Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [22]
"Sitting on an American Levitation couch is harder than standing up in a birchbark canoe," said Fern dryly. "Throw yourself into one of these so-called chairs, and it will bounce you off the wall like a stone out of a sling-shot. Sit on the edge of your desk, and it will waltz you around the room like a Wright brother at Kitty Hawk."
Constant touched his desk ever so lightly. It shuddered nervously.
"Well—they still haven’t got all of the bugs out of it, that’s all," said Constant.
"Truer words were never spoken," said Fern.
Constant now made a plea that he had never had to make before. "A guy is entitled to a mistake now and then," he said.
"Now and then?" said Fern, raising his eyebrows. "For three months you have made nothing but wrong decisions, and you’ve done what I would have said was impossible. You’ve succeeded in more than wiping out the results of almost forty years of inspired guessing."
Ransom K. Fern took a pencil from the air and broke it in two. "Magnum Opus is no more. You and I are the last two people in the building. Everyone else has been paid off and sent home."
He bowed and moved toward the door. "The switchboard has been arranged so that all incoming calls will come directly to your desk here. And when you leave, Mr. Constant, sir, remember to turn out the lights and lock the front door."
A history of Magnum Opus, Inc., is perhaps in order at this point.
Magnum Opus began as an idea in the head of a Yankee traveling salesman of copper-bottomed cookware. That Yankee was Noel Constant, a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was the father of Malachi.
The father of Noel, in turn, was Sylvanus Constant, a loom fixer in the New Bedford Mills of the Nattaweena Division of the Grand Republic Woolen Company. He was an anarchist, though he never got into any trouble about it, except with his wife.
The family could trace its line back through an illegitimacy to Benjamin Constant, who was a tribune under Napoleon from 1799 to 1801, and a lover of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Stael-Holstein, wife of the then Swedish ambassador to France.
One night in Los Angeles, at any rate, Noel Constant got it into his head to become a speculator. He was thirty-nine at the time, single, physically and morally unattractive, and a business failure. The idea of becoming a speculator came to him as he sat all alone on a narrow bed in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton Hotel.
The most valuable corporate structure ever to be owned by one man could not have had humbler headquarters in the beginning. Room 223 of the Wilburhampton was eleven feet long and eight feet wide, and had neither telephone nor desk.
What it did have was a bed, a three-drawer dresser, old newspapers lining the drawers, and, in the bottom drawer, a Gideon Bible. The newspaper page that lined the middle drawer was a page of stock-market quotations from fourteen years before.
There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive?
The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks water from the springs of the bed.
This comes very close to describing the genesis of Magnum Opus. The materials with which Noel Constant built his fortune were hardly more nourishing in themselves than calendar dates and bedsprings.
Magnum Opus was built with a pen, a check book, some check-sized Government envelopes, a Gideon Bible, and a bank balance of eight thousand, two hundred and twelve dollars.
The bank balance was Noel Constant’s share in the estate of his anarchist father. The estate had consisted principally of Government bonds.
And Noel Constant had an investment program. It was simplicity itself. The Bible would be his investment counselor.
There are those who have concluded, after studying Noel Constant’s investment pattern, that he was either a genius or had a superb system of industrial spies.
He invariably picked the stock