Friday (35 page)

“How did you know I was cheated?”

“Come, come! We are not children.”

“Uh, may I think about it?”

“Yes. Concerning your ex-migration: I recommend that you not move to the planet Olympia. Otherwise I have no specific advice other than to migrate. When I was younger, I thought I could change this world. Now I no longer think so but for emotional reasons I must keep on fighting a holding action. But you are young and, because of your unique heritage, your emotional ties to this planet and to this portion of humanity are not great. I could not mention this until you shuffled off your sentimental connection in New Zealand—”

“
I
didn’t ‘shuffle’ it off; I was kicked out on my arse!”

“So. While you are deciding, look up Benjamin Franklin’s parable of the whistle, then tell me—no, ask yourself—whether or not you paid too much for your whistle. Enough of that—Two assignments for you: Study the Shipstone corporate complex, including its interlocks outside the complex. Second, the next time I see you I want you to tell me precisely how to spot a sick culture. That’s all.”

Boss turned his attention to his console, so I stood up. But I was not ready to accept so abrupt a dismissal as I had had no opportunity to ask important questions. “Boss. Don’t I have any duties? Just random study that goes nowhere?”

“It goes somewhere. Yes, you have duties. First, to study. Second, to be awakened in the middle of the night—or stopped in the hallway—to answer silly questions.”

“Just that?”

“What do you want? Angels and trumpets?”

“Well…a job title, maybe. I used to be a courier. What am I now? Court jester?”

“Friday, you are developing a bureaucratic mind. ‘Job title’ indeed! Very well. You are staff intuitive analyst, reporting to me only. But the title carries an injunction: You are forbidden to discuss anything more serious than a card game with any member of the analytical section of the general staff. Sleep with them if you wish—I know that you do, in two cases—but limit your conversation to the veriest trivia.”

“Boss, I could wish that you spent less time under my bed!”

“Only enough to protect the organization. Friday, you are well aware that the absence of Eyes and Ears today simply means that they are concealed. Be assured that I am shameless about protecting the organization.”

“You are shameless, unlimited. Boss, answer me one more question. Who is behind Red Thursday? The third wave sort of fizzled; will there be a fourth? What’s it all about?”

“Study it yourself. If I told you, you would not know; you simply would have been told. Study it thoroughly and some night—when you are sleeping alone—I will ask you. You will answer and then you will know.”

“Fer Gossake. Do you
always
know when I’m sleeping alone?”

“Always.” He added, “Dismissed,” and turned away.

As I left the sanctum sanctorum I ran into Goldie coming in. I was feeling grouchy and simply nodded. Not sore at Goldie. Boss! Damn him. Supercilious, arrogant voyeur! I went to my room and got to work, so that I could stop fuming.

First I punched for the names and addresses of all the Shipstone corporations. While these were printing I called for histories of the complex. The computer named two, an official company history combined with a biography of Daniel Shipstone, and an unofficial history footnoted “muckrake.” Then the machine suggested several other sources.

I told the terminal to print out both books and I asked it for printouts of other sources if four thousand words or less, summarized if not. Then I looked over the corporations list:

I looked at this list with easily controlled enthusiasm. I had known that the Shipstone trust had to be big—who does not have half a dozen Shipstones within easy reach, not counting the big one in your basement or foundation? But now it seemed to me that studying this monster would be a lifetime career. I was not that much interested in Shipstones.

I was nibbling around the edges when Goldie stopped by and told me that it was time to put on the nosebag. “And I have instructions to see to it that you do not spend more than eight hours a day at your terminal and you are to take a full weekend every week.”

“Ah so. Tyrannical old bastard.”

We started for the refectory. “Friday…”

“Yes, Goldie?”

“You are finding the Master grumpy and sometimes difficult.”

“Correction. He is always difficult.”

“Mmm, yes. But what you may not know is that he is in constant pain.” She added, “He can no longer take drugs to control it.”

We walked in silence while I chewed and swallowed that one. “Goldie? What is wrong with him?”

“Nothing, really. I would say that he is in good health…for his age.”

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know. From things I have heard I know that he is over a hundred. How much over I can’t guess.”

“Oh, no! Goldie, when I went to work for him, he could not have been more than seventy. Oh, he used canes but he was very spry. He moved as fast then as anyone.”

“Well…it’s not important. But you might remember that he hurts. If he is rude to you, it is pain talking. He thinks highly of you.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Ah… I’ve talked too much about my patient. Let’s eat.”

In studying the Shipstone corporate complex I did not attempt to study Shipstones. The way—the only way—to study Shipstones would be to go back to school, get a Ph.D. in physics, add on some intense postdoctoral study in both solid state and plasma, get a job with one of the Shipstone companies and so impress them with your loyalty and your brilliance that you are at long last part of the inner circle controlling fabrication and quality.

Since that involves about twenty years that I should have started back in my teens, I assumed that Boss did not intend me to take that route.

So let me quote from the official or propaganda history:

Prometheus, a Brief Biography and Short Account of the Unparalleled Discoveries of Daniel Thomas Shipstone, BS., MA., Ph.D., LL.D., L.H.D., and of the Benevolent System He Founded.

—thus young Daniel Shipstone saw at once that the problem was not a shortage of energy but lay in the transporting of energy. Energy is everywhere—in sunlight, in wind, in mountain streams, in temperature gradients of all sorts wherever found, in coal, in fossil oil, in radioactive ores, in green growing things. Especially in ocean depths and in outer space energy is free for the taking in amounts lavish beyond all human comprehension.

Those who spoke of “energy scarcity” and of “conserving energy” simply did not understand the situation. The sky was “raining soup”; what was needed was a bucket in which to carry it.

With the encouragement of his devoted wife Muriel (née Greentree), who went back to work to keep food on the table, young Shipstone resigned from General Atomics and became the most American of myth-heroes, the basement inventor. Seven frustrating and weary years later he had fabricated the first Shipstone by hand. He had found—

What he had found was a way to pack more kilowatt-hours into a smaller space and a smaller mass than any other engineer had ever dreamed of. To call it an “improved storage battery” (as some early accounts did) is like calling an H-bomb an “improved firecracker.” What he had achieved was the utter destruction of the biggest industry (aside from organized religion) of the western world.

For what happened next I must draw from the muckraking history and from other independent sources as I just don’t believe the sweetness and light of the company version. Fictionalized speech attributed to Muriel Shipstone:

“Danny Boy, you are not going to patent the gadget. What would it get you? Seventeen years at the most…and no years at all in three-fourths of the world. If you did patent or try to, Edison, and P. G. and E., and Standard would tie you up with injunctions and law suits and claimed infringements and I don’t know what all. But you said yourself that you could put one of your gadgets in a room with the best research team G.A. has to offer and the best they could do would be to melt it down and the worst would be that they would blow themselves up. You said that. Did you mean it?”

“Certainly. If they don’t know how I insert the—”

“
Hush!
I don’t want to know. And walls have ears. We don’t make any fancy announcements; we simply start manufacturing. Wherever power is cheapest today. Where is that?”

The muckraking author fairly frothed at the “cruel, heartless monopoly” held by the Shipstone complex over the prime necessities of “all the little people everywhere.” I could not see it that way. What Shipstone and his companies did was to make plentiful and cheap what used to be scarce and dear—this is “cruel” and “heartless”?

The Shipstone companies do not have a monopoly over energy. They don’t own coal or oil or uranium or water power. They do lease many, many hectares of desert land…but there is far more desert not being cropped for sunshine than the Shipstone trust is using. As for space, it is impossible to intercept even one percent of all the sunshine going to waste inside the orbit of Luna, impossible by a factor of many millions. Do the arithmetic yourself otherwise you’ll never believe the answer.

So what is their crime?

Twofold:

a) The Shipstone companies are guilty of supplying energy to the human race at prices below those of their competitors;

b) They meanly and undemocratically decline to share their industrial secret of the final assembly stage of a Shipstone.

This latter is, in the eyes of many people, a capital offense. My terminal dug out many editorials on “the people’s right to know,” others on “the insolence of giant monopolies,” and other displays of righteous indignation.

The Shipstone complex is mammoth, all right, because they supply cheap power to billions of people who want cheap power and want more of it every year. But it is not a monopoly because they don’t own any power; they just package it and ship it around to wherever people want it. Those billions of customers could bankrupt the Shipstone complex almost overnight by going back to their old ways—burn coal, burn wood, burn oil, “burn” uranium, distribute power through continent-wide stretches of copper and aluminum wires and/or long trains of coal cars and tank cars.

But no one, so far as my terminal could dig out, wants to go back to the bad old days when the landscape was disfigured in endless ways and the very air was loaded with stinks and carcinogens and soot, and the ignorant were scared silly by nuclear power, and
all
power was scarce and expensive. No, nobody wants the bad old ways—even the most radical of the complainers want cheap and convenient power…they just want the Shipstone companies to go away and get lost.

“The people’s right to know”—the people’s right to know
what?
Daniel Shipstone, having first armed himself with great knowledge of higher mathematics and physics, went down into his basement and patiently suffered seven lean and weary years and thereby learned an applied aspect of natural law that let him construct a Shipstone.

Any and all of “the people” are free to do as he did—he did not even take out a patent. Natural laws are freely available to everyone equally, including flea-bitten Neanderthals crouching against the cold.

In this case, the trouble with “the people’s right to know” is that it strongly resembles the “right” of someone to be a concert pianist—but who does not want to practice.

But I am prejudiced, not being human and never having had any rights.

Whether you prefer the saccharine company version or the vitriolic muckraker’s version, the basic facts about Daniel Shipstone and the Shipstone complex are well known and beyond argument. What surprised me (shocked me, in fact) was what I learned when I started digging into ownership, management, and direction.