“I gather she’s responsible for the mechanical styles women are affecting here at the moment, as though they were built in a factory and not born of a mother.”
“Right. She’s planning to hold a party. It’ll be a microcosm of what I mean, all there in the one apartment and dripping slime. I should drag you along with me, and then perhaps you’d—”
He stopped in mid-sentence, suddenly appalled at what he was saying and who he was saying it to.
“Mr. Masters, I’m dreadfully sorry! I have no business to talk to you this way!” Rising to his feet, covered in embarrassment. “I ought to be thanking you very sincerely for your tolerance, and here I am insulting you and…”
“Sit down,” Elihu said.
“What?”
“I said sit down. I haven’t finished, even if you have. Do you feel you owe me anything?”
“Of course. If I hadn’t been able to talk to somebody tonight, I think I’d have gone insane.”
“How well you express my feelings,” Elihu said with ponderous irony. “May I take it that right now you aren’t excessively concerned with GT’s company secrets remaining inviolate?”
“I know too damned well that they aren’t.”
“I’m sorry?” Elihu blinked.
“A private problem … Oh, why try and hide it? The shiggy I’ve been keeping around lately turned out this evening to be an industrial spy; my roomie discovered an eavesdropping gadget hidden in a polyorgan she brought with her.” Norman gave a harsh laugh. “Anything you want to know, just ask—I can always claim she was the one who got away with the secret.”
“I’d rather you told me openly if you tell me at all.”
“Yes, I shouldn’t have said that. Go ahead.”
“What do GT’s people think is my purpose in approaching them?”
“I don’t know. No one has told me.”
“Have you figured it out for yourself?”
“Not exactly. I was talking about it with my roomie earlier this evening. But we didn’t reach any definite conclusion.”
“Well, suppose I were to say my intention is to sell my dearest friend into slavery to The Man, and that I believe it’s for his own good—what then?”
Norman’s mouth rounded slowly into an O. He snapped his fingers. “President Obomi?” he said.
“You’re a very intelligent man, Mr. House. Well—your verdict?”
“But what have they got that GT might want?”
“It isn’t GT as such. It’s State.”
“Not willing to risk another Isola-type crisis?”
“You’re beginning to amaze me, and I’m not joking.”
Norman looked uncomfortable. “To be frank, it was one of the ideas my roomie and I were tossing around. If I hadn’t heard it from yourself, though, I’d never have credited it.”
“Why not? GT’s annual profit is almost fifty times the gross national product of Beninia; they could buy and sell many of the underdeveloped countries.”
“Yes, but even granting their ability to do it, which I can’t contest, the question remains: what is there in Beninia that GT might want?”
“A twenty-year rehabilitation project that will create an advanced industrial bridgehead in West Africa, serviced by the best port on the Bight of Benin, able to compete on their own terms and on their own ground with the Dahomalians and the RUNGs. State has a computer analysis which suggests that the intervention of a third force is the only factor likely to prevent a war over Beninia when my good friend Zad dies—and that day can’t be as far off as I’d like it to be. He’s working himself into his grave.”
“And this will belong to GT?”
“It’ll be—mortgaged to GT, let me put it that way.”
“Then don’t do it.”
“But if the alternative is war—?”
“From the inside, from the status of a junior VP in the corporation, I say that war itself isn’t as foul as what GT can do to a man’s self-respect. Listen!” Norman leaned forward earnestly. “Do you know what they’ve duped me into doing? I subscribe to these Genealogical Research outfits, these near-crank businesses which claim to trace your descent on the basis of your genotype. And do you know I haven’t commissioned one to track my Afram heritage? I don’t know where my black ancestors came from to within two thousand miles!”
“And supposing it’s a cousin of yours—and mine—who gives the order and the armies march into Beninia! What’s going to be left of the country? The loser is going to scorch the earth behind him when he retreats, and there will be nothing left except rubble and corpses!”
Norman’s intensity faded. He shrugged and nodded. “I guess you’re right. We’re all human beings, after all.”
“Let me tell you the scheme. GT will float a loan to finance the operation, and State will buy a fifty-one percent interest through front agents—mainly African banks. GT will guarantee five per cent per annum for the twenty-year period of the project, and publish estimates of a yield in excess of eight per cent. That’s solidly based, by the way, on State’s computations; when they give the data to Shalmaneser they expect it to be confirmed. Then they’ll recruit the teaching staff, mainly among people who were colonial administrators and so on in the old days, people who are used to West African conditions. The first three years will go on diet, sanitation and building. The next decade will go on training—a literacy drive first, then a technical education programme designed to make eighty per cent of the population of Beninia into skilled workers. I see you’re looking incredulous, but I say I believe this will work. There’s no other country in the world where you could bring it off, but in Beninia you can. And the last seven years will go to build the factories, install the machine-tools, string the powerlines, level the roads—everything else, in short, to leave Beninia as the most advanced country on the continent, South Africa not excepted.”
“Allah be merciful,” Norman said softly. “But where do you get the power to feed into the lines?”
“It’s going to be tidal, solar, and deep-sea thermal. Mainly the latter. The temperature gradient between the surface and the sea-bed at those latitudes could apparently run a whole country much larger than Beninia.”
Norman hesitated. “In that case,” he ventured at length, “the raw materials will presumably be coming from MAMP?”
A new cordiality entered Elihu’s manner. “As I said before, Mr. House, you suddenly astonish me. When we met earlier today your—ah—superficial image was so flawless as to conceal from me this sort of perceptivity. Yes, that’s going to be the carrot with which we coax the GT donkey into agreement: the promise of a built-in market that will enable them to put the MAMP mineral deposits to work.”
“On the basis of what you’ve told me,” Norman said, “I presume they jumped at the idea.”
“You’re the first person at GT to hear the full details.”
“The—? But why?” Norman’s question was almost a cry.
“I don’t know.” Elihu seemed suddenly weary. “I guess because I’d kept it to myself too long, and you were here when it broke loose. Shall I call Miss Buckfast and tell her I want you sent to Port Mey to conduct the initial negotiations?”
“I—wait a moment! What makes you so sure she’ll consent when you haven’t even explained the project to her?”
“I’ve met her,” Elihu said. “And I only need to meet someone once to know if this is the sort of person who’d like to own nine hundred thousand slaves.”
the happening world (5)
CITIZEN BACILLUS
Si monumentum requiris, circumspice
Take stock, citizen bacillus,
Now that there are so many billions of you,
Bleeding through your opened veins
Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific,
Of that by which they may remember you.
Gravestones, citizen bacillus?
“Here lies in God the beloved husband