Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [20]
He ran in place, trying to make a right-angle turn in Beatrice’s direction. Faster and faster he ran, and still he could get no traction.
He became translucent.
He began to shrink, to fizz crazily on the foyer floor like a ping-pong ball in a frying pan.
Then he disappeared.
There was no dog any more.
Without looking behind, Beatrice knew that her husband had disappeared, too.
"Kazak?" she said faintly. She snapped her fingers, as though to attract a dog. Her fingers were too weak to make a sound.
"Nice doggy," she whispered.
3
UNITED HOTCAKE PREFERRED
"Son—they say there isn’t any royalty in this country, but do you want me to tell you how to be king of the United States of America? Just fall through the hole in a privy and come out smelling like a rose."
—NOEL CONSTANT
MAGNUM OPUS, the Los Angeles Corporation that managed Malachi Constant’s financial affairs, was founded by Malachi’s father. It had a thirty-one-story building for its home. While Magnum Opus owned the whole building, it used only the top three floors, renting out the rest to corporations it controlled.
Some of these corporations, having been sold recently by Magnum Opus, were moving out. Others, having been bought recently by Magnum Opus, were moving in.
Among the tenants were Galactic Spacecraft, Moon-Mist Tobacco, Fandango Petroleum, Lennox Monorail, Fry-Kwik, Sani-Maid Pharmaceuticals, Lewis and Marvin Sulfur, Dupree Electronics, Universal Piezoelectric, Psychokinesis Unlimited, Ed Muir Associates, Max-Mor Machine Tools, Wilkinson Paint and Varnish, American Levitation, Flo-Fast, King O’Leisure Shirts, and the Emblem Supreme Casualty and Life Assurance Company of California.
The Magnum Opus Building was a slender, prismatic, twelve-sided shaft, faced on all twelve sides with blue-green glass that shaded to rose at the base. The twelve sides were said by the architect to represent the twelve great religions of the world. So far, no one had asked the architect to name them.
That was lucky, because he couldn’t have done it.
There was a private heliport on top.
The shadow and flutter of Constant’s helicopter settling to the heliport seemed to many of the people below to be like the shadow and flutter of the Bright Angel of Death. It seemed that way because of the stock-market crash, because money and jobs were so scarce—
And it seemed especially that way to them because the things that had crashed the hardest, that had pulled everything down with them, were the enterprises of Malachi Constant.
Constant was flying his own helicopter, since all his servants had quit the night before. Constant was flying it badly. He set it down with a crash that sent shivers through the building.
He was arriving for a conference with Ransom K. Fern, President of Magnum Opus.
Fern waited for Constant on the thirty-first floor—a single, vast room that was Constant’s office.
The office was spookily furnished, since none of the furniture had legs. Everything was suspended magnetically at the proper height. The tables and the desk and the bar and the couches were floating slabs. The chairs were tilted, floating bowls. And most eerie of all, pencils and pads were scattered at random through the air, ready to be snatched by anyone who had an idea worth writing down.
The carpet was as green as grass for the simple reason that it was grass—living grass as lush as any putting green.
Malachi Constant sank from the heliport deck to his office in a private elevator. When the elevator door whispered open, Constant was startled by the legless furnishings, by the floating pencils and pads. He had not been in his office for eight weeks. Somebody had refurnished the place.
Ransom K. Fern, aging President of Magnum Opus, stood at a floor-to-ceiling window, looking out over the city. He wore his black Homburg hat and his black Chesterfield coat. He carried his whangee walking stick at port arms. He was exceedingly thin—always had been.
"A butt like two beebees," Malachi Constant’s father