“Dr. Guibedo,” Patricia said, “do you mean that the food comes already prepared? That would take a lot of the fun out of housekeeping. Don’t you think so, Mr. Scratchon?”
“I think that this sawed-off runt’s head is as fat as his belly! Don’t you realize what he’s doing? Can’t you understand that when construction, farming, and banking fold, the entire country will go down the drain, too? Businesses by the thousands will go bankrupt. Millions of men will be out of work, and we sit here debating!” Scratchon folded his arms, fury in his eyes.
The twinkle left Guibedo’s eyes, and the smile wrinkles on his face smoothed. “Yah, I know. A lot of changes will happen. And I’m sorry if they make some people unhappy. Change and progress have always hurt some people, but the net effects have been good for humanity. The Industrial Revolution, for example, wasn’t very nice for the people who had to work in those old factories. And the old nobility didn’t like what was happening, either. But without it, the three of us and them guys with the cameras would be out digging potatoes with a stick to eat. So changes will happen, but I make a promise. Anybody who wants a house, I will sell him a seed. No matter what happens, everybody can have a nice place to live and plenty of food to eat. I’ll even get the sauerbraten right.”
“Bare sustenance!” Scratchon said. “That’s all you’re offering. Good men don’t work for food and minimal housing. People work for status, for prestige, to make a contribution to humanity and to provide security for themselves and their loved ones. People have spent their lives building the industries that you’re trying to collapse. Worked then-hearts out so that their children and their grandchildren could live decently. And you’re trying to wreck it all!”
“Ach! You’re just saying that there won’t be so many big shots. And maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe we’ve got too many big shots pushing people around. But decency? You can be just as decent as you want in a tree house. You just got nobody to look down at, because they can live just as good as you!”
With all of the art of a true real estate salesman, Scratchon shifted gears.
“I think you’re trying to sidestep the major issue here. The modern home is the product of thousands of years of refinements, the collective work of humanity. These tree things are basically untried and unsound. No one knows if they’ll last.”
“Ach! You got a brick as old as a redwood?”
“Our homes are symbols of our status, of our contributions to society.”
“Big shot,” Guibedo muttered, but Scratchon continued uninterrupted.
“Oh, the idea of living free of charge sounds okay at first. There’s a little larceny in all of us.” Scratchon gave the camera a toothy smile. “And the idea of living in a tree might bring out a childish romanticism in some. But to give up our solid, modern homes, full of modern conveniences, to live like apes in a tree? The whole concept is absurd. Personally, I wouldn’t live in one if you gave it tome!”
“I would give you one if you would live in it,” Guibedo said. “All you have said, you have said from ignorance. You don’t know how nice they are. Try for yourself. You will love them like I do.”
“Get serious, Guibedo. I’d be the laughingstock of the neighborhood. Anyway, I’ve got a business to run. I don’t have time for gardening.”
“I’ll plant if for you, Burty, and I’ll take care of it. We put it in your backyard, so you and everybody can compare it with your old house.”
Scratchon thought about the comparison between a tree house and his $450,000 Tudor brick home in Forest Hills. Yeah, he thought, and with the economy being what it is, Shadow Lawn Estates, Inc., can use all the publicity it can get.
“Ms. Cambridge, if I go through with this stunt, would you give it proper television coverage?”
“Why, of course, Mr. Scratchon. An experiment like this would make a wonderful program.”
“Plant your tree, Guibedo.”
“You’ll give it an honest try? Promise to live in it for a year, or at least six months?” Guibedo said.
“You’ve got a deal, Guibedo. We’ll show people what living in a tree is really like.”
Chapter Two
SEPTEMBER 20, 1999
GETTING RICH is easy. It just takes a lot of work.
The average person spends fifty-six hours a week sleeping, forty hours a week making money, and the remaining ninety-two hours in the week spending money. If you work one hundred hours a week, you have two and a half times the income but only thirty-two hours a week to spend it in.
It helps to get in on the ground floor of a new industry, as I did with medical instrumentation. It usually helps to be a bachelor. And being crippled results in having fewer distractions. But the important thing is to get yourself into the habit of working yourself to your very limits.
Heinrich Copernick sat in front of his biomonitoring console. A thin plastic tube, red with his blood, ran from his left thigh to the machine. A similar tube ran from the console back to his leg. But the blood it carried was discolored with the chemicals that had been added to it.
“The calcium level is a bit low again,” Copernick muttered to himself as he typed in revised instructions to the mixer.
The white numbers on his panel were generated by a Cray Model 12 computer in the next room from a complete analog of the biochemical reactions taking place within his body. Even with the algorithms developed by his Uncle Martin, the program had taken more than two years to write.
Below each white prediction number was a status readout of his actual biochemistry. These were all green except for calcium, which was still in the yellow.
The phone rang. Copernick had disconnected the video section before he started his self-modification program.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Copernick? This is Lou von Bork.”
“Hello, Lou. How goes it in Washington?”
“So-so. You know that bill to put tree houses under the jurisdiction of the Food and Drug Administration? Well, I fixed it so it will die in committee.”
“Great! Old Anne Cary will spit nickels when she hears about it.”
“Yeah. I just hope that I don’t get in range. She’ll be at it again next year. And then she’ll have the banking people behind her, besides the construction unions.”
“Then we’ll just have to lick them again.”
“What do you mean ‘we,’ Mr. Copernick? I’m out here with nothing but a smile and a shoeshine.”
“And you are doing a fine job. You and your six technicians and nine million dollars worth of equipment. Now what’s the bad news?”
“HEW. They just passed a ruling that discriminates against people living in your uncle’s tree houses. Not through Congress. A departmental ruling. Not a thing that I could do about it.”
“Just what did they do?” Copernick asked.
“Cut in half the welfare benefits of anybody living in one. Think we should fight it? In court, I mean.”
“Sounds pretty expensive. Let’s let this one pass. A guy with a tree house can still live well on five hundred dollars a month.”
“You’re probably right, sir. Anyway, odds are the welfare types will do the suing for us.”
“And doing it with the government’s lawyers. Anything else?”
“Oh, the army is talking about using them for barracks. The National Real Estate Board wants to make them illegal. And the State Department is thinking about donating a few million seeds to the Africans. But I don’t think that anything will come of any of it.”