy futures this morning.
They'll dismantle my stuff and haul it away. I've got to have some money."
"No!" W. J. Born barked. "Absolutely not!"
"They'll come with a truck for the generators this afternoon. I stalled them. My stocks kept going up. And now—all I wanted was enough in reserve to keep working. I've got to have money."
"No," said Born. "After all, it's not my fault."
Loring's ugly face was close to his. "Isn't it?" he snarled. And he spread out the paper on the desk.
Born read the headline—again—of the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975: securities crash in global crisis: banks close; clients storm brokerages! But this time he was not too rushed to read on: "A world-wide slump in securities has wiped out billions of paper dollars since it started shortly before closing yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange. No end to the catastrophic flood of sell orders is yet in sight.
Veteran New York observers agreed that dumping of securities on the New York market late yesterday by W. J. Born of W. J. Born Associates pulled the plug out of the big boom which must now be consigned to memory. Banks have been hard-hit by the—"
"Isn't it?" Loring snarled. "Isn't it?" His eyes were crazy as he reached for Bern's thin neck.
Dominoes, W. J. Born thought vaguely through the pain, and managed to hit a button on his desk. Miss Illig came in and screamed and went out again and came back with a couple of husky customers' men, but it was too late.
THE GOLDEN ROAD
[Stirring Science Stories, March 1942]
OUT OF THE myth of night and language there come strange tales told over wine. There is a man known as The Three-Cornered Scar who frequents a village spot famed for its wine and raconteurs, both of which are above the average.
The Three-Cornered Scar favored us by a visit to my table and ordering, during the course of his story, five half-bottles of house red to my account. The wine is drunk up and the story told.
1
Colt was tired. He was so bone-broke weary that he came near to wishing he was dead. It would have been easy to die in the snow; heaps in the way seemed to beg for the print of his body. He skirted crevasses that were like wide and hungry mouths.
This was Central Asia, High Pamir, a good thousand miles from any permanent habitation of the human race. The nomadic Kirghiz population had been drained away to the Eastern front, civil and military authorities likewise. Colt himself was the tragic, far-strayed end of the First Kuen-Lung Oil Prospecting Expedition, undertaken by a handful of American volunteers on behalf of the Chungking government.
Estimating generously, his assets were five more days of scanty eating.
And an eternity of sleep under the glaring stars of the plateau? …
He had struck, somehow, an easier way across the snow-covered, rocky wastes. There was a route to follow, a winding, mazy route that skirted the Alai Range's jagged foothills and slipped through Tengis-Bai Pass.
Old memories of maps and trails swirled through Colt's tired head; he bore north for no better reason than that he could guide himself by Polaris, low on the horizon. Colt was headed, with a laugh and a curse, for Bokhara.
Colt marched through the first watch of the night, before the smiting cold of space descended on this roof of the world; then he would sleep, twitching with frost. He would wake eight hours later, a stone, a block of wood, to unkink his wretched muscles, shoulder his pack, and march under the naked, brassy sun.
The Parsees said that this High Pamir was the cradle of human life, that from here had sprung the primals who proliferated into white, yellow, black and brown. To the southwest, at the same thirteen-thousand elevation, was the Valley of the Oxus, a green ribbon in the steel gray and bone white of the plateau. To the northeast were the great peaks—
Everest, Kinchinjunga, K-4—that started where other mountains ended, shooting from seventeen thousand up to unthinkable heights, sky-piercing.
Night and day scarcely interrupted the flow of his thoughts. His waking fantasies and his dreams alike were brutish, longing for warmth and comfort, bespelled remembrance of palmier days. He woke to find an ear frostbitten, dead, marble white, without sensation, killed by cold.
It came to him slowly, the idea forcing its way through the numbed machinery of his brain, that he was following a path. This easier way across the plateau could be nothing but one of the historic caravan routes. Over this trail had gone a billion feet of beasts and men, and his own had found their way into the ancient grooves. Colt was content with that; going by the sun and stars was good, compass better, but best of all were the ways that men had taken and found well suited.
There were animal droppings before him now and then, once a fragment of broken crockery. He doubled his pace, from a slow plod to a loping, long-strided walk that took much of his husbanded wind.
Finally he saw the print in a snowbank that spelled man. It was a shod foot's mark, light and side-stepping. As he watched, a puff of wind drifted it over with dry, gleaming snow.
Colt found a splash of milk against a rock, then the smell of camel clinging about a wiry shrub.
He saw them at last, the tail of a great caravan, and fell fainting into the arms of tall, curious Kirghiz camel drivers. They carried him in a litter until he awoke and could eat, for nothing was so important or unexpected that it could be allowed to break the schedule of the march.
Colt opened his eyes to grunts of satisfaction from his bearers. He accepted the hunks of dried meat and bottle of warm tea they gave him, trying to catch enough of the language to offer thanks.
Coming down the line of the caravan was a large Hindu on one of the small Mongolian ponies. He reined beside Colt and asked in French,
"How are you? They passed me word. Can you march with us?"
"But yes! It's like life out of death to find you people here. What can I do to help?"
The Hindu dismounted to walk the pony beside him. "Keep up spirits.
Our few Europeans are tired of each other's company. In case of bandit raiding—highly improbable, of course—you'll fight. I'm Raisuli Batar, merchant of the Punjab. I'm caravan master, whose word is law. Not that it's necessary—the boys are well behaved and we have enough food."
"Where are we headed?" asked Colt, gnawing on the hunk of meat.
"We started for Bokhara. Come up the line to meet the better sort with me. They're agog with excitement, of course, don't dare break line without my permission, which I don't choose to grant. By way of payload we have crates of soap on the camels and drums of flavoring essence on the ponies."
Colt sniffed, finding wintergreen and peppermint on the air. "May you find a good price," he said respectfully. Raisuli smiled and the American was pleased. The caravan master was big and solid, with a grim, handsome face. It was good to please a man like that, Colt thought.
They quickened their pace, overtaking a hundred plodding bearers and a herd of sheep. Colt was introduced to a pale, thoughtful
man named McNaughton, a reader in history at the University of Glasgow, who said he had been doing field work in Asia for three years.
Farther on were Lodz and wife, two young Poles from Galicia who were hoping for government work in Bokhara. The man was quiet, his English heavily accented. The wife spoke French only, but with the vivid dash of a Parisienne. Her lips were touched with scarlet; here in the wilderness of the High Pamir she wore a freshly pressed riding habit.
Colt was enchanted.
Raisuli cast a glance at the sky. "Bedding down," he snapped. "Excuse me—c'est l'heure."
He left Colt with the Poles, mounting his pony again to gallop down the line barking orders to the various Hindus, Tajiks, Chinese, Abyssinians, Kirghiz and Kroomen who made up the crew. It took no more than a quarter hour to bring the unwieldy line to a halt; in another quarter hour a thousand felt tents were pitched and pegged, fires lighted and animals staked out.
"He times well, that one," smiled M. Lodz. Colt looked up and saw the sky already deepening into black. He shuddered a little and drew nearer to the fire.
"I think," said McNaughton absently, "that I could take a little refreshment." Lodz looked up from under his brows, then clapped his hands. A native boy came running. "Bring food—some of that cold joint, wallah."
"Yes, sahib."
"Such a night this will be, perhaps," said M. Lodz softly, "as it was in August."
"Just such a night," said McNaughton. "Will you join us, Mr. Colt?"
"Not I," said the American with a sense of guilt. "I was fed when I came to after fainting. Is it safe—may I look about?"
He got no answer. The boy had returned with a great haunch of meat; silently the Occidentals gathered about it, taking out knives. Colt watched in amazement as the dainty Frenchwoman hacked out a great slab of beef and tore at it, crammed it down her throat. Before it was swallowed she was cutting away again.
"Ah—I asked if I ought to look about…."
Lodz shot him a sidewise glance, his mouth crammed with meat, his jaws working busily. Then, as though Colt had never spoken, he returned to the serious business of feeding, with the same animal quality as his wife and McNaughton showed.
His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction Page 8
