The President of the Stock Exchange, Samuel Norton, made us a brief, courtly speech. He was a tall, well-groomed man of middle years, easy of manner, obviously quite pleased with his place in the universe. He told us of the history of his organization, gave us some weighty statistics, boasted a bit about the current Stock Exchange headquarters, which had been built in the 1980’s, and closed by saying, “Our guide will now show you the workings of our operations in detail. When she’s finished, I’ll be happy to answer any general questions you may have — particularly those concerning the underlying philosophy of our system, which I know must be of great interest to you.
The guide was an attractive girl in her twenties with short, shiny red hair and a gray uniform artfully designed to mask her feminine characteristics. She beckoned us forward to the edge of the balcony and said, “Below us you see the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange. At the present time, four thousand one hundred twenty-five common and preferred stocks are traded on the Exchange. Dealings in bonds are handled elsewhere. In the center of the floor you see the shaft of our main computer. It extends thirteen stories into the basement and rises eight stories above us. Of the hundred floors in this building, fifty-one are used wholly or in part for the operations of this computer, including the levels for programming, decoding, maintenance, and record storage. Every transaction that takes place on the floor of the Exchange or on any of the subsidiary exchanges in other cities and countries is noted with the speed of light within this computer. At present there are eleven main subsidiary exchanges: San Francisco, Chicago, London. Zurich, Milan, Moscow, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Rio de Janeiro, Addis Ababa, and — ah — Sydney. Since these span all time zones, it is possible to carry out securities transactions twenty-four hours a day. The New York Exchange, however, is open only from ten in the morning to half past three, the traditional hours, and all ‘off-the-floor’ transactions are recorded and analyzed for the pre-opening session the following morning. Our daily volume on the main trading floor is about three hundred fifty million shares, and roughly twice that many shares are traded each day on the subsidiary exchanges. Only a generation ago such figures would have been regarded as fantastic.
“Now, how does a securities transaction take place?
“Let us say that you, Mr. Vornan, wish to purchase one hundred shares of XYZ Space Transit Corporation. You have seen in yesterday’s tapes that the market price is currently about forty dollars a share, so you know that you must invest approximately four thousand dollars. Your first step is to contact your broker, which of course can be done by a touch of your finger to your telephone. You place your order with him, and he immediately relays it to the trading floor. The particular data bank in which XYZ Space Transit transactions are recorded takes his call and notes your order. The computer conducts an auction, just as has been done in listed securities on the Exchange since 1792. The offers to sell XYZ Space Transit are matched against the offers to buy. At the speed of light it is determined that one hundred shares are available for sale at forty, and that a buyer exists. The transaction is closed and your broker notifies you. A small commission is his only charge to you; in addition there is a small fee for the computer services of the Exchange. A portion of this goes to the retirement fund of the so-called specialists who formerly handled the matching of buy and sell orders on the trading floor.
“Since everything is handled by computer, you may wonder what is taking place elsewhere on the trading floor. What you see represents a delightful Stock Exchange tradition: although not strictly necessary any longer, we maintain a staff of brokers who buy and sell securities for their own accounts, exactly as in the old days. They are following the precomputer process. Let me trace the course of a single transaction for you…”
In clean, precise tones she showed us what all the mad scurrying on the floor was about. I was startled to realize that it was done purely as a charade; the transactions were unreal and at the end of each day all accounts were canceled. The computer actually handled everything. The noise, the discarded papers, the intricate gesticulations — these were reconstructions of the archaic past, performed by men whose lives had lost their purpose. It was fascinating and depressing: a ritual of money, a running-down of the capitalistic clock. Old brokers who would not retire took part in this daily amusement, I gathered, while alongside them the monstrous shaft of the computer, which had unmanned them a decade previously, gleamed as the erect symbol of their impotence.
Our guide droned on and on, telling us of the stock ticker and the Dow-Jones averages, deciphering the cryptic symbols that drifted dreamily by on the screen, talking of bulls and bears, of short sellers, of margin requirements, of many another strange and wonderful thing. As the climax of her act she switched on a computer output and allowed us to have a squint at the boiling madhouse within the master brain, where transactions took place at improbable speeds and billions of dollars changed hands within moments.
I was awed by the awesomeness of it all. I who had never played the market felt the urge to phone my broker, if I could find one, and get plugged into the great data banks. Sell a hundred GFX! Buy two hundred CCC! Off a point! Up two! This was the core of life; this was the essence of being. The mad rhythm of it caught me completely. I longed to rush toward the computer shaft, spread my arms wide, embrace its gleaming vertical bulk. I envisioned its lines reaching out through the world, even unto the reformed socialist brethren in Moscow, threading a communion of dollars from city to city, and extending perhaps to the Moon, to our coming bases on the planets, to the stars themselves… capitalism triumphant!
The guide faded away. President Norton of the Stock Exchange stepped forward again, beaming pleasantly, and said. “Now, if I can help you with any further problems—”
“Yes,” said Vornan mildly. “What is the purpose, please, of a stock exchange?”
The executive reddened and showed signs of shock. After all this detailed explication… to have the esteemed guest ask what the whole thing was about? We looked embarrassed ourselves. None of us had thought that Vornan had come here ignorant of the basic uses of this enterprise. How had he let himself be taken to the Exchange without knowing what it was he was going to see? Why had he not asked before this? I realized once again that if he were genuine, Vornan must view us as amusing apes whose plans and schemes were funny to watch for their own sake; he was not so much interested in visiting a thing called a Stock Exchange as he was in the fact that our Government earnestly desired him to visit that thing.
“Well,” said the Stock Exchange man, “am I to understand, Mr. Vornan, that in the time that you — that you come from there is no such thing as a securities exchange?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Perhaps under some other name?”
“I can think of no equivalent.”
Consternation. “But how do you manage to transfer units of corporate ownership, then?”
Blankness. A shy, possibly mocking smile from Vornan-19.
“You do have corporate ownership?”
“Pardon,” Vornan said. “I have studied your language carefully before making my journey, but there are many gaps in my knowledge. Perhaps if you could explain some of your basic terms—”
The executive’s easy dignity began to flee. Norton’s checks were mottled, his eyes were flickering like those of a beast trapped in a cage. I had seen something of the same look on Wesley Bruton’s face when he had learned from Vornan that his magnificent villa, built to endure through the ages like the Parthenon and the Taj Mahal, had vanished and been forgotten by 2999, and would have been retained only as a curiosity, a manifestation of baroque foolishness, if it had survived. The Stock Exchange man could not comprehend Vornan’s incomprehension, and it unnerved him.