The Past Through Tomorrow Page 16

  Mrs. Harriman was temporarily diverted. “Well, I have thought it might be nice to build another place, Delos—say a little chalet tucked away in the mountains, nothing ostentatious, not more than two servants, or three. But we won’t close this place until it’s built, Delos—after all, one must live somewhere.”

  “I was not thinking of building right away,” he answered cautiously.

  “Why not? We’re not getting any younger, Delos; if we are to enjoy the good things of life we had better not make delays. You needn’t worry about it; I’ll manage everything.”

  Harriman turned over in his mind the possibility of letting her build to keep her busy. If he earmarked the cash for her “little chalet,” she would live in a hotel nearby wherever she decided to build it—and he could sell this monstrosity they were sitting in. With the nearest roadcity now less than ten miles away, the land should bring more than Charlotte’s new house would cost and he would be rid of the monthly drain on his pocketbook.

  “Perhaps you are right,” he agreed. “But suppose you do build at once; you won’t be living here; you’ll be supervising every detail of the new place. I say we should unload this place; it’s eating its head off in taxes, upkeep, and running expenses.”

  She shook her head. “Utterly out of the question, Delos. This is my home.”

  He ground out an almost unsmoked cigar. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, but you can’t have it both ways. If you build, you can’t stay here. If you stay here, we’ll close these below-ground catacombs, fire about a dozen of the parasites I keep stumbling over, and live in the cottage on the surface. I’m cutting expenses.”

  “Discharge the servants? Delos, if you think that I will undertake to make a home for you without a proper staff, you can just—”

  “Stop it.” He stood up and threw his napkin down. “It doesn’t take a squad of servants to make a home. When we were first married you had no servants—and you washed and ironed my shirts in the bargain. But we had a home then. This place is owned by that staff you speak of. Well, we’re getting rid of them, all but the cook and a handy man.”

  She did not seem to hear him. “Delos! sit down and behave yourself. Now what’s all this about cutting expenses? Are you in some sort of trouble? Are you? Answer me!”

  He sat down wearily and answered, “Does a man have to be in trouble to want to cut out unnecessary expenses?”

  “In your case, yes. Now what is it? Don’t try to evade me.”

  “Now see here, Charlotte, we agreed a long time ago that I would keep business matters in the office. As for the house, we simply don’t need a house this size. It isn’t as if we had a passel of kids to fill up—”

  “Oh! Blaming me for that again!”

  “Now see here, Charlotte,” he wearily began again, “I never did blame you and I’m not blaming you now. All I ever did was suggest that we both see a doctor and find out what the trouble was we didn’t have any kids. And for twenty years you’ve been making me pay for that one remark. But that’s all over and done with now; I was simply making the point that two people don’t fill up twenty-two rooms. I’ll pay a reasonable price for a new house, if you want it, and give you an ample household allowance.” He started to say how much, then decided not to. “Or you can close this place and live in the cottage above. It’s just that we are going to quit squandering money—for a while.”

  She grabbed the last phrase. “‘For a while.’ What’s going on, Delos? What are you going to squander money on?” When he did not answer she went on, “Very well, if you won’t tell me, I’ll call George. He will tell me.”

  “Don’t do that, Charlotte. I’m warning you. I’ll—”

  “You’ll what!” She studied his face. “I don’t need to talk to George; I can tell by looking at you. You’ve got the same look on your face you had when you came home and told me that you had sunk all our money in those crazy rockets.”

  “Charlotte, that’s not fair. Skyways paid off .It’s made us a mint of money.”

  “That’s beside the point. I know why you’re acting so strangely; you’ve got that old trip-to-the-Moon madness again. Well, I won’t stand for it, do you hear? I’ll stop you; I don’t have to put up with it. I’m going right down in the morning and see Mr. Kamens and find out what has to be done to make you behave yourself.” The cords of her neck jerked as she spoke.

  He waited, gathering his temper before going on. “Charlotte, you have no real cause for complaint. No matter what happens to me, your future is taken care of.”

  “Do you think I want to be a widow?”

  He looked thoughtfully at her. “I wonder.”

  “Why— Why, you heartless beast.” She stood up. “We’ll say no more about it; do you mind?” She left without waiting for an answer.

  His “man” was waiting for him when he got to his room. Jenkins got up hastily and started drawing Harriman’s bath. “Beat it,” Harriman grunted. “I can undress myself.”

  “You require nothing more tonight, sir?”

  “Nothing. But don’t go unless you feel like it. Sit down and pour yourself a drink. Ed, how long you been married?”

  “Don’t mind if I do.” The servant helped himself. “Twenty-three years, come May, sir.”

  “How’s it been, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “Not bad. Of course there have been times—”

  “I know what you mean. Ed, if you weren’t working for me, what would you be doing?”

  “Well, the wife and I have talked many times of opening a little restaurant, nothing pretentious, but good. A place where a gentleman could enjoy a quiet meal of good food.”

  “Stag, eh?”

  “No, not entirely, sir—but there would be a parlor for gentlemen only. Not even waitresses, I’d tend that room myself.”

  “Better look around for locations, Ed. You’re practically in business.”

  3

  STRONG ENTERED their joint offices the next morning at a precise nine o’clock, as usual. He was startled to find Harriman there before him. For Harriman to fail to show up at all meant nothing; for him to beat the clerks in was significant.

  Harriman was busy with a terrestrial globe and a book—the current Nautical Almanac, Strong observed. Harriman barely glanced up. “Morning, George. Say, who’ve we got a line to in Brazil?”

  “Why?”

  “I need some trained seals who speak Portuguese, that’s why. And some who speak Spanish, too. Not to mention three or four dozen scattered around in this country. I’ve come across something very, very interesting. Look here… according to these tables the Moon only swings about twenty-eight, just short of twenty-nine degrees north and south of the equator.” He held a pencil against the globe and spun it. “Like that. That suggest anything?”

  “No. Except that you’re getting pencil marks on a sixty dollar globe.”

  “And you an old real estate operator! What does a man own when he buys a parcel of land?”

  “That depends on the deed. Usually mineral rights and other subsurface rights are—”

  “Never mind that. Suppose he buys the works, without splitting the rights: how far down does he own? How far up does he own?”

  “Well, he owns a wedge down to the center of the Earth. That was settled in the slant-drilling and off-set oil lease cases. Theoretically he used to own the space above the land, too, out indefinitely, but that was modified by a series of cases after the commercial airlines came in—and a good thing, for us, too, or we would have to pay tolls every time one of our rockets took off for Australia.”

  “No, no, no, George! you didn’t read those cases right. Right of passage was established—but ownership of the space above the land remained unchanged. And even right of passage was not absolute; you can build a thousand-foot tower on your own land right where airplanes, or rockets, or whatever, have been in the habit of passing and the ships will thereafter have to go above it, with no kick back on you. Remember how we had to lease the air south o
f Hughes Field to insure that our approach wasn’t built up?”

  Strong looked thoughtful. “Yes. I see your point. The ancient principle of land ownership remains undisturbed—down to the center of the Earth, up to infinity. But what of it? It’s a purely theoretical matter. You’re not planning to pay tolls to operate those spaceships you’re always talking about, are you?” He grudged a smile at his own wit.

  “Not on your tintype. Another matter entirely. George—who owns the Moon?”

  Strong’s jaw dropped, literally. “Delos, you’re joking.”

  “I am not. I’ll ask you again: if basic law says that a man owns the wedge of sky above his farm out to infinity, who owns the Moon? Take a look at this globe and tell me.”

  Strong looked. “But it can’t mean anything, Delos. Earth laws wouldn’t apply to the Moon.”

  “They apply here and that’s where I am worrying about it. The Moon stays constantly over a slice of Earth bounded by latitude twenty-nine north and the same distance south; if one man owned all that belt of Earth—it’s roughly the tropical zone—then he’d own the Moon, too, wouldn’t he? By all the theories of real property ownership that our courts pay any attention to. And, by direct derivation, according to the sort of logic that lawyers like, the various owners of that belt of land have title—good vendable title—to the Moon somehow lodged collectively in them. The fact that the distribution of the title is a little vague wouldn’t bother a lawyer; they grow fat on just such distributed titles every time a will is probated.”

  “It’s fantastic!”

  “George, when are you going to learn that ‘fantastic’ is a notion that doesn’t bother a lawyer?”

  “You’re not planning to try to buy the entire tropical zone—that’s what you would have to do.”

  “No,” Harriman said slowly, “but it might not be a bad idea to buy right, title and interest in the Moon, as it may appear, from each of the sovereign countries in that belt. If I thought I could keep it quiet and not run the market up, I might try it. You can buy a thing awful cheap from a man if he thinks it’s worthless and wants to sell before you regain your senses.

  “But that’s not the plan,” he went on. “George, I want corporations—local corporations—in every one of those countries. I want the legislatures of each of those countries to grant franchises to its local corporation for lunar exploration, exploitation, et cetera, and the right to claim lunar soil on behalf of the country—with fee simple, naturally, being handed on a silver platter to the patriotic corporation that thought up the idea. And I want all this done quietly, so that the bribes won’t go too high. We’ll own the corporations, of course, which is why I need a flock of trained seals. There is going to be one hell of a fight one of these day’s over who owns the Moon; I want the deck stacked so that we win no matter how the cards are dealt.”

  “It will be ridiculously expensive, Delos. And you don’t even know that you will ever get to the Moon, much less that it will be worth anything after you get there.”

  “We’ll get there! It’ll be more expensive not to establish these claims. Anyhow it need not be very expensive; the proper use of bribe money is a homeopathic art—you use it as a catalyst. Back in the middle of the last century four men went from California to Washington with $40,000; it was all they had. A few weeks later they were broke—but Congress had awarded them a billion dollars worth of railroad right of way. The trick is not to run up the market.”

  Strong shook his head. “Your title wouldn’t be any good anyhow. The Moon doesn’t stay in one place; it passes over owned land certainly—but so does a migrating goose.”

  “And nobody has title to a migrating bird. I get your point—but the Moon always stays over that one belt. If you move a boulder in your garden, do you lose title to it? Is it still real estate? Do the title laws still stand? This is like that group of real estate cases involving wandering islands in the Mississippi, George—the land moved as the river cut new channels, but somebody always owned it. In this case I plan to see to it that we are the ‘somebody’.”

  Strong puckered his brow. “I seem to recall that some of those island-and-riparian cases were decided one way and some another.”

  “We’ll pick the decisions that suit us. That’s why lawyers’ wives have mink coats. Come on, George; let’s get busy.”

  “On what?”

  “Raising the money.”

  “Oh.” Strong looked relieved. “I thought you were planning to use our money.”

  “I am. But it won’t be nearly enough. We’ll use our money for the senior financing to get things moving; in the meantime we’ve got to work out ways to keep the money rolling in.” He pressed a switch at his desk; the face of Saul Kamens, their legal chief of staff, sprang out at him. “Hey, Saul, can you slide in for a powwow?”

  “Whatever it is, just tell them ‘no,’” answered the attorney. “I’ll fix it.”

  “Good. Now come on in—they’re moving Hell and I’ve got an option on the first ten loads.”

  Kamens showed up in his own good time. Some minutes later Harriman had explained his notion for claiming the Moon ahead of setting foot on it. “Besides those dummy corporations,” he went on, “we need an agency that can receive contributions without having to admit any financial interest on the part of the contributor—like the National Geographic Society.”

  Kamens shook his head. “You can’t buy the National Geographic Society.”

  “Damn it, who said we were going to? We’ll set up our own.”

  “That’s what I started to say.”

  “Good. As I see it, we need at least one tax-free, non-profit corporation headed up by the right people—we’ll hang on to voting control, of course.

  We’ll probably need more than one; we’ll set them up as we need them. And we’ve got to have at least one new ordinary corporation, not tax-free—but it won’t show a profit until we are ready. The idea is to let the non-profit corporations have all of the prestige and all of the publicity—and the other gets all of the profits, if and when. We swap assets around between corporations, always for perfectly valid reasons, so that the non-profit corporations pay the expenses as we go along. Come to think about it, we had better have at least two ordinary corporations, so that we can let one of them go through bankruptcy if we find it necessary to shake out the water. That’s the general sketch. Get busy and fix it up so that it’s legal, will you?”

  Kamens said, “You know, Delos, it would be a lot more honest if you did it at the point of a gun.”

  “A lawyer talks to me of honesty! Never mind, Saul; I’m not actually going to cheat anyone—”

  “Hmmph!”

  “—and I’m just going to make a trip to the Moon. That’s what everybody will be paying for; that’s what they’ll get. Now fix it up so that it’s legal, that’s a good boy.”

  “I’m reminded of something the elder Vanderbilt’s lawyer said to the old man under similar circumstances: ‘It’s beautiful the way it is; why spoil it by making it legal?’ Okay, brother gonoph, I’ll rig your trap. Anything else?”

  “Sure. Stick around, you might have some ideas. George, ask Montgomery to come in, will you?” Montgomery, Harriman’s publicity chief, had two virtues in his employer’s eyes: he was personally loyal to Harriman, and, secondly, he was quite capable of planning a campaign to convince the public that Lady Godiva wore a Caresse-brand girdle during her famous ride… or that Hercules attributed his strength to Crunchies for breakfast.

  He arrived with a large portfolio under his arm. “Glad you sent for me, Chief. Get a load of this—” He spread the folder open on Harriman’s desk and began displaying sketches and layouts. “Kinsky’s work—is that boy hot!”

  Harriman closed the portfolio. “What outfit is it for?”

  “Huh? New World Homes.”

  “I don’t want to see it; we’re dumping New World Homes. Wait a minute—don’t start to bawl. Have the boys go through with it; I want the price kept up
while we unload. But open your ears to another matter.” He explained rapidly the new enterprise.

  Presently Montgomery was nodding. “When do we start and how much do we spend?”

  “Right away and spend what you need to. Don’t get chicken about expenses; this is the biggest thing we’ve ever tackled.” Strong flinched; Harriman went on, “Have insomnia over it tonight; see me tomorrow and we’ll kick it around.”

  “Wait a sec, Chief. How are you going to sew up all those franchises from the, uh—the Moon states, those countries the Moon passes over, while a big publicity campaign is going on about a trip to the Moon and how big a thing it is for everybody? Aren’t you about to paint yourself into a corner?”

  “Do I look stupid? We’ll get the franchises before you hand out so much as a filler—you’ll get ‘em, you and Kamens. That’s your first job.”

  “Hmmm…” Montgomery chewed a thumb nail. “Well, all right—I can see some angles. How soon do we have to sew it up?”

  “I give you six weeks. Otherwise just mail your resignation in, written on the skin off your back.”

  “I’ll write it right now, if you’ll help me by holding a mirror.”

  “Damn it, Monty, I know you can’t do it in six weeks. But make it fast; we can’t take a cent in to keep the thing going until you sew up those franchises. If you dilly-dally, we’ll all starve—and we won’t get to the Moon, either.”

  Strong said, “D. D., why fiddle with these trick claims from a bunch of moth-eaten tropical countries? If you are dead set on going to the Moon, let’s call Ferguson in and get on with the matter.”

  “I like your direct approach, George,” Harriman said, frowning. “Mmmm… back about 1845 or ‘46 an eager-beaver American army officer captured California. You know what the State Department did?”

  “No.”

  “They made him hand it back. Seems he hadn’t touched second base, or something. So they had to go to the trouble of capturing it all over again a few months later. Now I don’t want that to happen to us. It’s not enough just to set foot on the Moon and claim it; we’ve got to validate that claim in terrestrial courts—or we’re in for a peck of trouble. Eh, Saul?”