But when I told Ruth that was what I wanted, she said, “Look, Ben. Maybe I can jockey the ship over without all that fuss.”
And she did. We got everything back on board, strapped ourselves into our bunks, and Ruth brought the Isabel shuddering up to a few hundred feet of altitude, tilted her forward for a moment, and then brought her shuddering back down on her own white tail flame. It was a gorgeous maneuver; I was astonished that it could be done at all.
When we stepped out a half hour later over smoking ground, we stood twenty yards from my hill of uranium. Ruth stood beside me looking modest but clearly pleased with herself. I turned and shook her hand warmly.
The next morning we opened the big hatchways and lowered the processing machinery to the surface. The two enjays—the nuclear jeeps—were fitted with backhoes, and Mimi and Sato each drove one while Annie had the metallurgical plowing equipment taken out and got it in place. By afternoon, fourteen people were working together and a steady stream of uranyl nitrate was moving along conveyor belts.
The Isabel, seated on her retros as she was, is nearly as tall as the Washington Monument, and a great deal thicker. I walked around her several times while the preparation of this cargo was getting underway, the piling-up of our bonanza, and then I stopped for a long silent look at the heavy boxes now escalating their way up to the empty holds. The thrill of discovery was gone. I watched this accumulation of potential wealth with something like weariness. It was beyond doubt the apex of my financial career and a mineral find almost beyond the dreams of Cortez in Mexico, yet I found myself without enthusiasm. Maybe I’m just tired, I thought. I went back on board and into my stateroom, took a bottle from the cabinet and poured myself a stiff drink. The Isabel was shuddering as her holds began to fill. I took a long swallow of Bourbon and sat wearily in my Eames chair. What it all meant for me then was merely more money. I had won my original gamble and was bringing off a coup that would stagger the financial communities of the world. Juno uranium could reverse the decline of New York, of the whole United States. If an ice age really was on its way, this uranium would keep the people of the world from freezing, would open up new possibilities even for the poorest. Especially for the poorest. And I could be, in a few years, the richest man alive.
I finished my whiskey and poured another. I felt weary. I felt as though I had done nothing and solved nothing.
Chapter 4
I believe that in the twentieth century a person could become a billionaire on four or five correct guesses and on being in the right place at the right time three times. The United States economy underwent a steady expansion during that century. A tenacious but lucky fool could quadruple his inheritance with less skill than it took to win at Monopoly. Quite a few tenacious and lucky fools did just that, and then went on to work widespread mischief with their radio stations and their crusades for Christ—that Gentile, middle-class Christ of the Texas billionaire!—and their John Birch societies and their general loutish arrogance.
There are still men and women of that kind around and I know some of them pretty well. I don’t socialize with them at their prayer breakfasts and their Permastone country-squire mansions, but I sell real estate to them from time to time. They are a rarer breed in the twenty-first century than in the last two. Ours is a dwindling economy. Energy sources and population have been shrinking for seventy years. If a person in 1940 had bought almost anything, from canned-soup factories to Australian ranchland, and hung on to it for twenty years, he would have enriched himself enormously and along the way gained a reputation for perspicacity. His sons and daughters would have been written about in the papers as though their lovers and their art purchases and their drug addictions were of national importance.
Well, it doesn’t work that way anymore. If you hang on to what you own, it loses value. Markets keep getting smaller; there are fewer people to buy canned soup. Even with the Chinese now using armpit sprays and mascara and perfumed toilet paper, the world market keeps getting smaller.
I have several ways I rely on for making money; the chief one is knowing when to sell and what to sell for. There are lots of things for sale out there and, as always, some are bargains but most are not. I buy the bargains and I know how and when to sell them. I am not a producer of wealth or of much that society needs or wants; most people like me are the same and always have been; we are really people who are either smart enough or powerful enough or rich enough to begin with, to be able to take advantage. Marx called us jackals, and, as usual, Marx was right. I’m worth about two billion and I sometimes hate myself for it.
When I was in my late thirties and making a lot of money in the declining real estate market, I went through a period of a few years collecting impressive-looking buildings on bankruptcies and by finding weaknesses in the networks of mortgages that were common in those days. It was easy, once you grasped that things were going bad faster than anybody else thought they were. It was the 2040s, the time of the uranium bust. Nobody was having any babies; the military had its crude hands on all the crude oil; whole industries were reeling; just taking the Mercedes limousines away from all those gray-templed hustlers who sat on their boards had thrown most U.S. corporations into tailspins. I was selling short like a mad Arab at a bazaar; I rescued real estate from the courts, spiffed up its paperwork, found ways of unloading it and then found ways of writing it off. Jolly times, if you had the nerve. During all this a lot of buildings passed through my hands and I hung on to a few that suited my fancy. I wound up owning what had once been a fine arts museum in San Francisco, which I lived in for six months because of some tax advantages. I also owned a house in Georgia, four banks in Dallas, the Japan Camera Center in Chicago, two solid blocks of Park Avenue in New York, and a baroque, five-story mansion at Sixty-third and Madison. I decided one rainy Thursday to make it my family home; I spent three months knocking out walls and redecorating—over fifty workmen would be there sweating away at any given time.
I think that place reflected my time in prison more than anything else. I had learned to shoot passable nineball in jail and I had a billiard room put in my mansion, with a fine nineteenth-century mahogany table. I almost never played anymore, but I loved looking at the way the green baize surface glowed under the Tiffany lamps. I had been claustrophobic sometimes in my cell and couldn’t sleep; I had a whole floor of that place as my master bedroom, with a huge bathroom each for me and Anna and an unfinished pine floor big enough for basketball. I furnished the main living room in eighteenth century; I had fallen in love with that from a picture book at the prison library: English Eighteenth-century Houses. There were gold armchairs with white brocade seats and cloisonné snuffboxes and clocks with cherubs on their faces. I bought two Fragonards, and a chandelier from a French palace. But all I remember using that room for was playing three-card stud with my accountants. We didn’t entertain. Anna spent most of her time in the bedroom, reading or making hooked rugs.
During the redecorating Anna was living with her parents upstate, in their parsonage in Watertown, and on the night before she and our daughter Myra were to come and make a grand attempt at living with me, I went to the place and poured myself a tumbler of Japanese Campari in the cathedral-ceilinged kitchen and walked around in a kind of euphoric daze for hours. I allowed myself to imagine being a paterfamilias on the grand scale. Since Anna and I had only one child, it would be necessary for us to start breeding fast, but that seemed okay at the time. There was a big nursery on the top floor. What the hell; we could have six or seven kids and reverse the trend. I didn’t know anybody else who had children. There alone in that big spooky expensive place I visualized the bustle and warmed to it. Moonlight came through high casement windows onto the floor of my cavernous living room and glistened on the cherrywood grand piano. I sat on the bench and played “Stardust” and “Bridge over Troubled Waters” soulfully and drank more Campari. I got up and went to the billiard room and played myself a game of nineball. I still remember: I ran the first seven and then miscued on the eight. I walked down to the wine cellar and counted the whites, took the walnut and brass elevator up to the fourth floor and surveyed the guest suite, done in early twenty-first century, with everything pastel and puffy, even the kitchen and butler’s pantry. I smoked a Japanese cigar, drank a glass of Japanese whisky, turned on my Japanese music system for a while, glanced through the Japanese section of the Wall Street Journal and thought briefly of buying a resort hotel near Osaka. But I wasn’t really interested, and Japanese investments troubled me; I knew her depression would worsen from buying American coal, as indeed has happened. My spirit was troubled there in my mansion and I didn’t know why. Yes, I did. It wasn’t going to work out, and I knew it then.