Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [21]
According to figures released by the Bureau of Internal Revenue, Fern was the highest-paid executive in the country. He had a salary of a flat million dollars a year—plus stock-option plans and cost-of-living adjustments.
He had joined Magnum Opus when he was twenty-two years old. He was sixty now.
"Some—somebody’s changed all the furniture," said Constant.
"Yes," said Fern, still looking out over the city, "somebody changed it."
"You?" said Constant.
Fern sniffed, took his time about answering. "I thought we ought to demonstrate our loyalty to some of our own products."
"I—I never saw anything like it," said Constant. "No legs —just floating in air."
"Magnetism, you know," said Fern.
"Why—why I think it looks wonderful, now that I’m getting used to it," said Constant. "And some company we own makes this stuff?"
"American Levitation Company," said Fern. "You said to buy it, so we bought it."
Ransom K. Fern turned away from the window. His face was a troubling combination of youth and age. There was no sign in the face of any intermediate stages in the aging process, no hint of the man of thirty or forty or fifty who had been left behind. Only adolescence and the age of sixty were represented. It was as though a seventeen-year-old had been withered and bleached by a blast of heat.
Fern read two books a day. It has been said that Aristotle was the last man to be familiar with the whole of his own culture. Ransom K. Fern had made an impressive attempt to equal Aristotle’s achievement. He had been somewhat less successful than Aristotle in perceiving patterns in what he knew.
The intellectual mountain had labored to produce a philosophical mouse—and Fern was the first to admit that it was a mouse, and a mangy mouse at that. As Fern expressed the philosophy conversationally, in its simplest terms:
"You go up to a man, and you say, ’How are things going, Joe?’ And he says, ’Oh, fine, fine—couldn’t be better.’ And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn’t be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody’s having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much."
This philosophy did not sadden him. It did not make him brood.
It made him heartlessly watchful.
It helped in business, too—for it let Fern assume automatically that the other fellow was far weaker and far more bored than he seemed.
Sometimes, too, people with strong stomachs found Fern’s murmured asides funny.
His situation, working for Noel Constant and then Malachi, conspired nicely to make almost anything he might say bitterly funny—for he was superior to Constant père and fils in every respect but one, and the respect excepted was the only one that really mattered. The Constants—ignorant, vulgar, and brash—had copious quantities of dumb luck.
Or had had up to now.
Malachi Constant had still to get it through his head that his luck was gone—every bit of it. He had still to get it through his head, despite the hideous news Fern had given him on the telephone.
"Gee," said Constant ingenuously, "the more I look at this furniture, the more I like it. This stuff should sell like hotcakes." There was something pathetic and repellent about Malachi Constant’s talking business. It had been the same with his father. Old Noel Constant had never known anything about business, and neither had his son—and what little charm the Constants had evaporated the instant they pretended that their successes depended on their knowing their elbows from third base.
There was something obscene about a billionaire’s being optimistic and aggressive and cunning.
"If you ask me," said Constant, "that was a pretty sound investment—a company that makes furniture like this."
"United Hotcake preferred," said Fern. United Hotcake preferred was a favorite joke of his. Whenever people came to him, begging for investment advice that would double their