Hieroglyph (45 page)

He'd never thought much about hotels before then. But—with his company imploded, and his thoughts circling in meaningless spirals—it was the only thing he could latch on to. He needed to think about something else or go crazy. And so he studied the hotel, Mistry Majestic Long Island, in obsessive detail. How would it be different if it were on the moon? On Mars? In orbit? He decided that yes, it might work. It just might work.

“I'm an entrepreneur,” he said. “I can do it.” It was midafternoon on a weekday. He was alone in a hotel room three grades fancier than anything he could have afforded, and he was talking to himself. He walked past the queen-sized bed, threw open the sliding glass doors, stepped through to the tiny balcony, and shouted to the ocean, “I can do this.”

Or maybe it had all started long before that, the summer after his sophomore year at MIT. They had planted a seed, and Zak had carried it with him all those years.

That all-night session in the lounge outside their dorm rooms, they had been too young to legally drink, but with the help of some French grad students who didn't think much of American rules about alcohol, a small group of them were splitting a cooler full of Narragansett. Zak was expounding on how to colonize Mars, something he worked out in great detail, from the air-handling and regeneration system all the way to the sewage system. Saladin, always the voice of cynicism, pointed out at every opportunity “you don't know that,” and “that's never been tested,” and “what if it breaks down, and you need a spare part you don't have?” Eventually, Saladin made an argument. “Look, Zak. Seriously. Mars is way more hostile than you can imagine. It's colder than Antarctica, has less air than the top of Mount Everest, is drier than the Mojave, and is harder to get to than the bottom of the Marianas Trench. You say people are going to live there; it's our destiny? Fine. So we need room that bad, how come we don't have condos in Antarctica? Why no cities on the bottom of the Pacific? Why isn't the Gobi Desert populated? Those are vastly easier places to live than Mars. Yet nobody lives there.”

“People live in the Gobi Desert.”

“Maybe one person in a hundred square miles. You know how freaking big the Gobi is? It's empty.”

“People live in Antarctica, too.”

“Yeah, right—science stations. I mean, people who really
live
there, not just scientists on a glorified camping trip. You think humanity needs room? There's a whole continent we're not using.

“You think you can build a colony on Mars? Prove it. Build a hotel on Mount Everest. Or Antarctica; a hotel in Antarctica. That's a thousand times easier, but it's still damn hard. A hotel in Antarctica, that will show me you've got a clue, Zak. Call it an existence proof.”

“Don't be silly. Who in the world would you get to stay in a hotel in Antarctica?”

He looked around the room for support, but to his surprise, a handful of the sophomores were nodding. One, a kid whose name Zak had long ago forgotten, said, “Me. I'd go.” Another kid said, “Sure. Awesome skiing. Make it a ski lodge.” “Penguins,” another kid said, at the same time a fourth one said, “Set up tours to see the aurora.”

“See,” Saladin said. “There you go. Extreme tourism, that's the ticket. You got a market. Make me a hotel.”

“Drunken sophomores?” Zak said. “That's a market?”

“Build it and they will come.”

Some twelve years later, Izak Cerny slid a sheet of hotel stationery from the fake mahogany desk of a hotel room he couldn't afford. Underneath the letterhead “Hotel Mistry,” he wrote: “A hotel in Antarctica 1. Because it's really cool. 2. Because it's never been done. 3. Because it's expanding humanity into a new frontier. 4. As a step toward Mars. 5. To make money. 6. Because it's really cool, also penguins.” Then he wrote “people will want this.” He circled that twice and wrote in the margin, “!!emphasize this point!!”

The desk drawer held a privately printed autobiography of Gajadhar Mistry, founder of the hotel chain. An identical volume was in every room of the hotel: promotional reading for a million bored businesspeople who had already finished the
Wall Street Journal
. The motto of the founder was in boldface across the cover: “What others call obstacles, I call stepping-stones!”

Zak mined the book for relevant details, and then swiveled over to his laptop. He already had eight windows open, with searches on the geography and ecology of Antarctica. He opened a new browser window and typed in “Gajadhar Mistry.” He would try Google first and then check LinkedIn. He knew a lot of people. Somewhere in his network of friends and connections and friends of friends, there was someone who could put him in touch with Gajadhar Mistry.

GAJADHAR MISTRY HAD BLOW-DRIED
silver-gray hair that made him look like the uncle character in a Bollywood thriller. But other than that, he still had the body of a much younger man, muscles showing that he regularly worked out with his personal fitness trainer. He wore a T-shirt and jeans. When you're a billionaire who owns top-end hotels in twenty countries, apparently you don't care what anybody thinks of how you dress.

“My friends tell me that I should talk with you,” Mistry said. “So, tell me.
Why
should I talk with you?”

“I want to tell you about an idea—”

“Yes, yes.” Mistry waved his hands. “You want to build a space colony. I read the package you put together. It's crazy.”

Zak interrupted. “It's not a crazy idea. The space colony is just an example. It's about a self-sustaining biosphere to live in a hostile environment. Antarctica—”

Mistry raised a hand. “I have no problem with crazy ideas. The fact that your ideas are crazy is not a downside for me, Mr. Cerny—” He broke off. “Mr. Cerny, that's formal, and I am not a formal kind of guy. May I call you Izak?”

“Just Zak.”

“Zak. Excellent. Please call me Jerry. Now, Zak. Your ideas are crazy. Antarctica! Space hotels! Crazy indeed. But I like crazy ideas. I will let you convince me. And maybe your idea is not so completely crazy at all.”

“It's not.”

“Let me tell you,” Mistry said. “I have made a small fortune building luxury hotels catering to the extreme tourism market. My first hotel was for the jungle-trekking tourists, in Chiang Mai. You already knew that? Ah, you've read my book. Excellent, I see you do your homework. Tourists love elephants.” He waved his hand at the wall of the office. It was covered with photos taken at his various hotels, half of them featuring wild animals, with tourists on elephants in two of them. “The hotel in Chiang Mai was built on the backs of elephants—not literally, of course. Everybody loves elephants. Wonderful beasts. Penguins, now—I expect that some people would pay something to frolic with penguins, yes. And skiing, of course. Especially when it is summer in Japan and America.

“Now. Space colonies I have no interest in. But Antarctica? Crazy, but maybe crazy in a good way. Crazy the way I like.”

Mistry leaned back in his chair and folded his hands together, fingertips to fingertips. “But my question is, why should I talk to
you
? You already gave me your idea.”

Zak started to object, but Mistry raised his hand for silence again. “Yes, you gave it to me. Ideas can't be copyrighted. Once you sent me your package—thank you, and you have no ownership. I read your résumé. You have a physics degree from MIT, very impressive, you worked for several small technology businesses. Then you broke away to form your own company, which I see failed and went bankrupt in a most spectacular fashion. Now, maybe I like your idea. A hotel in Antarctica. I like the audacity. I'm
charmed
by your idea.”

He leaned forward and placed his elbows on the desk. “But I don't see that you know anything about building hotels. Why do I want
you
?”

Zak looked him in the eye. Mistry held his gaze and waited. “You don't know me,” Zak said. “You don't know this about me.” He enunciated each word separately, as if it were its own sentence. “I. Will. Make. This. Happen.”

Mistry rocked back in his chair and laughed. “Perfect! Really, that is most excellent. I admire your certainty. My first two companies failed, did you know that? I don't hold your failures against you, not as long as you learned what you needed to know. That is what I look for in a person. You're hired. Convinced me.”

“I was thinking to work as a consultant,” Zak said. “I can—”

“I'm sorry,” Mistry cut him off. “If you work for me, you will work for me. I will assure you that, as long as I like your work, you will not be objecting to the salary I offer, but I have this thing, Zak, perhaps it is a flaw. Perhaps not. But I demand control. Nonnegotiable.”

Mistry held his gaze, and for a moment neither one spoke. Finally Zak broke the silence. “Accepted.”

Mistry smiled. “Excellent. Most excellent. Now, there are some people I need you to meet . . .”

IT TURNED OUT THAT
“people that Mistry wanted him to meet” consisted of a woman in her sixties: Mrs. Jeanne Binder. She wore an enormous pair of round eyeglasses and, as far as he could see, a perpetual scowl. “I trust Mrs. Binder with everything,” Mistry told Zak. “Whatever she tells you, please be assured that I say exactly the same thing.”

Zak and Mistry were back in Mistry's office, in the penthouse suite of an art deco hotel in Miami Beach. As he talked, Mistry went through a large pile of paperwork methodically, signing things without, as far as Zak could see, looking at them.

“What does she do?” Zak asked. “What do I need her for?”

“Everything,” Mistry said.

“She's an architect? Structural engineer? Hotel manager? What?”

“If that's what you need, yes.”

“She can't have expertise in everything.”

“She most certainly can. She
hires
expertise.”

“But what does she do?”

“My friend Zak, your ideas may be crazy, and I told you I like that. But one thing cannot be crazy. It is Mrs. Binder's task to make sure that the thing that is not crazy is the money. Mrs. Binder is your accountant.”

“Great,” Zak said. “An accountant. And she's running the show?”

Mistry clapped him on the shoulder. “You'll be great friends.”

BEFORE HE LEFT—MISTRY APPARENTLY
never spent more than a few days anywhere—he had an entire floor of the hotel in Miami Beach cleared out, converting a large conference room into a war room for the minions whom Mrs. Binder was to hire, giving her an office with a large glass window looking out over the beach, and Zak one looking west toward the intercoastal waterway. The floor was still mostly empty. Zak was sitting at a huge, empty desk wondering what he was supposed to be doing when Mrs. Binder came to his office. He was doodling sketches of geodesic domes. She came in holding a stack of glossy color brochures. She placed them carefully on his desk before turning to talk.

“Mr. Mistry tells me that I'm to make sure that you don't spend your time exploring outer space,” Mrs. Binder said. “He informs me that you are going to design a hotel in Antarctica. Quite a desolate place, I'm told. I'm not sure that it's much better than outer space. How many units are you projecting to build? What capacity fraction do you think you can fill? What are your estimates for projected profit margin per unit?”

“It'll fill up,” Zak said confidently. “I don't have any details yet. I know it'll work.”

She looked at him over the rim of her glasses. “Your business plan doesn't include a number of units?”

“I don't have a business plan. There are too many variables—”

She took her glasses off and polished them with a corner of her blouse. “No business plan.”

“Sorry, no. I've never been much for business plans. I like real things—”

“No business plan. Hmm. Mr. Mistry tells me that your previous business venture failed. I believe I see why.”

He hung his head down. “I—”

“A business plan is a real thing, Mr. Cerny. As real as rocks or rockets.”

“So what?”

“What? What, I would say, is we make a business plan.”

“I'm not good with that kind of stuff.”

“Trust me, Mr. Cerny.” She looked at her now well-polished glasses and then put them in a breast pocket. “It will be brilliant.”

The brochures she had left on his desk were glossy flyers advertising a wide range of extreme tourism activities, from zip-lining in the rain-forest canopies of Honduras to BASE jumping from a skyscraper in Singapore. This was what she saw as his market.

Somewhat grudgingly, he admired her thoroughness. Her network of contacts seemed to include people from all around the world. She polled travel agents specializing in vacations into uncomfortable and dangerous areas of the world. She found a list of cruise ships offering tours to Antarctica and put together a spreadsheet analyzing which ships, how many sailings and what times they sailed each year, estimates of the fraction of cabins sold, length of the trip, and the price and profit margin per passenger.

“I do believe you may have found a viable market niche,” she said. “I had no idea. Over eighty companies are offering cruises and tours to Antarctica. It's a short tourist season, though: starts in November and goes to April. Four or five months.”

“Sunlight,” Zak said. “After April the days get too short.”

Mrs. Binder nodded. “That. And since it's a ship-based service, they have to wait for ice to clear. We'll need airline service.”

“I was figuring that.”

“We'll build an airstrip. Dock facilities too; we want those cruise ships.”

“Of course,” Zak said.

“Current market for Antarctic tourism is fifty thousand tourists a year. In the first year, we'll aim at capturing twenty percent of the market. Figuring for double occupancy, five-night stay, twenty-five thousand room-nights. At a thousand dollars a night, comes to an annual net of twenty-five million.”