Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut [25]
"Mr. Constant," he said, "right now you’re as easy for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to watch as a man on a street corner selling apples and pears. But just imagine how hard you would be to watch if you had a whole office building jammed to the rafters with industrial bureaucrats—men who lose things and use the wrong forms and create new forms and demand everything in quintuplicate, and who understand perhaps a third of what is said to them; who habitually give misleading answers in order to gain time in which to think, who make decisions only when forced to, and who then cover their tracks; who make perfectly honest mistakes in addition and subtraction, who call meetings whenever they feel lonely, who write memos whenever they feel unloved; men who never throw anything away unless they think it could get them fired. A single industrial bureaucrat, if he is sufficiently vital and nervous, should be able to create a ton of meaningless papers a year for the Bureau of Internal Revenue to examine. In the Magnum Opus Building, we will have thousands of them! And you and I can have the top two stories, and you can go on keeping track of what’s really going on the way you do now." He looked around the room. "How do you keep track now, by the way— writing with a burnt match on the margins of a telephone directory?"
"In my head," said Noel Constant.
"There is one more advantage I have yet to point out," said Fern. "Some day your luck is going to run out. And then you’re going to need the shrewdest, most thorough manager you can hire—or you’ll crash all the way back to pots and pans."
"You’re hired," said Noel Constant, father of Malachi.
"Now, where should we erect the building?" said Fern.
"I own this hotel, and this hotel owns the lot across the street," said Noel Constant. "Build it on the lot across the street." He held up an index finger as crooked as a crankshaft. "There’s just one thing—"
"Yes, sir?" said Fern.
"I’m not moving into it," said Noel Constant. "I’m staying right here."
Those who want more detailed histories of Magnum Opus, Inc., can go to their public libraries and ask for either Lavina Waters’ romantic Too Wild a Dream? or Crowther Gomburg’s harsh Primordial Scales.
Miss Waters’ volume, while fuddled as to business details, contains the better account of the chambermaid Florence Whitehill’s discovery that she was pregnant by Noel Constant, and her discovery that Noel Constant was a multi-multi-millionaire.
Noel Constant married the chambermaid, gave her a mansion and a checking account with a million dollars in it. He told her to name the child Malachi if it was a boy, and Prudence if it was a girl. He asked her to please keep coming to see him once every ten days in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton Hotel, but not to bring the baby.
Gomburg’s book, while first-rate on business details, suffers from Gomburg’s central thesis, to the effect that Magnum Opus was a product of a complex of inabilities to love. Reading between the lines of Gomburg’s book, it is increasingly clear that Gomburg is himself unloved and unable to love.
Neither Miss Waters nor Gomburg, incidentally, discovered Noel Constant’s investment method. Ransom K. Fern never discovered it either, though he tried hard enough.
The only person Noel Constant ever told was his son, Malachi, on Malachi’s twenty-first birthday. That birthday party of two took place in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton. It was the first time father and son had ever met.
Malachi had come to see Noel by invitation.
Human emotions being what they are, young Malachi Constant paid more attention to a detail in the room’s furnishings than he did to the secret of how to make millions or even billions of dollars.
The money-making secret was so simple-minded to begin with, that it didn’t require much attention. The most complicated part of it had to do with the manner in which young Malachi was to pick up the torch of Magnum Opus when Noel had, at long last, laid it down. Young Malachi