He turned back to the bedroom and investigated his host’s dresser drawers. There were shirts, socks, silk underwear, and dress shoes. There were even some of the currently faddish Byron revival cravats.
Rick Venner’s eyes went easy. “You know,” he said softly, aloud. “It looks as though there’s going to be an additional guest at that party tonight.”
Chapter Eight
“My impression is that there are cheaper ways, ways less demanding of capital, to satisfy any goal put forward by the L5 effort—to do that on Earth rather than to do it in space... What are needed to solve these problems on Earth are different values and institutions—a better attitude toward equity, a loss of the growth ethic, and so forth. I would, rather work at the root of the problem here.”
—Dennis Meadows, co-author of The Limits of Growth; Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World.
*
Carl Gatena was awaiting Bruce Carter when the freelance writer returned to the L5 Hilton with the Security man who had found him in the park talking with Pal Barack. In fact, the flack was pacing up and down in agitation.
When Bruce entered, the other came up and said, “My chum-pal, I turn my back for a few minutes and you disappear.”
“I got bored,” Bruce shrugged. “And I guess I was anxious to get my first look at the island.”
The other scowled puzzlement at him. “But the guards. How the hell did you get out without a pass or anybody to go with you?”
Bruce in turn seemed surprised. “I just walked out,” he said in all innocence.
Carl Gatena closed his eyes wearily, opened them again, and looked at the Security man who had found the missing writer.
The Security officer said, “I found him in the park, talking with one of the workers.”
Gatena said to Bruce, “What did he have to say?”
“Nothing much.” Bruce shrugged it off, lacking interest. “I only spoke with him for a few minutes. He was one of the landscaping men. Largely, he told me his contract was up tomorrow and he was looking forward to returning to Earth.”
“Didn’t like it here, eh?”
The freelancer shrugged again. “He didn’t seem to want to renew the contract.”
The flack said, “Well, Ron’s waiting for us. Shall we go on up?” He looked over at the Security man. “Be sure and check that other matter out.”
“Yes, sir,” the other said, touching the brim of his cap.
The publicity offices of Lagrange Five Project were on the second-to-the-top floor of the hotel. And they were on the extensive side. There must have been at least a dozen young men and women going about their business or seated at desks in the several rooms Bruce passed with his guide. Only two or three of them wore coveralls; the others were attired as they might have been in any office Earthside. At least there was some decoration here, the freelancer noted. It consisted largely of photographs and paintings pertaining to the Lagrange Five Project, including some depictions of the Luna base. As a matter of fact, Bruce had seen some of the color shots in Lagrange Five Corporation publicity down on Earth.
They wound up before a door a bit more ornate than usual. Gold lettering on it proclaimed simply, Ron Rich, Director. There was no identity screen. Carl Gatena knocked briskly and, without awaiting a response, took the knob in hand and opened the door, ushering Bruce through.
“Here he is, Chief,” the flack said. “Elusive sonofagun.”
Ron Rich was every inch the PR Man. He came to his feet, smiling broadly, absolutely beaming pleasure, and rounded his desk to shake hands. He was possibly five years older than Bruce and had the dynamic projection that the freelancer had long since come to associate with Madison Avenue publicity pros.
“So,” the Chief of L5 Corporation’s public relations happily said, “the famous Bruce Carter. I’ve been reading your stuff for years, Bruce. A real follower of yours.”
“Thanks,” Bruce told him. He smiled his slow smile, even as he took the extended hand. “Would you have told me if you hadn’t liked it?”
“Hell, no,” the other grinned. “I’m a flack by trade. We’re all born liars. Sit down, Bruce. I recognize you from your book jacket covers, of course, and I’ve seen you from time to time on Tri-Di and TV panels. But it’s a treat to meet you personally.”
Bruce thanked him again and sat.
When the two publicity men had also taken seats he said, “It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to get up here. I’ve been trying to make it for years. It wasn’t until I got next to Doctor Ryan himself, by phone, on one of his trips down Earthside, that I finally got permission.”
The other nodded and looked very frank. “Yeah,” he said. “And, to be truthful, it was no accident. We made every effort to keep you out—along with all other freelancers.”
Bruce took him in, somewhat surprised at the admission. He said, “Why?”
“Because we can control most of the media. Among other things, we’re big advertisers. Besides that, the same rich mucky-mucks who control the press and the airwaves are often big investors in the L5 Corporation. So just about all the coverage we get is upbeat. And that’s a challenge to any freelance writer. If you could publish material really giving us the old boot, you’d hit the jackpot. So you come up with that in mind.”
Bruce crossed his legs and said mildly, “By definition, a freelancer isn’t necessarily a bastard. I don’t make a practice of falsifying my material. If you’ve read as much of my stuff as you say, you would know that.”
The publicity man sighed before answering. “You wouldn’t have to falsify, Bruce. It would take precious little digging around for you to find material for a dozen anti-Lagrange Five Project pieces. Hell, you could do one of your famous muckraking books.”
Bruce Carter felt his eyebrows go up in surprise. At least Ron Rich was pulling no punches.
“It’s like this,” the PR man went on. “To any layman, this project looks like a madhouse. For the pros—the scientists, the engineers, the technicians—sure, they have their problems every day, but they have the overall picture, and to them its just one hell of a big job that’ll eventually be all wrapped up.”
“I can see a certain amount of validity in that,” Bruce admitted. “However, I’m not exactly green. I don’t go dashing around throwing mud at things I don’t understand.”
Ron Rich pressed his point. “Suppose you were in an operating room, witnessing some long, complicated surgery—say, a heart transplant. There are a dozen doctors there and nurses and various medical technicians all over the place. It’s a crazy bin. Everybody is scurrying around, there’s blood all over. People are chanting out readings from all sorts of gismos. They all seem comparatively cool, but it’s a madhouse from your viewpoint. Nurses slap gruesome-looking tools into the hands of doctors, other nurses swab the sweat off the foreheads of those surgeons in there with blood up to their elbows. Needles on dials up on gobbledygook devices keep swaying this way and that, and their readings are repeated by technicians watching them, flicking switches, pressing buttons. A real nut factory, so far as you’re concerned.”
Bruce began to say something but didn’t.
“All right,” the PR man said, “That’s Island One of Lagrange Five. To you it looks like a lunatic asylum. Everything’s going to pot. Everything looks like it came out of a science fiction horror Tri-Di show. But, you see, that’s not the way it looks to Sol Ryan and the top technicians and engineers of the world. They know what’s going on. They know when they do something wrong and it has to be rectified. And frankly, lots of things that go wrong, often through sheer stupidity on the part of somebody, can run into tens of millions of dollars. This is the biggest operation that the world has embarked upon. Ever. It makes the Great Wall of China look like a child playing with building blocks.”
Bruce still held his peace.
The publicity man was breathing deeper now, in his earnestness. “Can you begin to see, Bruce, why we don’t want muckraking, ambitious laymen up
here? We can’t even tell you what’s going on—you don’t have the background to understand it. You’d have to have a dozen degrees in half a dozen sciences to get the overall picture. Frankly, we’re scared shitless of people like you. We can keep going in the science, the engineering, the technology of building these islands, but we can’t adequately handle the problem of informing the public of just what’s happening. The public doesn’t have the know-how to understand and, let me be sincere, neither do you.”
He laughed bitterly. “As a matter of fact, neither do I.”
Carl Gatena, seated off to one side, laughed softly at that.
Ron Rich looked over at him for a moment, then said, “Carl, why don’t you go look up that Mary Beth Houston girl, the perpetual emotion one, and butter her up a little?”
It was obviously a dismissal. Gatena came to his feet, as always smiling, and said, “Sure, Chief. See you around later, Bruce.”
Bruce said, “Yeah, sure, Carl.”
When the underling had gone, Bruce turned back to the PR head. “Wizard,” he said. “What’s the answer? You don’t want unknowledgeable writers around, sticking their feet in their mouths. But here I am. And my reputation is that I write it like I see it.”
Ron Rich sighed deeply. He said, “Bruce, there are hundreds of billions of dollars involved. And it’s not just the money we get from grants from governments and foundations, or the billions that come from big investors buying into the corporation, or the union pension funds, or the mutual funds. It’s the millions of ordinary people investing money they often can’t afford. We can’t let somebody come along and, for a few lousy bucks, throw a lot of shit in the fan that might disillusion half the world.”
“Wizard,” Bruce said again, recrossing his legs. “So what is the answer?”
The other leaned forward earnestly. In his day, Bruce Carter had never met anyone who could be so earnest as a publicity flack.
Rich said very slowly, “Bruce, you’ve got to come out of this assignment with copy. That’s obvious. You have a name, especially among the liberal, progressive element down Earthside. However, let my boys handle it. We’ll come up with the story material. All you’ll have to do is release it to your markets under your byline. You’ll be taken care of, beyond your dreams of avarice, Bruce. Let’s put it that way.”
“I’ve got some pretty extensive dreams in that direction,” Bruce said, smiling softly. He shifted in his chair again. “There’s one difficulty, Ron. It’d never do for your flacks to write my copy. I’ve got fans. In fact, I’ve got millions of them. My last book stayed on the bestseller list for nearly a year. With no false modesty, I’m probably the best-read writer in my particular field since Vance Packard. They know my work. Even with computer matching, you can’t fake my style without some gung-ho fans spotting it. I have to write it myself. Sure, I’m a professional freelancer. I make my living at it. And it’s like Samuel Johnson once said, ‘Anybody who writes for any reason except to make money is an ass.’ But I doubt if you taking over would be worth my throwing away a reputation that’s taken me half my life to build.”
Ron Rich said softly, “I’m talking about a guarantee of at least one million, Bruce.”
“That’s a lot of guarantee,” Bruce said, nodding. “But, in actuality, I make enough as it is to lead a very comfortable life. Besides, if a million dollars were tossed into my lap in a lump sum, you know what’d happen to it? I’m single. The tax people, these days, would hit me for nine-tenths of it. I’d be in the highest bracket with no excuse for special deductions.”
Ron Rich said, very softly indeed, “Deposited to an unnumbered account in Geneva, Switzerland.”
The writer had to laugh, in deprecation. “And then you’d have me by the balls for the rest of my life. If I refused to jump through your hoops, you’d leak the information and I’d be in the banger for twenty years for tax evasion. And I’d lose every reader I’ve accumulated, in their sheer disgust. No thanks, Ron.”
The other was irritated. “We don’t operate that way,” he protested, then sighed deeply all over again. “Sure, you’ll find things to set up a howl about. Hell, I can think of half a dozen right off the cuff. The dehydrated food most of the colonists eat now is god-awful. If we gave it to the scientists and top technicians, they’d drop out like Italian soldiers in combat. We’ve got a million problems. But you’ve got to see our point, Bruce. This is the biggest project of all time. We’ll lick our problems, we’re licking them now, but we can’t have some freewheeling, half-assed writer—if you’ll pardon the expression—trying to make a quick buck throwing shit in the fan.”
Bruce nodded. “I get the message. I got it the first time around,” he said. “Let’s let it ride for the present. Let me look around, initially. Maybe we’ll come up with something that makes sense to both of us in a few days. One thing: your boy, Carl Gatena, was pretty keen about my not going out without a guide. I was stopped at the entrance to the hotel by one of the Security men. When I finally did mosey around a bit in the town, it wasn’t more than fifteen minutes before another Security lad picked me up and brought me back to you. I don’t particularly appreciate this kind of surveillance, Ron.”
Ron Rich sighed and held his two hands out in a gesture of it being out of his control. “I’ll see what I can do, but policy is not to allow casual visitors from Earthside to go around tearing up the pea patch.”
“I’m not a casual visitor,” Bruce said coldly. “I can see where you wouldn’t want that big-shot Arab to go out on his own and trip over his robes and break his ass, or something, but I’m a writer, not a VIP on a junket.”
“We’ll see,” the other said again. He looked at his wrist chronometer. “Sol Ryan ought to be free by now. He’s another big fan of yours. So is Annette. I told them I’d bring you up, soonest.”
“Who’s Annette?” Bruce said, coming to his feet, as his host did.
“She’s Sol Ryan’s Person Friday. His brains behind the brains. She runs interference for him, straight-arming anybody who gets in the way. You’ll love Annette Casey. Everybody loves Annette. Sometimes I wonder why.”
“Person Friday?”
“Yeah,” Ron grinned. “Nobody ever thought women’s lib would get to the point achieved by Annette Casey. It used to be Man Friday.”
On the way up to O’Malley’s office, Bruce said casually, “These Tri-Di and TV movies you release to the public Earthside. Where do you make them, Ron?”
The other glanced over at him. “How do you mean, Bruce? Largely, we film them up here, or at the Luna base, or out in the space showing the construction going on.”
“Yeah, largely. But those shots taken inside Island One. The beautiful town. The kids running around playing in the parks on the grass, climbing the trees, swimming in the river. The lovers strolling hand in hand through the fields of flowers. The happy family, sitting around the table groaning with the abundant food you grow in the island. The big community dances, complete with orchestra and with the guys standing around the bar with big steins of beer. Everybody happy as a pig in shit.”
“Hell,” the other said, after snorting. “We have a mock-up of parts of the interior of the island, the way it’s going to look when all the bugs have been solved and it’s all finished. It’s located in Saudi Arabia. Really remote, so the chances of its existence being discovered are nil. See, I’m not pulling any punches with you, Bruce. You know how publicity is. To keep the people happy we’ve got to kind of emphasize the positive. They wouldn’t understand if they saw some of the rough edges.”
“Ummm,” Bruce said mildly. “Some of the early publicity you people put out really did bring out the imagination of some of your illustrators. I remember a painting of what the interior of Island Four was going to look like. In the foreground was a scene in the countryside. There was a big boulder in a big field. It was the size of a two-story house. How in the hell were you going to get a boulder of that size up from the moon? Using that mass driver, with
its ten-pound buckets firing Luna ore up to Lagrange Five? It’d be unlikely you could get a boulder much larger than a man’s head off the moon’s surface with that super-catapult. But what really got me in that depiction was that in the far background was an enormous lake, looking somewhat like San Francisco Bay. And across it was a bridge, looking like the Oakland-San Francisco bridge. Now, how silly could the designers of that Island Four be, to build a bridge costing possibly hundreds of millions, when they could have just redesigned the landscape so that no bridge was necessary.”
Ron had to laugh. “Touché,” he said. “Some of the early publicity was pretty far out. However, that boulder makes sense. You’ve got to realize that by the time we’re building Island Four, we won’t be dependent solely on materials from the moon. We’ll be mining the asteroids. It wouldn’t be very difficult to send down a small asteroid and work it into the interior of the island. If you brought it in before you started spinning the island for artificial gravity, a single man could shivvy it around into position, since it’d be weightless.”
“You got me there,” Bruce admitted.
They arrived at the offices of the ultimate head of the Lagrange Five Project. The quarters of Ron Rich, as publicity director, had been far from austere, but they were nothing compared to those of Solomon Ryan. The reception room was as luxurious as any Bruce had ever seen in Greater Washington or New York. Obviously, all furnishings, equipment, and decorations had been lobbed up from Earth.
Ron Rich flipped a hand at the pert-looking office girl behind the reception desk and said, “Hi, Ruthie. I think Sol’s expecting us.”
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