And the president was ready to come home any day now. He was running out of excuses to stay in Europe. If he did so much longer, Russia would be sure he was planning a new world war. Nothing else would keep him overseas that long.
Dr. Pensoitte checked out of the motel, and Harold W. Smith was left with a breakfast of prune whip yogurt, a half grapefruit, black coffee, dry toast, and a morning newspaper talking about the strange attacks at the White House and the mysterious sudden presidential trip to Europe.
The Earth Goodness workers to whom he had given his $5,000 came into the motel restaurant with two shoe boxes. They were talking happily. Revvers College had been a good stop for Dr. Pensoitte. There was over $40,000 collected, and that didn't include the heavy contributions
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in checks. No wonder they hadn't been impressed with Smith's $5,000. And no wonder they didn't have money problems.
In one shoe box, they kept the bankbook and all donations. In the other shoebox, they kept a list of new members' names. When they got back to their office in Washington, D.C., they would have a little old woman type out the new names by hand and put them on addressograph plates. Every few months, when they got around to it, they would send out appeals for money. Receipts for expenditures were kept in an old Jobbo Cleanser barrel. Just before tax time, they would take the barrel down to an accounting service in a discount chain store and have the man do the Earth Goodness Society's books for the year. It cost a hundred dollars and occasionally, they would be a few hundred dollars off the mark in receipts. Every year they had enough money though to sponsor a $'/2 million rally and a $4 million television education show.
The excess millions were left to grow.
In brief, they were as stable as a seabed.
All this Smith picked up while pretending to read his paper and listening to them complain about how they were really disorganized. They were disorganized, said one of the girls, because they had lost one receipt from the day before.
She was talking about a factor of less than five dollars. Smith dropped his hotel spoon into the yogurt and moved in on this one dangling thread.
He introduced himself as the man who had donated $5,000 the day before. One of the girls remembered him. Somewhat.
"I'd like to help," Smith said. "1 see you have problems with receipts, and that's just what I'm good at. I'm retired pretty much, and I would love to do the scut work
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for you. You need to be freed for the bigger things, the things only young people can do right."
"You've been listening in on our conversation," said one.
"I have," Smith admitted. "I'm just sort of an old bookkeeper sort. I've done a lot of harm to this earth in my lifetime, and if I can make it up by helping you, in just little things, I would be deeply grateful."
"We already have a bookkeeper."
"I'll be her assistant. I'll be a gofer. You've got to let me make up for desecrating Mother Earth. I've been such a human about it."
"I don't know. We kind of run sort of well now."
"You're too important to run sort of well. You've got to run perfectly. Your minds have got to be freed from the drudgery of receipt taking and motel room planning. Let h be planned for you."
"But that's our job."
"Your job is to save the world from people like the one I used to be. 1 took the blessings of the earth and made artificial fertilizer to inject into earth's sacred skin so someone could make money. I'm so ashamed."
As he said this, Smith was making an adjustment in the box listing new members. He noticed one corner of the lid wasn't on right. When he adjusted it, it accidentally fell off and the entire box was a mess. "Let me straighten it out," he volunteered. By lunch he was making their hotel reservations, and by supper, he had made his major breakthrough.
They were going to let him give them full and easy access to all their information, immediately, through the use of a computer. Mailing lists were going to go out at the flick of a switch. Receipts would be called up with the touch of another switch. They would have versatility and easy power such as they had never dreamed of.
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He even got a thank you call from Dr. Pensoitte herself. But she got off the phone quickly and didn't know his name. It didn't matter. He was on his way. In three days, she would be clinging to his arm for help, and she was going to be helpless without him, her closest advisor. And then.he would find out where in the organization a killer arm lurked, and he would intercept it and attack.
He got a mainline computer into their Washington office in the morning before the bookkeeper arrived. Since the little old lady wasn't capable of programming the computer or entering the records, there had to be programmers.
With programmers, of course, there came a personnel director and a personnel committee. There also had to be special programs designed precisely to make Earth Goodness more cost-effective. That used only a few hundred thousand dollars of the surplus.
Instead of Earth Goodness dipping into the bank account to pay all medical bills, Smith drew up a medical program with program director, a minority program, a citizens' awareness program, a rehabilitation program for criminals and, of course, security guards, which he explained were always a necessity when you had a rehabilitation program.
But he was still only nibbling away at the hundreds of thousands. There were millions yet to consume, and a whole day was gone.
It was not until he got the army and navy to help that the battle was won.
Because everything was at their fingertips in the form of a computer identification system for employees, who now numbered over 200, the original Earth Goodness staff in Washington had no more idea of who they were hiring than if they had tried to read the names in the stars.
The Admiral of the Fleet and the Lieutenant General
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arrived at Earth Goodness on the day of their retirement from the armed services. Smith gave them one instruction.
"Gentlemen, I am trying to conserve money. Therefore, I will give you only half of anything you ask for. But other than that, you are in charge. Make us lean and mean. Cut costs to the bone."
Within two days, under the leadership of these service academy graduates, Earth Goodness, Inc. was $42 million in debt, and if they cut back all programs by half the next year, they would be running a $ 127 million deficit. It cost forty dollars every time the toilet was flushed, and the lowest bid on an office throw rug was $13,782.58, and that did not include delivery, which was extra.
But to make sure there was no climbing out of the hole, Smith cut off all chances of retreat. He retired the little old lady and her addressograph cards. He threw out the Jobbo barrel and retained the most prestigious law firm in Washington for a crash organization program.
Once these people had put their minds to it, there was no way to get back to simple management, even with the Jobbo barrel. The lawyers created the grand illusion that with them on hand, somehow all the chaos would be manageable.
The true nature of the disaster, however, was not lost on Dr. Mildred Pensoitte. Just as Smith had planned.
"My lord, we have to launch a giant fund-raising campaign just to buy the stamps to launch another fund-raising campaign. We're running around in circles, and if we stop, we'll be crushed."
At that moment, a very conservative lemon-faced man in a three-piece gray suit walked into her New York City offices with a plan to absolutely, brutally cut everything in half no matter who or what was destroyed. Fire, discharge, close down, cut back, no matter what. He was an expert at it, he assured her.
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His named was Harry Smith, he said.