Mission Earth 02 - Black Genesis

by Black Genesis [lit]

  He unrolled more chart, got some newcomers to hold it. "The Swiss-Liechtenstein fund flow goes under­ground to West Germany and thence to Hong Kong. Do you get it? No?"

  More of the chart was unrolled and held, "You can see why, now. The Hong Kong funds—see the purple arrow there—flow to Singapore, come back to Tahiti and..."

  He unrolled more chart, "... arrive right in our own backyard in the Bahamas. Clever, eh? But look at Lon­don."

  He unrolled more chart. One whole width was de­voted to three corporations, three stockbrokers and three bank accounts, all in London. Orange lines radiated out and came back to Hong Kong. "And that is how we get the funds into the Bahamas from the City as they call it. But you will be interested in this."

  He unrolled more chart and got more holders. There was an interlocking series of lines which stretched out to every bank account and brokerage house, a spider web of royal blue. "That is the arbitrage network. By means of a centrally controlled system, we can take advantage of the differences of currency prices throughout the whole

  network and every time we transfer any funds, we also make a mint! It requires telexes and lease lines from RCA, of course. But it will pay for itself every week."

  He unrolled more chart, got more holders. The steps were pretty thronged by now.

  "What was the artist thinking when he drew it?" asked a girl.

  "Soul music," said a learned boy.

  "I think it's quite lovely," said another girl. "It cer­tainly makes one tranquil."

  "And now," Izzy said to Heller, "I'll bet you've been holding your breath waiting until I got around to this." He waved his arm in a grand gesture at a single corpo­ration marked with a circle and red arrows. "That," said Izzy, "is MULTINATIONAL! By reason of nominee shares, noninterlocking controlled boards, it orchestrates the entire conduct of the entire remaining chart. And lis­ten, here is the best part: it calls itself a MANAGE­MENT company! It isn't visibly liable for a single thing any other company does! Isn't that great?"

  "But why," said Heller, "why all these different cor­porations and brokerage houses and bank accounts?"

  "Now, I am responsible for you. Right?"

  "Right," said Heller.

  "If any one of those corporations goes broke, it folds all by itself and it doesn't do a thing to any other part of the entire consortium. You get it? You can go bank­rupt to your heart's content! You can also sell them for tax losses, buy other corporations with them. You can also hide and vanish profits. Everything."

  "But," said Heller doubtfully, "I don't see that so many——"

  "Well, I will admit I haven't told you the real rea­son." He leaned over to Heller's ear. "You told me you had an enemy. Mr. Bury of Swindle and Crouch. He is

  the most vicious, unprincipled lawyer on Wall Street. With this setup, he will never be able to touch you."

  "Why not?" said Heller.

  Izzy leaned much closer and whispered much more quietly, hard to hear above the chatter of the crowd. "Be­cause in every record, neither you nor your name will ever appear in any of this. And anything you are publicly connected with will not feed back into any of this. They are all private companies, all for profit, all controlled by actual stock shares. It is impenetrable!"

  He stood back. "There is just one thing more I need your approval on. I didn't put it on this chart. An art student did it for me at breakfast."

  Tucked in the bottom of the roll was another roll. It opened to a picture about two feet by three. It was a round, black globe. It had a little piece of rope or some­thing sticking out of the top of it. Sparks were flying from the tip.

  "What is it?" said Heller.

  "It is my proposal for the evolving logo of Multina­tional! Actually, it is the old symbol of anarchy, a bomb! See the lit fuse?"

  "A chemical powder bomb," said Heller.

  "Now, we turn the poster over and we simply see a dark sphere with a wisp of cloud at the top. And that's what we will put out as the logo but you and I will know what it really is. Now do you approve?"

  "Well, yes," said Heller.

  "The chart and the logo?"

  "Well, yes," said Heller.

  "I know it is crude and hastily done. I haven't even filled in many of the names. I think it is very tolerant of you to approve it."

  "What is this?" a newcomer asked Heller. "A work of art?"

  "Yes," said Heller. "A work of art!"

  "Well now, let's roll it up," said Izzy.

  "No," said several of the crowd at once. One said, "A lot of people haven't been able to see it. We'll spread it out on the steps here and people can go up on the par­apet there or climb the statue and get a real look."

  Overruled, Heller and Izzy drew back and let them have their way.

  "Did you get re-enrolled?" said Heller.

  "Oh, yes," said Izzy. "That's why I was a little late. While I was doing all this, I got a brand-new idea for a doctorate thesis. And I saw them about it. It's 'The Use of Corporations in Undermining Totally the Existing World Order.'"

  "And they agree to let you re-enroll and write it?"

  "You see, the mistake I was making was getting off into political science and they kept telling me so. My doc­torate is in business administration. But this new idea is perfect. It doesn't contain the word government, it does contain the word corporations. And world order can be interpreted to mean capitalistic finance. So unless some horrible, malignant fate overtakes me from some other quarter, I can get my doctor's degree at the end of this October."

  "Then you paid your bill," said Heller.

  "Oh, yes. You can have your two hundred advance back."

  "But how... ?"

  "Right after I left you yesterday, I went to the Bank of America. I showed them the two hundred which proves I had a job and borrowed five thousand dollars without collateral. I paid off the government loan and have far more left than I really need. I won't have to sleep in the park—I'm always afraid of being mugged. I can stay in a dorm a couple of nights until we get our

  offices. And, if you don't mind, I'll sleep there when we do."

  I was speechless. How could this ragtag, mucked-up mess of a timid little man walk into a bank and borrow five thousand just by showing them a couple of hundred-dollar bills?

  "Now wait a minute," said Heller, obviously having afterthoughts. "It will take a long, long time to set up all those corporations in Hong Kong and Tahiti and wher­ever. What do you have in mind as a time schedule?"

  "Oh, that is my fault," said Izzy. "I have been under such a nervous strain lately. I didn't want to tell you because I was afraid you would balk."

  "So, how long? Two months? A year?"

  "Oh, heavens, no! I was shooting for next Tuesday! I thought you would want it Friday but there's a week­end ..."

  "Next Tuesday," said Heller. Then he seemed to rally. "You're going to need money for all this. So here is ten thousand to start with. Will that be enough?"

  "Oh, heavens, yes. Too much, actually. I'll put it in a locker at the bus station to keep it safe. And then put it in the first bank account. And then, when everything is set, you can put your capital in the various bank accounts and it will get transferred around and start to get to work. Is it too much to ask to meet you here on these steps 4:00 P.M. Tuesday?"

  And then I thought I had it. This Izzy was a sly, clev­er crook. He was going to take all of Heller's money, deny him any control and leave him broke. I cancelled any idea of interfering with Izzy Epstein! He didn't even give Heller a receipt!

  Izzy got his chart back from the congratulatory crowd. Several even helped him carry it as he went away.

  I laughed. Maybe that was the last Heller would ever see of him!

  Chapter 7

  I was quite heartened by the number of potential allies I was picking up in case everything else went wrong with my plans for Heller. Vantagio, Miss Sim­mons, this Izzy Epstein. I began to keep a list. When Raht and Terb called in, possibly I could greatly embel�
�lish my planning.

  Heller spent the afternoon doing some more check­ing on class locations, obviously still trying to figure out how to be in two or three places at once and get tutored at the same time. And then he went around to the other side of what was labelled "Journalism" and found the col­lege bookstore on Broadway.

  All day he had been running into people and stick­ing his nose into professors' offices and making up a list. He had been using the back side of a computer printout with the staples removed and now had this yard-long sheet with titles and texts and manuals and authors scrib­bled all over it. He handed it to the girl behind the coun­ter. She was obviously some graduate student doing part-time work to handle the current rush. Pretty, too.

  "All this?" she said, adjusting her horn-rimmed glasses. "I can't read some of this writing. I wish they would teach kids to read and write these days."

  Heller peered over at what she was pointing at. Yikes! He had annotated the list over on the edge with Voltarian shorthand!

  My pen was really poised. Oh, I've seen Code breaks in my time. Maybe a whore and a tailor wouldn't know they were dealing with an extraterrestrial but he was in a college area and those people are smart.

  "It's shorthand," said Heller. "The main titles and authors are in English."

  They were, too. In very neat block print.

  "What's this here?" said the girl, lifting her glasses above her eyes to see better. She was pointing at The Fun­damentals of Geometry by Euclid. "We don't have any books by that author. Is it a new paperback?"

  Heller told her she'd have to help him as he didn't know either. She went to her catalogues and looked up under "Authors." She couldn't find it. So she looked in a massive catalogue of alphabetical book titles. Then, cheered on by Heller, she looked up the author in the book titles. "Hey, here it is!" she said. "Euclidian Geom­etry as Interpreted and Rewritten by Professor Twist from an Adaption by I. M. Tangled." She went and found a copy. "You wrote here that his name was 'Euclid' when it was 'Euclidian.' You should learn how to spell."

  They couldn't find anything by somebody named "Isaac Newton" and the girl decided he must be some revolutionary banned by the New York Tactical Police Force. But Heller persevered and they eventually came up with a book, Laws of Motion I Have Rewritten and Adapted from a Text by Dr. Still as Translated from an Archaic English Newtonian Work by Elbert Mouldy by Pro­fessor M. S. Pronounce, Doctor of Literature.

  "You should have told me it would be in the liter­ature section," said the girl. "You don't even know how to read a card catalogue."

  "I'll try to find out," said Heller.

  "Jesus," said the girl, "they teach card catalogues in

  the third grade! God, didn't anybody ever teach you any­thing? There's a staff at High Library devoted to show­ing students how to do it. You ask them over there. I'm here to sell books, not teach kindergarten! But let's get on, this is an awfully long list! You're keeping others wait­ing!"

  They did make progress, however, and the pile of books grew and grew. Finally the girl, peering between the columns of books and lifting her glasses to see Heller, said, "You can't carry all these. And I'm not going to wrap them. So you go over to the college store and get about five rucksacks while I get an assistant to add up this bill."

  Heller did as he was told.

  When he returned, he packed the five rucksacks and paid the bill. Then he began to adjust straps and finally managed to get the sacks hung around him. Other stu­dents who had been waiting made room for him disinter­estedly.

  "Can you manage?" said the girl. "That must be about two hundred pounds. Books are heavy."

  "Just barely," said Heller. "But we haven't got every­thing on this list."

  "Oh, the rest of that stuff. Well, take that one about thirty from the top, World History Rewritten by Competent Propagandists for Kiddies and Passed by the American Med­ical Association, that's fourth grade grammar school. We don't carry that sort of thing. You'll have to get them at Stuffem and Glutz, the city's authorized school supplier. They're on Varick Street." And she gave him the number. "My God," she added, "how'd you ever get here not knowing those texts?"

  Heller turned to make his way through the backlog of student customers who stepped aside patiently. The

  girl said to the next student in line, "Jesus, what we get for freshmen these days."

  "It says on your slip there he's a senior," said the stu­dent.

  "I got it!" said the girl. I quickly and hopefully jacked up the audio. "He's here on an athletic scholar­ship! A weight lifter! Hey, call him back. I was awful impolite. I need a date for tonight's dance! Boy, am I dumb! He was cute, too."

  Yes, she certainly was dumb! She had denied me opportunity after opportunity to file charges against Hel­ler for Code breaks! And they had watched somebody heft two hundred pounds of rucksacks like they were air and I'm sure if they had looked out the door or window they would have seen Heller running along, clickety-clack, without a care in the world to the subway. My faith in the powers of observation of college students had suffered a heavy blow. Maybe they were all on drugs. That was the only possible explanation! An extraterres­trial right under their noses making all kinds of give­aways and they hadn't even blinked an eye!

  Heller got right on down to Varick Street on the same subway. He got into the city-authorized bookstore. And he was shortly showing a half-blind old man his list. In the subway he had ticked off missing titles with a red pen and now he handed it over, Voltarian shorthand and all, for the red checks to be filled.

  The old man bustled off to a storeroom. "You want thirty copies of each?" he called back.

  "One will do just fine."

  "Oh, you're a tutor. All right." And he came back in about ten minutes, staggering under a stack of books. "I'll get the rest now." And he went back and came out staggering under a second stack.

  Heller checked off the titles. He got almost to the end. "There's one missing: Third Grade Arithmetic."

  "Oh, they don't teach that anymore. It's all 'new math' now."

  "What's 'new math'?" said Heller.

  "I dunno. They put out a new 'new math' every year. It's something about greater and lesser numbers without using any numbers this year. It was orders of magnitude of numbers last year but they were still teach­ing them to count. They stopped that."

  "Well, I've got to have something about basic arith­metic," said Heller.

  "Why?"

  "You see," said Heller, "I do logarithms in my head and the only arithmetic I've ever seen done was by some primitive tribe on Flisten. They used charcoal sticks and slabs of white lime."

  "No kidding?" said the old man.

  "Yes, it was during a Fleet peace mission. They wouldn't believe we had that many ships and it was really funny to see them jumping about and counting and multiplying and writing it down. They were more advanced than others I've seen, however. One tribe had to use their fingers and toes to count their wives. They never had more than fifteen wives because that was all the fingers and toes they had."

  The old man said, "A Fleet man, huh? I was in the Navy myself, war before last. You just wait there."

  He went back and searched and searched and finally came out with a dusty, tattered text that had been lying around for ages. "Here's a book called Basic Arithmetic Including Addition, Multiplication and Division With a Spe­cial Section on Commercial Arithmetic and Stage Acts" He opened the yellowed pages, "It was published in Phila­delphia in 1879. It's got all sorts of tricks in it like adding

  a ten-digit column of thirty entries by inspection. Old-time bookkeeper stuff. Lot of stage tricks: they used to go on stage and write numbers and do complicated exam­ples upside down leaning over a blackboard and get the answer in three seconds and the audience would flip out. Mr. Tatters said to throw it out but I sort of thought I should send it to a museum. Since they passed the law that kids had to use calculators in class, nobody is inter­ested in it anymore. But as you're a navy man like mys
elf you can have it."

  Heller paid and the old man wrapped up the books into two more huge packages. Another two hundred pounds of books. I expected Heller to heft them up and walk off. It disappointed me when he found four hun­dred pounds too cumbersome. I'm sure he could have, with some strain, walked off with them. He had them call him a taxi. The old man even got a dolly and helped him load up. Heller thanked him.

  "Don't throw that book away," said the old man at the curb. "I don't think there's a soul in this country knows how to do it anymore. I don't think they even remember it ever existed. When you're through with it, give it to a museum!"

  "Thanks for piping the side!" said Heller and the taxi drove away leaving the old man waving at the curb.

  Code break. "Piping the side!" It must be some Vol­tarian Fleet term. No, wait a minute. I had never heard the term on Voltar. But Heller wouldn't know Earth terms like that. Or would he? The Voltarian Fleet doesn't use pipes. A lot of them use puffsticks. Only Earth people smoke pipes. It was moving into the New York rush hour so I had a lot of time to work on this. I got as far as Earth sailors as well as spacers have a lot to do with whores when my concentration was inter­rupted.

  A houseman was wheeling all that book tonnage across the lobby and Vantagio popped out of his office like some miniature jack-in-the-box.

  He stared at the packages, tore a piece of paper off a corner and opened a rucksack to verify they were books. "They accepted you!" He let out a wheeze of relief and mopped his face with a silk handkerchief. He waved the houseman on and pushed Heller into his office.

  "You did it!" said Vantagio.

  "I think you did it," said Heller.

  Vantagio looked at him with feigned blank innocence.

  "Come on," said Heller. "They waived everything including having a head! How did you do it?"

  Vantagio started laughing and sat down at his desk. "All right, kid, you got me. It was awfully late and I had an awful time getting hold of the university president last night but I did it. You see, at peak periods, we use some of the Barnyard College girls here. So I just told him that if you weren't enrolled in full by 9:30 this morn­ing, we'd cut off our student aid program."