The Past Through Tomorrow Page 17

  Kamens nodded. “Remember what happened to Columbus.”

  “Exactly. We aren’t going to let ourselves be rooked the way Columbus was.”

  Montgomery spat out some thumb nail. “But, Chief—you know damn well those banana-state claims won’t be worth two cents after I do tie them up. Why not get a franchise right from the U. N. and settle the matter? I’d as lief tackle that as tackle two dozen cockeyed legislatures. In fact I’ve got an angle already—we work it through the Security Council and—”

  “Keep working on that angle; we’ll use it later. You don’t appreciate the full mechanics of 1 the scheme, Monty. Of course those claims are worth nothing—except nuisance value. But their nuisance value is all important. Listen: we get to the Moon, or appear about to. Every one of those countries puts up a squawk; we goose them into it through the dummy corporations they have enfranchised. Where do they squawk? To the U. N., of course. Now the big countries on this globe, the rich and important ones, are all in the northern temperate zone. They see what the claims are based on and they take a frenzied look at the globe. Sure enough, the Moon does not pass over a one of them. The biggest country of all—Russia—doesn’t own a spadeful of dirt south of twenty-nine north. So they reject all the claims.

  “Or do they?” Harriman went on. “The U. S. balks. The Moon passes

  over Florida and the southern part of Texas. Washington is in a tizzy. Should they back up the tropical countries and support the traditional theory of land title or should they throw their weight to the idea that the Moon belongs to everyone? Or should the United States try to claim the whole thing, seeing as how it was Americans who actually got there first?

  “At this point we creep out from under cover. It seems that the Moon ship was owned and the expenses paid by a non-profit corporation chartered by the U. N. itself—”

  “Hold it,” interrupted Strong. “I didn’t know that the U. N. could create corporations?”

  “You’ll find it can,” his partner answered. “How about it, Saul?” Kamens nodded. “Anyway,” Harriman continued, “I’ve already got the corporation. I had it set up several years ago. It can do most anything of an educational or scientific nature—and, brother, that covers a lot of ground! Back to the point—this corporation, this creature of the U. N., asks its parent to declare the lunar colony autonomous territory, under the protection of the U. N. We won’t ask for outright membership at first because we want to keep it simple—”

  “Simple, he calls it!” said Montgomery.

  “Simple. This new colony will be a de facto sovereign state, holding title to the entire Moon, and—listen closely!—capable of buying, selling, passing laws, issuing title to land, setting up monopolies, collecting tariffs, et cetera without end. And we own it!

  “The reason we get all this is because the major states in the U. N. can’t think up a claim that sounds as legal as the claim made by the tropical states, they can’t agree among themselves as to how to split up the swag if they were to attempt brute force and the other major states aren’t willing to see the United States claim the whole thing. They’ll take the easy way out of their dilemma by appearing to retain title in the U. N. itself. The real title, the title controlling all economic and legal matters, will revert to us. Now do you see my point, Monty?”

  Montgomery grinned. “Damned if I know if it’s necessary, Chief, but I love it. It’s beautiful.”

  “Well, I don’t think so,” Strong grumbled. “Delos, I’ve seen you rig some complicated deals—some of them so devious that they turned even my stomach—but this one is the worst yet. I think you’ve been carried away by the pleasure you get out of cooking up involved deals in which somebody gets double-crossed.”

  Harriman puffed hard on his cigar before answering, “I don’t give a damn, George. Call it chicanery, call it anything you want to. I’m going to the Moon! If I have to manipulate a million people to accomplish it, I’ll do it.”

  “But it’s not necessary to do it this way.”

  “Well, how would you do it?”

  “Me? I’d set up a straightforward corporation. I’d get a resolution in Congress making my corporation the chosen instrument of the United States—”

  “Bribery?”

  “Not necessarily. Influence and pressure ought to be enough. Then I would set about raising the money and make the trip.”

  “And the United States would then own the Moon?”

  “Naturally,” Strong answered a little stiffly.

  Harriman got up and began pacing. “You don’t see it, George, you don’t see it. The Moon was not meant to be owned by a single country, even the United States.”

  “It was meant to be owned by you, I suppose.”

  “Well, if I own it—for a short while—I won’t misuse it and I’ll take care that others don’t. Damnation, nationalism should stop at the stratosphere. Can you see what would happen if the United States lays claim to the Moon? The other nations won’t recognize the claim. It will become a permanent bone of contention in the Security council—just when we were beginning to get straightened out to the point where a man could do business planning without having his elbow jogged by a war every few years. The other nations—quite rightfully—will be scared to death of the United States. They will be able to look up in the sky any night and see the main atom-bomb rocket base of the United States staring down the backs of their necks. Are they going to hold still for it? No, sirree—they are going to try to clip off a piece of the Moon for their own national use. The Moon is too big to hold, all at once. There will be other bases established there and presently there will be the God-damnedest war this planet has ever seen—and we’ll be to blame.

  “No, it’s got to be an arrangement that everybody will hold still for— and that’s why we’ve got to plan it, think of all the angles, and be devious about it until we are in a position to make it work.

  “Anyhow, George, if we claim it in the name of the United States, do you know where we will be, as business men?”

  “In the driver’s seat,” answered Strong.

  “In a pig’s eye! We’ll be dealt right out of the game. The Department of National Defense will say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Harriman. Thank you, Mr. Strong. We are taking over in the interests of national security; you can go home now.’ And that’s just what we would have to do—go home and wait for the next atom war.

  “I’m not going to do it, George. I’m not going to let the brass hats muscle in. I’m going to set up a lunar colony and then nurse it along until it is big enough to stand on its own feet. I’m telling you—all of you!—this is the biggest thing for the human race since the discovery of fire. Handled right, it can mean a new and braver world. Handle it wrong and it’s a oneway ticket to Armageddon. It’s coming, it’s coming soon, whether we touch it or not. But I plan to be the Man in the Moon myself—and give it my personal attention to see that it’s handled right.”

  He paused. Strong said, “Through with your sermon, Delos?”

  “No, I’m not,” Harriman denied testily. “You don’t see this thing the right way. Do you know what we may find up there?” He swung his arm in an arc toward the ceiling. “People!”

  “On the Moon?” said Kamens.

  “Why not on the Moon?” whispered Montgomery to Strong.

  “No, not on the Moon—at least I’d be amazed if we dug down and found anybody under that airless shell. The Moon has had its day; I was speaking of the other planets—Mars and Venus and the satellites of Jupiter. Even maybe out at the stars themselves. Suppose we do find people? Think what it will mean to us. We’ve been alone, all alone, the only intelligent race in the only world we know. We haven’t even been able to talk with dogs or apes. Any answers we got we had to think up by ourselves, like deserted orphans. But suppose we find people, intelligent people, who have done some thinking in their own way. We wouldn’t be alone any morel We could look up at the stars and never be afraid again.”

  He finished, seeming a l
ittle tired and even a little ashamed of his outburst, like a man surprised in a private act. He stood facing them, searching their faces.

  “Gee whiz, Chief,” said Montgomery, “I can use that. How about it?”

  “Think you can remember it?”

  “Don’t need to—I flipped on your ‘silent steno.’”

  “Well, damn your eyes!”

  “We’ll put it on video—in a play I think.”

  Harriman smiled almost boyishly. “I’ve never acted, but if you think it’ll do any good, I’m game.”

  “Oh, no, not you, Chief,” Montgomery answered in horrified tones. “You’re not the type. I’ll use Basil Wilkes-Booth, I think. With his organ-like voice and that beautiful archangel face, he’ll really send ‘em.”

  Harriman glanced down at his paunch and said gruffly, “O.K.—back to business. Now about money. In the first place we can go after straight donations to one of the non-profit corporations, just like endowments for colleges. Hit the upper brackets, where tax deductions really matter. How much do you think we can raise that way?”

  “Very little,” Strong opined. “That cow is about milked dry.”

  “It’s never milked dry, as long as there are rich men around who would rather make gifts than pay taxes. How much will a man pay to have a crater on the Moon named after him?”

  “I thought they all had names?” remarked the lawyer.

  “Lots of them don’t—and we have the whole back face that’s not touched yet. We won’t try to put down an estimate today; we’ll just list it. Monty, I want an angle to squeeze dimes out of the school kids, too. Forty million school kids at a dime a head is $4,000,000.00—we can use that.”

  “Why stop at a dime?” asked Monty. “If you get a kid really interested he’ll scrape together a dollar.”

  “Yes, but what do we offer him for it? Aside from the honor of taking part in a noble venture and so forth?”

  “Mmmm…” Montgomery used up more thumb nail. “Suppose we go after both the dimes and the dollars. For a dime he gets a card saying that he’s a member of the Moonbeam club—”

  “No, the ‘Junior Spacemen’.”

  “O.K., the Moonbeams will be girls—and don’t forget to rope the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts into it, too. We give each kid a card; when he kicks in another dime, we punch it. When he’s punched out a dollar, we give him a certificate, suitable for framing, with his name and some process engraving, and on the back a picture of the Moon.”

  “On the front,” answered Harriman. “Do it in one print job; it’s cheaper and it’ll look better. We give him something else, too, a steelclad guarantee that his name will be on the rolls of the Junior Pioneers of the Moon, which same will be placed in a monument to be erected on the Moon at the landing site of the first Moon ship—in microfilm, of course; we have to watch weight.”

  “Fine!” agreed Montgomery. “Want to swap jobs, Chief? When he gets up to ten dollars we give him a genuine, solid gold-plated shooting star pin and he’s a senior Pioneer, with the right to vote or something or other. And his name goes outside of the monument—microengraved on a platinum strip.”

  Strong looked as if he had bitten a lemon. “What happens when he reaches a hundred dollars?” he asked.

  “Why, then,” Montgomery answered happily, “we give him another card and he can start over. Don’t worry about it, Mr. Strong—if any kid goes that high, he’ll have his reward. Probably we will take him on an inspection tour of the ship before it takes off and give him, absolutely free, a picture of himself standing in front of it, with the pilot’s own signature signed across the bottom by some female clerk.”

  “Chiseling from kids. Bah!”

  “Not at all,” answered Montgomery in hurt tones. “Intangibles are the most honest merchandise anyone can sell. They are always worth whatever you are willing to pay for them and they never wear out. You can take them to your grave untarnished.”

  “Hmmmph!”

  Harriman listened to this, smiling and saying nothing. Kamens cleared his throat. “If you two ghouls are through cannibalizing the youth of the land, I’ve another idea.”

  “Spill it.”

  “George, you collect stamps, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How much would a cover be worth which had been to the Moon and been cancelled there?”

  “Huh? But you couldn’t, you know.”

  “I think we could get our Moon ship declared a legal post office substation without too much trouble. What would it be worth?”

  “Uh, that depends on how rare they are.”

  “There must be some optimum number which will fetch a maximum return. Can you estimate it?”

  Strong got a faraway look in his eye, then took out an old-fashioned pencil and commenced to figure. Harriman went on, “Saul, my minor success in buying a share in the Moon from Jones went to my head. How about selling building lots on the Moon?”

  “Let’s keep this serious, Delos. You can’t do that until you’ve landed there.”

  “I am serious. I know you are thinking of that ruling back in the ‘forties that such land would have to be staked out and accurately described. I want to sell land on the Moon. You figure out a way to make it legal. I’ll sell the whole Moon, if I can—surface rights, mineral rights, anything.”

  “Suppose they want to occupy it?”

  “Fine. The more the merrier. I’d like to point out, too, that we’ll be in a position to assess taxes on what we have sold. If they don’t use it and won’t pay taxes, it reverts to us. Now you figure out how to offer it, without going to jail. You may have to advertise it abroad, then plan to peddle it personally in this country, like Irish Sweepstakes tickets.”

  Kamens looked thoughtful. “We could incorporate the land company in Panama and advertise by video and radio from Mexico. Do you really think you can sell the stuff?”

  “You can sell snowballs in Greenland,” put in Montgomery. “It’s a matter of promotion.”

  Harriman added, “Did you ever read about the Florida land boom, Saul? People bought lots they had never seen and sold them at tripled prices without ever having laid eyes on them. Sometimes a parcel would change hands a dozen times before anyone got around to finding out that the stuff was ten-foot deep in water. We can offer bargains better than that—an acre, a guaranteed dry acre with plenty of sunshine, for maybe ten dollars—or a thousand acres at a dollar an acre. Who’s going to turn down a bargain like that? Particularly after the rumor gets around that the Moon is believed to be loaded with uranium?”

  “Is it?”

  “How should I know? When the boom sags a little we will announce the selected location of Luna City—and it will just happen to work out that the land around the site is still available for sale. Don’t worry, Saul, if it’s real estate, George and I can sell it. Why, down in the Ozarks, where the land stands on edge, we used to sell both sides of the same acre.” Harriman looked thoughtful. “I think we’ll reserve mineral rights—there just might actually be uranium there!”

  Kamens chuckled. “Delos, you are a kid at heart. Just a great big, overgrown, lovable—juvenile delinquent.”

  Strong straightened up. “I make it half a million,” he said.

  “Half a million what?” asked Harriman.

  “For the cancelled philatelic covers, of course. That’s what we were talking about. Five thousand is my best estimate of the number that could be placed with serious collectors and with dealers. Even then we will have to discount them to a syndicate and hold back until the ship is built and the trip looks like a probability.”

  “Okay,” agreed Harriman. ‘You handle it. I’ll just note that we can tap you for an extra half million toward the end.”

  “Don’t I get a commission?” asked Kamens. “I thought of it.”

  “You get a rising vote of thanks—and ten acres on the Moon. Now what other sources of revenue can we hit?”

  “Don’t you plan to sell stock?” asked Ka
mens.

  “I was coming to that. Of course—but no preferred stock; we don’t want to be forced through a reorganization. Participating common, non-voting—”

  “Sounds like another banana-state corporation to me.”

  “Naturally—but I want some of it on the New York Exchange, and you’ll have to work that out with the Securities Exchange Commission somehow. Not too much of it—that’s our show case and we’ll have to keep it active and moving up.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather I swam the Hellespont?”

  “Don’t be like that, Saul. It beats chasing ambulances, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Well, that’s what I want you—wups!” The screen on Harriman’s desk had come to life. A girl said, “Mr. Harriman, Mr. Dixon is here. He has no appointment but he says that you want to see him.”

  “I thought I had that thing shut off,” muttered Harriman, then pressed his key and said, “O.K., show him in.”

  “Very well, sir—oh, Mr. Harriman, Mr. Entenza came in just this second.”

  “Send them both in.” Harriman disconnected and turned back to his associates. “Zip your lips, gang, and hold on to your wallets.”

  “Look who’s talking,” said Kamens.

  Dixon came in with Entenza behind him. He sat down, looked around, started to speak, then checked himself. He looked around again, especially at Entenza.

  “Go ahead, Dan,” Harriman encouraged him. “Tain’t nobody here at all but just us chickens.”

  Dixon made up his mind. “I’ve decided to come in with you, D. D.,” he announced. “As an act of faith I went to the trouble of getting this.” He took a formal-looking instrument from his pocket and displayed it. It was a sale of lunar rights, from Phineas Morgan to Dixon, phrased in exactly the same fashion as that which Jones had granted to Harriman.

  Entenza looked startled, then dipped into his own inner coat pocket. Out came three more sales contracts of the same sort, each from a director of the power syndicate. Harriman cocked an eyebrow at them. “Jack sees you and raises you two, Dan. You want to call?”