Regan's Planet


Robert Silverberg

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

CHAPTERS
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ONE
The view, from sixteen miles above sea level, was a fine one. It was a cloudless day, and North America lay spread out for the Factor Claude Regan like an unrolled map. Down there was the great gouge of Hudson Bay, and Canadian soil, white and brown and green, and along the curved plane lay the United States, to the south. Claude Regan looked out with pleasure, as though he were looking down on his own personal kingdom.

Strictly speaking, it was not true. Claude Regan did not own North America, though sometimes in recent months he had been tempted to think he did. He did not even own the luxurious private jet that was carrying him over the Pole from China to Denver at 2,800 miles an hour. The plane was the property of Global Factors, Inc., which was not yet quite the same thing as being the property of the Factor Claude Regan. And North America was the property of—well, not his, nor even the company’s.

Regan turned away from the port. “It’s a splendid view,” he remarked to the aide nearest him.

‘It certainly is, Factor Regan.“

‘You can see how the globe is curved,“ Regan went on. ”Just in case you had your doubts.“

‘I never doubted it, Factor Regan.“

‘That’s good. I’m glad to hear that,“ Regan said. The aide did not redden. They were impervious to needling, Regan thought. He opaqued his window—the glare was a little uncomfortable—and glanced again at the papers in his lap. It was the text of a financing agreement between the People’s Republic of China, on the one hand, and Global Factors, Inc., on the other, whereby a loan of 600,000,000 platinum-based dollars was to be advanced to the party of the first part, the said loan to bear interest at the rate of eight percent per annum, with sinking fund provisions commencing the first of July, 1994, and continuing at the rate of $30,000,000 per annum until—

Regan nodded. Everything was in order. Chairman Ch’ien had howled at the interest rate, and probably was still howling. Regan had listened patiently, had smiled, had quietly said, “Well, in that case, perhaps you had best turn elsewhere for the loan, Chairman Ch’ien…”

It was done. The People’s Republic of China had come, hat in hand, to Claude Regan’s company for a loan, and now the agreement was signed. Regan thumbed his eyes tiredly. An aide saw the gesture.

‘Can I get you a stimmo, Factor Regan?“

‘Get me a glass of water,“ Regan said. ”Straight.“

He leaned back against the upholstery and flicked the vibrator. His back muscles were cramped and tense. Never any time for decent exercise any more, Regan thought. Too damn busy holding the hands of Heads of State.

But wasn’t that what you wanted, he asked himself?

The glass of water arrived. Regan gulped it, glanced at the steno, and said, “Letter. To His Serene Highness, Sir Bawala Abukawa Ngdala, Prime Minister of the Federation of Nigeria, Lagos. Dear Bobo: It was terribly kind of you to invite me to the opening of the new hydroelectric project, and I wish I could have been there. Unfortunately, my presence was required in Peking at that time, and…”

Eyes closed, Regan droned out the rest of the letter. It was the sort of thing he usually delegated to an aide, but there was nothing he could do, up here in this jet, except work and sleep, and he preferred to work. When the letter was done, there was another, and then another. And then it was time to receive the afternoon report from the Denver office.

At thirty-five, Claude Regan was at the top of the world’s largest corporate entity, Global Factors, Inc. Both he and the company had come a long way in the past twenty years.

Regan had been a fifteen-year-old high school student in 1970 when Global Factors was organized, under its original name of Appalachian Acceptance Corporation—a small firm, headed by Regan’s uncle, the main business of which was financing automobile purchases. The Boom of 1973-74 had seen Appalachian Acceptance Corporation thrive and expand its operations; and the Panic of 1976, with its wave of foreclosures, had left the company owning half a dozen miscellaneous and scruffy companies in fields ranging from rocketing to real estate. Somehow old Bruce Regan had held the fledgling empire together through the hard times that followed. Today it dominated the international financial community and dealt with the nations of the world almost as a sovereign entity itself.

Bruce Regan was in retirement now—involuntary, to be sure. Young Claude had mounted a proxy fight against his uncle only the year before, in 1989. “Time for a change,” Claude had declared, and Bruce was pensioned off as Chairman of the Board, with Claude replacing him as chief executive officer.

An aide came stumbling up the aisle—one of the faceless men with whom Regan liked to surround himself.

‘Call for you, Factor Regan!“ the man gasped. ”Your private line!“ ”My wife?“

‘No, sir. It’s Washington calling!“ ”The Washington office?“ Regan asked. ”No, sir! Washington! The White House!“ ”Oh. All right.“ Regan scowled and jabbed the button in the arm of his chair. The switchboard girl in the cockpit flipped the call to Regan. Yellow and green streaks swirled and danced on the screen for a moment, and then, as the scrambler pattern cleared, the jowly face of the President of the United States appeared. ”Claude.“

‘Hello, Tom. How’s the country treating you?“ President Hammond laughed hollowly. ”Wonderful sense of humor! I think it’s marvelous that a man with your responsibilities can crack a joke!“

Regan managed a faint smile. He tried to keep the irritation from showing. The President of the United States was a foolish, pathetic figure, and not simply because he happened to be foolish, pathetic Tom Hammond. The job itself had lost its aura. There the man sat, at the nation’s capital, amid all the trappings of power—but only the trappings. “What’s the problem, Tom?” “I’d like to see you,” the President said. “You’re seeing me now.” “No. I mean at the White House.”

‘Don’t you trust your scrambler system?“ Regan asked.

President Hammond shrugged. “It’s not that. This—well, this ought to be handled in person, that’s all. Can you stop by for a while?”

Regan resisted the temptation to fob Hammond off with an appointment for the middle of the next month. Certain fictions had to be maintained, after all. This man was the President of the United States, and Claude Regan was just a whippersnapper who had wheeled and dealed himself into a brand new position of great power. 

‘I can be there at seven,“ Regan said. ”Just let me tell the pilot.“

 

They met in the Monroe Room. Lincoln and his generals had discussed strategy there. McKinley had read the despatches from Cuba there. Roosevelt and Churchill had pored over war maps there. Kennedy had had his famous meeting with Castro there. And Thomas Hammond, forty-first President of the United States, now wrapped a clammy hand around that of the Factor Claude Regan.

The contrast was striking. President Hammond was a shambling bear of a man, vast and soft, six-feet-five and bulkier than Taft. Regan was small, compact, spare of build, almost fleshless. The President was balding and middle-aged; Regan had a thick mop of red hair and looked younger than his years. Hammond had been born during the Hoover Administration, which practically made him a contemporary of Garfleld or Grant in the eyes of Regan, a product of Eisenhower’s second presidency.

Hammond’s bland brown eyes met Regan’s blue, almost faded-looking ones. The President said, “I’ve got an assignment for you, Claude. I realize you’re a busy man, but I’ve had the whole cabinet kicking this thing around for a week, and we decided you were the only one for it.”

A muscle flickered in the Factor’s cheek. “Go on, Toni.”

Hammond sighed and turned away, hulking ponderously around the room as though he could not bring himself to go on. Finally he said, “You know about the World’s Fair, don’t you?”

‘The Columbian Exposition? Sure.“

‘It’s due to open in less than two years. July fourth, 1992. Claude, we’re in an unholy mess. The whole planning commission just resigned in a huff. We aren’t going to make it by opening day unless we get somebody dynamic and forceful to run the show. You, Claude.“

Regan stared. “Me? Run a world’s fair?”

‘It’s vital to the security of the Western world.“

‘Just a silly sideshow, and—“

‘No. It’s more than that.“ Hammond squared his vast shoulders and seemed to take on oratorical fervor. ”The whole hemisphere is on trial, Claude. This fair has to be a display of our vigor, our purpose, our national strength. We’ve got to stand up on our hind legs and show all these assorted yellow and black bastards that we’ve still got what it takes. We need to make the world tremble, Claude. We—“

‘Why don’t we just H-bomb Nigeria?“ Regan asked wearily. ”That’ll accomplish the same thing in a whole lot less time, and—“

‘You’re being facetious,“ the President said, in a depressed tone. He came forward, towering over the Factor. ”Claude, don’t play with this. I tell you it’s essential that we run this fair the right way, and that you run it. You’re the only man who can. You must do it.“

Regan looked at him stonily.

‘You’ll take it, won’t you?“ Hammond said. ”Do it for me, Claude. For all of us?“

‘You must think I’m crazy,“ Regan said. ”Well, you’re probably right.“

 

It was just what he needed: averaging only sixteen hours a day as head of Global Factors, he now had a full-time job as Chairman of the 1922 Fair as well. But some obligations are unavoidable. In his ticklish position as head of a quasi-sovereign entity within the United States, he had to make certain concessions. Hammond wanted him, and in all likelihood had already leaked the news of his appointment to the newsfax sheets. The publicity would not be good if he refused.

Regan thought about the job all the way home—home being a hilltop palace of redwood, glass and steel, looking down on the sprawling metropolis of Denver. The company jet took him westward out of the capital in an hour, and a limousine was waiting at the airport. Sirens shrilled ahead of him all the way home, and traffic obediently pulled off the road to let Factor Regan pass.

Nola was waiting for him, slim and sleek in a black sheath of spun silk. She greeted him coolly, with a chaste kiss on the cheek. She had been his wife nine years, long enough to lose her awe of him. They stood together on the terrace, moonlight highlighting her pale face, with its bladelike cheekbones. He had been gone four days.

‘Were you bored, darling?“ he asked.

‘Of course not,“ she said crisply. ”I played the Chaplin tapes, and I rode through the hills, and I sunbathed nude on the patio and took a shot at a reporter who came by in a helicopter. It was a very quiet time, Claude. I played the stock market, too. I sold Global Factors short, a thousand shares. Wasn’t that a coy thing to do?“

Regan spun round, angrily jabbed the autobar. A cold martini spurted out. “Did you really do that, Nola?”

‘Do you think I did?“

‘You’re capable of anything. Even breaking the law about insider transactions.“

‘I did it through the Swiss account,“ she said. ”No one will ever know. I lost two grand, Claude. The filthy stock went up. It always goes up. But I was bored, darling. I like to play the market when I’m bored. How was China? Did you see the Great Wall?“

‘I saw Ch’ien,“ Regan said. ”And nothing else. We closed the deal this morning.“

‘And the World’s Fair?“ Nola asked. ”I heard it on the newsfax five minutes before you came in. What kind of thing is that?“

‘They didn’t lose any time, did they?“ he muttered. ”Well, it’s true. I’m heading the Fair.“

‘I think that’s amusing.“

‘Do you?“ he snapped. He scowled at her. ”If it amuses you so much, you take charge of it.“

‘Oh, no, darling. It’s all yours!“

 

They ate, on the roof terrace—real steak, real French wine. Being a millionaire had its advantages. During the meal, Regan painfully made conversation with his wife, and somehow dealt with a constant stream of memoranda as well. Nola faced him across the table, glacially cool, radiantly lovely. Regan could feel the waves of hatred emanating from her. His steak took on a coppery taste. She ruined everything, puncturing his happiness with a glance, with a pucker of her cheeks. Bitch, he thought, and signed a voucher.

They had no children. They had taken the Sterility Pledge in ‘84, at the height of the fashion, and of course there was no undoing that. Regan had had no use for children on his way up, but now, at the summit, he needed an heir. Nola would not tolerate an adoption. If children came to live with them, her life might take on a purpose, and she would no longer have the luxury of tormenting herself and him with her boredom.

‘Tell me about this World’s Fair, darling,“ she said, turning the innocent sentence into a biting sarcasm by inflection alone.

He chose to ignore the inflection. “It’s the five-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’ discovery of the New World,” he explained. “The United States wants to throw a big fling to celebrate. A kind of muscle-flexing to impress the Asian-African nations. Hammond wants me to run it. That’s all.” “Why you? Don’t you have enough to do?” “They had a committee,” Regan said. “The whole thing fell apart. Hammond seems to think I can work miracles.” “Can’t you?”

‘Not all the time. Will you excuse me?“ He left the table, not having touched dessert or the cognac that accompanied it. The liftshaft took him down to his den, a hundred feet deep in bedrock. It was the sanctum sanctorum, and nothing, not even the messenger bearing word of Judgment Day, could reach him here. He slipped off his tunic and lowered himself into a vibrobath.

His mood of tension and depression slipped away as the gentle eddying motion rocked him into relaxation. He was a man with a tiger by the tail, and that can get wearing at times. The highest rung of global finance is a slippery one. There he was, at the top, nowhere higher to go. In a way, the new assignment would be an interesting challenge, he thought. Whipsawing prime ministers was growing dull.

And—now that he had thought about it—he could see the importance of the Fair. The United States was past its peak as a nation, sliding gracefully down into old age. Nigeria, Brazil, China—those were the countries to reckon with today. Russia and America, two sleepy titans, drained of vitality by long years of cold war, were comical staggering figures to the sharpshooters of the new industrial powers.

The 1992 Fair might help to change all that. Regan knew his Image Dynamics. The shadow was the substance; content was form; power was the display of intent. Put on a good show and hold back the tide—for a while.

It was midnight Denver time when he went to his bedroom. He had been through so many time zones today that he had little idea how long he had been awake, but he was tired. Tomorrow there were the reins of Global Factors to pick up. And then, he thought, he would have to see about getting this World’s Fair on the move.

Nola had not waited for him. He glanced at the burnished redwood paneling of the door separating their bedrooms, and saw that it was locked. He had expected it. Shrugging, he undressed quickly, prepared for bed. Glancing out, he saw a streak of light crossing the sky at a sharp angle—the Mars rocket, climbing fast. Give my best to the Martians, Regan thought.

He switched off the light, and moments later switched himself off with the same ease. His sleep was deep and dreamless almost until morning—when, suddenly, the gaudy midways of the 1992 World’s Fair came to blazing life in his awakening brain.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWO
Global Factors, Inc., occupied the tallest building in Denver, the sixty-two story Carlin Building, a slim tower of travertine and tinted glass that had mushroomed during the Boom of ‘73. Appalachian Acceptance had held the mortgage; the Panic of ’76 had undone the promoters of the building, and Appalachian Acceptance had foreclosed. It had seemed like a useful building for company headquarters, and the firm moved west, shedding its old name in the process. The Factor Claude Regan occupied a suite on the topmost floor, with the Rockies behind him and a view of the First National Bank Building ahead of him. He kept his desk uncluttered, as much to show off the sumptuous grain of the real wood as to simplify his business routine.

The factoring companies had taken over American business gradually, over the past decade and a half. The process was all but complete, now. You began by lending money to companies against accounts receivable, you branched out by financing expansion campaigns; then came a panic, and you found yourself owning a company, and to keep yourself from bankruptcy you had to operate the company for your own account. It had all been much more complex than that, of course. But now, in the late summer of 1990, Global Factors, Inc., was the largest and most powerful of the twelve finance firms that had come to control American industry.

They were holding companies, really. They owned controlling interests in everything. There were still some independents, of course; General Motors had not gone under, nor Dupont, nor IBM. But even those corporate giants maintained friendly relations with the factors—because they were smart. In Denver, Regan presided over a sprawling empire with outposts on every continent—including a base in Antarctica. Did a nation need a loan for industrial development? See the man from Global. Did a commuter want to finance a home improvement? See the man from Global.

The system worked. It worked to the tune of an annual business up in the forty-million-dollar class. Claude Regan had bought his first hundred shares of Global stock at 11; now, after splits and stock dividends, those shares were worth thousands apiece. He was not the only one to have grown wealthy out of the new corporate dispensation.

But he had more than mere wealth. He had power.

He was the man at the top.

Now, on his return from China, the division heads came to make their reports. They were men in their fifties and sixties, mostly, every last one of them a multimillionaire. Their days were numbered with the company. Regan had taken over too recently to dare to get rid of them yet; it was less than twelve months since the proxy fight had pushed Uncle Bruce upstairs. He had already moved his own men into secondary out.

Positions in each of the company’s great divisions, and, one by one, he soon would pick off these oldsters and get them. They had no love for him. But they kept their resentments well hidden.

From the head of the table, Regan surveyed the tight-lipped faces. He glanced at the man to his right.

‘Donnelly?“

‘Semiconductor division up twelve percent, Factor Regan. The monthly gross is now over three hundred million, including overseas income. We—“

Regan shot past him. “Lee?”

‘We’ve opened our sixteenth power reactor this year, Factor Regan. Total electrical production in kilowatt hours—“

Down the line. Chemicals, drugs, transportation, realty, all the subsidiaries, even the original factoring firm at the bottom of it all. Regan listened, absorbed statistics, rattled off suggestions, hints, and orders.

The last man to report was Regan’s only appointee to high company office—Tim Field, president of Global Factors International, the new subsidiary in charge of coordinating overseas activity. Field was thirty-two and had come up with Regan all the way. Like Regan, he was a small man physically, but slower of speech, less high-strung.

He said, “This month’s overseas activities have been highly favorable. I’ve just returned from Brazil, Factor, and it looks as though they’ll let us build an automobile plant there after all.‘”

‘With expropriation guarantees?“ Regan demanded.

‘We’re still working on that, Factor.“

‘What about Nigeria?“

‘Henderson is representing us at the dam dedication. He’ll be seeing the Prime Minister today and I’ll be in touch.“

Regan nodded. It was vital to the company’s future to get footholds in the new industrial nations. Global was already well ensconced in Europe and the Near East—but in the coming century, Nigeria, Brazil, and China would have the big money. Since China was Leninist, extending the company’s power there posed certain problems. But Nigeria and Brazil certainly would have to be welded into Global’s empire before the twenty-first century dawned, Regan knew.

When Field had finished his report, Regan said, “You’ve all heard about this World’s Fair assignment of mine. I expect that it’ll take up a large share of my time over the next two years. Effective today, Tim Field will represent me at these meetings and will take over many of my functions in the corporation.” Regan glanced at Field, who looked a little dazed. “Tim, I want you to work out something with your next-in-command so that some of your responsibilities will be shared. And so on down the line.”

Someone discreetly cleared his throat. It was old Rex Bennett, a shrewd and venerable banker who guided Global’s fiscal policies. He was a holdover from the regime of Regan’s uncle, too important to be dismissed just yet.

‘Bennett?“

‘I was just wondering, Factor. Do you think this new assignment of yours is in the best interests of the firm?“

‘It’s in the best interests of the United States, Bennett.“

‘Yes, sir, but those two interests don’t always coincide.“

Regan glowered at him. “I’ve had a direct Presidential request to do this job, Bennett. The President and I feel it’s something that needs to be done, and that I’m best suited for it.” He paused, then added, “Incidentally, I have some plans for using the Fair to our own benefit. The welfare of Global Factors, Inc., is always uppermost in my mind, Bennett.”

‘Of course, sir. But—“

‘The subject is closed, Bennett. Are there any other questions?“

 

By midday, Claude Regan was on his way east again, to attend a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Fair, in Washington. En route, he ran through a briefing tape on the Fair. It was not a subject he had paid much attention to before yesterday. The 1992 Fair had been in the talking stage for four or five years, but Regan had had other matters on his mind during those years.

During the hour-long flight, he ran through the newsclips. They seemed strangely incomplete. Where, for instance, was the Fair going to be held? A clipping dated June, 1990—only two months back—still talked of “possible sites.” And what about financing? Had they floated a bond issue, or was Congress appropriating money, or what?

Regan was disturbed by the omissions in the file.

He grew a great deal more disturbed at the meeting itself. There were twelve men around the shining table—the President, Regan, and ten members of the World’s Fair Executive Committee. Originally there had been fifteen on the committee, but it seemed that five had resigned during last week’s crisis and unalterably refused to have anything to do with the project furthermore. The other ten had resigned too, but were willing to meet with the new chairman, at least.

It was the second time in six hours that Regan had attended a meeting. The same sort of faces confronted him now; the faces of middle-aged men, pink and well-scrubbed, men who had been holding the reins of power for twenty or thirty years and whose contempt for the upstart in their midst was equalled only by their fear of him.

There were three bankers in the group, and a high member of the United Nations Secretariat, and an under-secretary of State, and a governor of the New York Stock Exchange. There was a well-known philanthropist, and a retired Senator from West Virginia, and several other prominent figures of the moneyed, influential world. It was a select group.

Regan faced them and said, “Gentlemen, will someone-tell me where this Fair is going to be held?”

Former Senator Washburn harrumphed and said, “That’s not been quite decided, Mr. Factor.”

‘With less“ than two years to go?”

‘We were unable to agree on a site.“

‘Do you think a Fair can be built overnight?“ Regan asked.

‘There were administrative problems,“ the U.N. man put in. ”Irreconcilable personality differences. We—“

‘Yes,“ Regan said. ”I begin to see.“ He took a packet of stimmo tablets from his breast pocket and pointedly offered them around, as though hinting that the members of the committee could do with a jolt. There were no takers. Regan shrugged and popped a pill into his own mouth. He glanced at the President and said, ”Mr. President, what sort of financing arrangments will be available for the fair? I mean, Federal support.“

Hammond looked uneasy. “Well, of course there’ll be a Federal grant. You understand, exports have fallen off… unfavorable balance of trade… deficit . . certain difficulties… appropriation…”

‘Naturally,“ Regan said.

A glow came into the Chief Executive’s eyes. “But this Fair is going to reverse that trend!” he boomed. “It’ll be our way of recapturing America’s old prestige. This is going to be the show to end all shows, Claude. It’ll dazzle them! It’ll awe them! It’ll impress the biflimbus out of them! We’ll show these new countries that they’re just a bunch of noo—noov—”

“Nouveaux riches,” the U.N. man prompted.

‘Exactly!“ cried the President. ”Claude, you’ve got to pull out all the stops. Spend five billion! Ten billion, if you have to! Twenty! But knock ’em dead!“

‘Can I count on at least six billion dollars from the Federal Government?“ Regan asked.

Hammond gasped. “Six billion? It’s an unbalanced budget already, Claude. I don’t see how we can possibly—”

‘Four billion?“

‘I’ll try to get you two,“ the President muttered. ”The rest has to be raised privately.“

Regan had been expecting that. He stood up, raked a glance over the assembled company. “Gentlemen, we have a big job ahead. I can count on your cooperation, of course?”

There was murmuring. Regan stilled it.

‘I want the use of your names on the Fair letterhead,“ he said. ”There probably won’t be any further meetings of the Executive Committee. I just want your names. I’ll handle the work alone.“

They were unhappy about that. Regan let them take it or leave it. The committee system, he pointed out, had been tried and found wanting. Either they lent their names, but took no part in the decision-making, or else they could have all the responsibility they wanted—without him. Take it or leave it.

They took it.

Regan smiled serenely. “Thank you, gentlemen. That’ll be all.”

 

He set up an office in Washington, renting three floors of a skyscraper six blocks from the Capitol and dubbing it World’s Fair Headquarters. There had been a headquarters in New York, but Regan had no use for New York. It took a day and a half to transfer the records to the new office.

Regan moved in. A direct closed-circuit line linked him to Denver, so that he could keep an eye on the Global Factors operation while settling into this new job. Regan’s first task was to go through the minutes of the now disbanded committee, and see just what had been accomplished since 1988, when the first meeting had been held.

It was appalling.

All they had managed to do was set a date for opening the Fair: July 4, 1992. Why July 4? Well, it was patriotic. The Fair would run for two years. Every nation in the world would have a pavilion. Large corporations—particularly the twelve factoring firms—would be invited to participate. All the pavilions, of course, would be built at the expense of the exhibitors. But who would pay for the purchase of land? Who underwrote the promotional expenses? For God’s sake, where would the Fair be held?

No answers.

‘It’s stuff like this that has sent this country down the hill,“ Regan complained to a corps of his aides, flown in from Denver to help. ”A hundred years ago nobody would have done it this way. But we’re soft now. We can’t make decisions. We can’t get anything done. And meanwhile Brazil builds a new dam every week, and—“

Regan’s first important decision went forth to the news-fax sheets that afternoon. Cameras ground as he declared levelly, “There has been an adjustment in the opening date of the Columbian Exposition. It will now commence on October 12, 1992. Please don’t regard this as a postponement, merely as an adjustment. It struck the members of the committee that it was far more appropriate to open the Fair on the actual anniversary of the great discovery.”

Postponement, adjustment—the fact remained that Regan had bought three months of extra time. Now he had twenty-six months to get things shipshape, instead of twenty-three. It might make a difference. He poked around for some way of “adjusting” opening day still farther into the future, but found none. Columbus had made his landfall in October, damn him. Regan needed time—but no time was to be had.

None was to be wasted, either, a site had to be chosen for the Fair, fast, and construction begun.

But where?

A long-legged young man named Hal Martinelli had been serving as counsel and general factotum for the former Executive Committee. Regan had retained him, since he was the only one connected with the committee who seemed to have any idea of how to get things done. Martinelli filled Regan in on the site problem—struggling, all the while, with his overmastering awe for the Factor.

‘We had the site narrowed down to six cities, sir. But then we bogged down, sir.“

‘Cut out the sir,“ Regan ordered. ”There’s no time. Which six cities?“

‘Well, sir, there was—“

“Martinelli!”

‘Sorry, sir.“ The counsel flushed, bit his lip, took a deep breath. ”New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Houston, Boston, and New Orleans were the finalists.“

‘What the hell do they have to do with Christopher Columbus?“

‘Nothing, sir. Sorry!“ Martinelli grinned. ”But they had facilities available to hold fairs. They each made formal presentations last year.“

‘What happened?“

‘It was impossible to reach a final decision. The matter was left in abeyance.“

‘To go on abeying indefinitely?“ Regan made a face. ”Hal, get hold of the six cities and tell them to make their presentations again. They’ve got three days, and anyone who can’t scrape together a presentation by deadline time is automatically out.“

‘Yes, Factor Regan!“

 

While he was waiting, Regan zoomed back to Denver to attend a directors’ meeting. He authorized a boost in the dividend—for the eleventh year in a row—and suggested that they consider a stock split in October. Global Factors stock rose three points. Claude Regan’s personal wealth increased automatically, on paper, at least, by eleven million dollars. He took no notice of that. He busied himself on the second day by going over the plans for a housing project in Pakistan. The government would build it, with a construction loan advanced by Global Factors. It would house two and a half million Pakistanis. A Global subsidiary would manage it. By the end of the day, the contract was signed. The sun never set on Global’s enterprises.

On Wednesday he was back in Washington. Nola had come with him, to view the presentations. It amused her to take part in these little things.

Houston and New Orleans had sent their mayors. The Other cities had sent lesser officials. Regan allowed each of the six forty-five minutes to tell its tale.

Somebody had worked long and hard on those six presentations, Regan thought. There were elaborate mock-ups, table-top models, plans, charts. He was amused by the look of desperation in each man’s eyes as he in turn entered the conference room and went into a preamble explaining why his city, and his alone, should be granted the honor of staging the Fair.

Regan eliminated New York and Chicago right away. Chicago wanted the Fair because it had held the last Columbian Exposition, in 1892. That seemed a good enough reason to Regan to scratch it this time. As for New York—well, Regan decided, New York wasn’t a good place to hold a World’s Fair. It was too sophisticated a place; a Fair tended to get swamped by the big city’s other attractions. Look at Boston, New Orleans, Houston, San Francisco—Regan listened to each in turn, nodded sagely, smiled now and then, now instilled hope, now struck terror. An idea was forming in the back of his mind. It was a Claude Regan sort of idea, and when it popped into his brain even he was a little frightened of it.

The gentleman from San Francisco had bowed his way out of the room, taking his complex automated models with him. Regan glanced sideways at his wife, who was coolly tracing a green lipstick line around her mouth. Martinelli and various other staff members stood stiffly, expectantly in corners of the room.

‘Well, darling?“ Nola drawled. ”Which shall it be?“ ”Which do you prefer?“ Regan asked. ”I don’t know.“ She shrugged indolently. ”I liked them all. But why don’t you give it to Houston dear? The man from Houston seemed so sincere.“

There was tension among the aides. They were exchanging glances. Would the all-powerful Claude Regan be swayed by his wife’s whim? Would the accolade fall upon Houston?

Regan said, “I don’t think it’ll go to Houston. Or any of the others.”

Ears pricked forward all through the room. “Why should we hold the Fair on Earth at all?” Regan said loudly. “Why not up in space somewhere?”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THREE
In Houston, there was wailing and weeping. In Boston there was gnashing of teeth. In San Francisco, rending of hair. Chicago, New York, New Orleans mourned after their particular fashions.

In the stinking slums of America’s decaying cities, news of Regan’s wild idea was received with incredulity and discussed with passion. Crouching over dinners of roasted rat, alley-dwellers of Manhattan or the Loop or downtown Los Angeles shook their heads and muttered, “He’s crazy! You can’t build a whole goddam planet!”

In Moscow, the Presidium met to discuss the news. High officials pondered it in Peking. There was consternation in Brasilia and dismay in Lagos. Stocks dipped sharply on the Johannesburg exchange, but rose in New York. The Wall Street Journal hesitantly commended Claude Regan’s boldness and vision, but at the same time warned that his grandiose plan could not be financed at the expense of the long-suffering taxpayer. “We hope,” the Journal commented, “that there will be no need to resort to government aid. Let the new space satellite gleam in the heavens as a shining example of the free-enterprise system at its most vigorous!”

Claude Regan read the world-wide comments with keen interest. Only one dismayed him for a moment: the leader in London’s Daily Mail, which said, “Claude Regan, America’s daring young man on the financial trapeze, is about to take a bold leap into outer space. We hope for the young man’s sake that he remembers how thin the air is up there. A failure in this gigantic enterprise could very well be the final step in the dismantling of the United States as a world power.”

That was all very true, Regan knew. For an uncomfortable instant he saw through the veil of time, and a history book of the future lay open before him—a book written in Swahili, or perhaps Mandarin, but perfectly understandable.

The downfall of the American capitalist economy, the passage read, may be directly linked with the rise of an impetuous financier named Claude Regan, who in the closing years of the twentieth century involved his already weary nation in a foolhardy project which ultimately. …

The mood passed. Regan regained his buoyancy and drive. Let history pronounce its verdict as it wished! Better to be remembered for a big mistake, he thought, than not to be remembered at all.

Washington, D.C., August 18. By special fax wire. The 1992 Columbian Exposition will take place aboard a space satellite. Claude Regan, Chairman of the exposition’s Executive Committee, made the news public today, one week after he assumed direction of the Fair.

‘We had several cities under consideration,“ Factor Regan declared. The 35-year-old Regan, who is also chief executive officer of Global Factors, Inc., listed San Francisco, Houston, and New Orleans as among the finalists. ”After due consideration, however,“ Factor Regan said, ”the members of the committee regretfully rejected all applications in favor of staging the exposition in space.“

The plan calls for the erection of a World’s Fair satellite in a fixed orbit over the United States at a height of 50,000 miles. The satellite will have 500 acres of exposition space, making it ten times the size of the largest space station currently in orbit. The construction costs, Factor Regan estimates, will be “several billion dollars.” This figure, he stressed, does not include the cost of the space liners that will be built to transport Fair-goers from Earth to the satellite.

Construction is due to begin next month. The exposition itself is scheduled to open on October 12, 1992, the 500th anniversary of the discovery of the New World.

President Hammond said diffidently, “But is it going to work out, Claude?”

‘Of course it will,“

‘But the fare you’ll have to charge to get people up to your satellite—“

‘A round trip will be fifty dollars,“ Regan said. ”Don’t you think people will pay fifty bucks for a trip to a space satellite?“

‘The fare’ to Moon Base is ten thousand,“ the President objected. ”How can you charge only fifty for—“

‘We’ll run the transport at a loss,“ Regan replied. ”The idea is to get people to the Fair, isn’t it?“

Regan extricated himself from the conversation and broke the contact. There was work to do, no time to spend reviewing the ifs and buts of the problem. He had to let the construction contracts for the satellite.

It would be built by private industry. The United States’ government had phased itself out of the space business in 1975, under the administration of President Delafleld and his American Conservative Party. Delafleld had been swept into office in ‘72, on a platform of getting the government back to its tidy old pre-1933 size, eliminating the national debt, repealing the income-tax amendment, and so forth.

The Boom of 1973 had been a direct result of Delafleld’s program. The Dow-Jones Industrials had gone over 2,000 for the first time, and prosperity was rife in the land—rife enough to allow Delafield to go through with his project of turning the activities of the government over to private enterprise. By 1975, he had succeeded, well enough to touch off the Panic of ‘76, with its awkward stock market crash a month before Election Day.

Delafield had carried only Mississippi and Alabama in ‘76. The rest of the country went for the new National Liberal party, and the American Conservatives had been out of power ever since. Space, though, still remained in private hands. The readjustments of the late ’70’s, concentrating economic power in the dozen big factoring concerns, had culminated in an uneasy status quo which nobody in either party wanted to disturb.

The biggest space company happened to be a Global Factors subsidiary. The second biggest was Aero do Brasil, a giant Latin American combine only ten years old. Regan had many reasons for not wanting to give the contract to his own firm, beginning with the obvious one of fearing charges of favoritism. A sounder reason was the fear that any company who took the contract on would ultimately complete it at a loss. Pioneers in this sort of thing always got hurt. Who knew how much it would cost to build a five-hundred acre exposition satellite? Far better to stick the competition with the job than to hurt his own firm’s finances and reap bad publicity in the bargain.

It didn’t make sense to give the contract to one of the other American factoring firms, of course. But if he called in the Brazilians, it might inspire Brazil to contribute in cash to the Fair, by way of a returned compliment. And the Fair needed cash.

The Fair needed cash in the worst way!

Regan detached a member of his Global Factors staff, an angular, gaunt young man named Lyle Henderson who was an expert on handling newly emerged nations, and sent him off to Brasilia to plant the seeds.

‘Remember, there’s a quid pro quo,“ Regan pointed out. ”We’d like them to build the satellite for us—but we wouldn’t mind a contribution to our general expense fund.“

‘That’s bribery, isn’t it?“ Henderson asked.

‘You might call it that,“ admitted Regan casually. ”If you had to call it anything.“

While waiting for Henderson’s return from Brazil, Regan opened the regular competitive-bidding channels for the job. Not all the aerospace companies cared to bid. Some were shrewd enough to realize they were likely to lose their shirts on the project; others simply did not care to undertake the necessary expansion of plant for a one-shot enterprise. There were five bids from American corporations, ranging from a low of three billion dollars to a high of nineteen billion.

The high bid had come from Global Factors’ own aerospace company. Regan had taken care that his own firm would not be likely to get the job.

Henderson came back three days later, and went straight to Regan’s Washington office.

‘They’re interested,“ Henderson said.

‘At what price?“

‘They think they can do it for about four and a half billion, Factor Regan. Say, a billion as a binder and construction money, the rest in six-month installments as they go along. They’ll undertake to pay a billion-dollar penalty if they aren’t ready on time.“

‘Can they do it in sixteen months?“

‘I think they can,“ Henderson said. ”I talked with Moeller himself—right at the top. He’s very excited about it. He thinks it’ll be a big boost for Brazil’s space prestige.“

Regan nodded. “So it will.”

Henderson looked a little troubled. “Chief—”

‘Mmm?“

‘I thought the idea of this Fair was to boost American prestige.“

‘It is.“

‘So why are we letting the Brazilians build our satellite for us?“

Regan smiled. “Because they’re going to lose two billion bucks building it, which will knock a giant hole in their space program, prestige or no prestige. Also because I’m interested in establishing friendly relations with Aero do Brasil as a matter of our own company policy. Also because I’d rather give the job to them than to any of our own domestic competitors, and for policy reasons I can’t give the job to us. Okay?”

‘Yes, sir.“

‘You think I’m a conniving Machiavellian scoundrel, don’t you, Lyle?“

‘Sir, I—“

‘It’s all right, Lyle. Sometimes I think so too.“

 

There was a troublesome aspect, though, to giving Aero do Brasil the construction contract. Regan needed money to get the Fair moving, and he expected to get some of that money from the Congress of the United States. But Congress was as penny-wise as ever. If he first announced the letting of the contract to Brazil, and then went before Congress to seek a grant, someone was bound to point out that Federal aid to the Fair was essentially a direct grant to subsidize the Brazilian aerospace industry. And that would make no sense to Congress. Why subsidize your most powerful competitor?

Regan had to get the money from Congress first, let the contract afterward. But Congress could deliberate for weeks or even months over the appropriation. And Regan didn’t have weeks or months to waste. Days and hours were vital now.

The House Appropriations Committee convened to listen to Regan on a blisteringly hot day near the end of August It was an election year; Congress was in a hurry to go home. But Regan needed the appropriation first.

The chairman of the committee was Representative Lancaster of Alabama, gray of eye and long in the tooth. He had been in the House for forty years, and liked to maunder on about the old days when he and Jack Kennedy were Congressmen together. Kennedy had moved on, to the Senate and then to the White House, but Lancaster was still there, grimly guarding the nation’s pursestrings.

‘Mr. Regan,“ he began testily—pointedly overlooking the recent fashion of styling a Factor by his title—”Mr. Regan, how much would you say this World’s Fair is going to cost the people of the United States?“

‘The overall cost of the Fair will be on the order of fifty billion dollars,“ Regan said. ”A great deal of this expense will be borne by the participating nations, of course, and those corporations that wish to exhibit. But there will have to be an initial appropriation from the Federal Government, to get the ball rolling.“

‘Exactly, Mr. Regan. Now, how much are you asking for?“

‘President Hammond has requested four billion dollars,“ Regan said.

Several committee members exchanged glances. Two of them laughed. Chairman Lancaster opined that the Fair was basically a frivolity, and that four billion dollars was a lot of money to spend on a frivolity. Regan launched into a discussion of the prestige value of the exposition. Representative Hawes of Texas politely expressed his doubts. Representative Slabaugh of Mississippi called the committee’s attention to the fact that the national debt stood just shy of a trillion dollars, and would the money not be better employed in reduction of the debt? Representative Morton of Alaska, a stern antitrust man who had led the losing fight against repeal of the Clayton and Sherman Acts in ‘74, asked a few discerning questions about the role Global Factors, Inc. would play in the construction and operation of the World’s Fair.

The session was a grueling one, but Regan was accustomed to pressure. He parried the low blows, deflected the true ones, riposted where he could, and returned to his office confident that Congress would cooperate.

A day later came a call from Dick Fry, President Hammond’s Congressional liaison man. Fry had just had a long talk with Chairman Lancaster and a few selected members of the Appropriations Committee.

‘They’ll give you a billion,“ Fry said. ”No more.“

‘That’s not enough! We requested four billion.“

‘I’m sorry, Factor. A billion’s the best that could be managed. Maybe the Senate will tack on another few hundred million. They’re not in a spending mood. They just want to get home to their constituents.“

‘Is there any hope of a further appropriation next session?“ Regan asked.

‘We’ll be in there pushing, Factor.“ 

 

Congress votes a billion for fair, the newsfax headlines declared the next day. Regan was disappointed, but not discouraged. A billion was a billion. It was a beginning.

The President duly signed the authorization, and a Treasury check for a billion platinum-backed dollars was formally turned over to Regan on the White House lawn, in a much-televised ceremony that the relay satellites bounced all over the globe. A day later, Congress adjourned. One day after that, Regan boarded a jet for Brazil.

A beaming President Magelhao greeted him amid the stark, sunbaked extremity of Brasilia. Novaes of Aero do Brasil was on hand, too, for the formal signing of the contract for the building of the World’s Fair Space Satellite.

‘I’m sure this will serve as another powerful bond of hemispheric solidarity,“ Regan declared resonantly in Portuguese acquired hypnotherapeutically the night before. ”After all, the landfall of Columbus is an event concerning not merely the United States of North America, but the entire Western Hemisphere. We are happy to have your great nation join our effort.“

The happiness was not so universal in the north. Almost without exception, the conservative press denounced the contract as a monstrous blunder. Support a competitor? Give jobs to Brazilians instead of to Americans? Let the world think that Brazil could build a better space satellite than the United States, for the United States’ own Fair? Regan must be insane, some editorialists concluded, while others, noting that Regan’s company had recently made a loan to the People’s Republic of China, commented that the man was quite clearly a crypto-Communist.

Regan weathered the storm. It was all over, in. a few days. With Congress not in session, there could be no investigation. Since terms of the contract were not made public, the other bidders could not claim that they had been jobbed. The fact that Regan had obviously bent over backward to avoid giving the contract to Global Factors was considered a point in his favor.

 

Aero do Brasil wasted no time—not with a non-completion penalty staring them in the face. Rockets came off the shelf, plans were drawn. Much of the construction work had to be subcontracted back to the United States, which mollified public opinion there to some extent. Late in September, Claude Regan was back in Brazil, this time out at the Matto Grosso launching site, to watch the official start of construction work.

Three gleaming Amazon rockets stood on the launching pad, each carrying a titanium girder. The satellite would have to be constructed in space, of course; no booster yet devised-could lift a satellite with a surface area of five hundred acres, and no booster of such capabilities was likely to be devised, since the recoil would be enormous. Girder by girder, the exposition satellite would be rocketed up piecemeal, and woven together by workmen with shoulder-harness rockets. Without gravity to hamper them, they could put the satellite together five or ten times as fast as a similar job could be done on Earth.

Or so Regan and Aero do Brasil hoped.

He had a few misgivings just now. They had used, as their master plan, a blowup of a blueprint some Global Factors engineers had worked out for a hundred-acre space resort. Since there was no time to start drafting from scratch, they had merely multiplied the specs by five. But it wasn’t always that simple to do things, Regan knew. He could only keep his fingers crossed.

By his sides, flanking him, stood Novaes and Moeller, respectively Chairman and President of Aero do Brasil. They were look-alikes—two plump, short, cheerful-looking men of about fifty, with glossy dark hair, olive skins, and irrepressibly bubbly personalities. Moeller waved a pudgy hand, an engineer closed a contact with an almost negligent flick of a finger, and one of the three rockets on the launching pads soared skyward. It had all happened quickly enough; the Aero do Brasil people had long ago outgrown the fingernail-biting stage of rocket launching, and failure was the startling exception now, not the rule.

Novaes began to sing, in a cracked, off-key basso. Regan’s newly acquired Portuguese was not up to the task of translating, but the song sounded jovially bawdy to him. Moeller clapped Regan on the back and boomed, “We are launched, Senhor Factor! We are begun!”

Someone handed Regan a glass. Brazilian champagne, sweet to the point of sickliness. The Brazilians had not yet developed a taste for brut. Eyes were on him. Regan quaffed the champagne as though it were ambrosia. His glass was immediately refilled. A second rocket zoomed from the pad. Novaes started to sing what was apparently a Portuguese translation of Wagner. Regan, fearful of that next refill, took his time over the second glass.

He looked upward, into the painfully bright blue tropical sky. The third rocket curved beyond the horizon. Soon, he thought, a metal moon would be taking shape up there—the largest artificial satellite ever built.

He could remember—it was one of his earliest memories—. staring up at the moon as it gleamed like a battered silver coin in the heavens.

‘I want it,“ he had said, and his father had laughed indulgently. ”I want it! I want it!“

‘Maybe you’ll have it when you grow up,“ his father had told him.

That had been in 1959, when he was four. Man was just learning to launch his first feeble satellites. Thirty-one years had passed, and Regan still didn’t own the Moon. It was beyond his grasp forever, mandated as a United Nations Trust Territory under international control. He had been there, twice, as he had been once to Mars, and that set him apart from most people. But he could not own the Moon.

Well, now he was building his own. It was Claude Regan’s way of doing things. “I want it!” he had shrieked at the Moon, and, failing in that ambition, he was building a moon of his own, Claude Regan’s moon, to gleam on through the centuries after he was gone.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOUR
Of course, it takes money to build moons.

The United States had contributed a billion dollars. Soon after, Brazil voted to appropriate two hundred million dollars toward the expenses of the Fair. It was a beginning—but he had billions of dollars to go. He had to line up commitments from participating nations, and outright grants wherever he could get them.

He was deeply enmeshed in the operations of the Fair, now, and Global Factors, Inc., had receded to second place in his scheme of things. He kept in touch, and visited Denver as often as his pressing schedule would let him. But most of the work there remained in the hands of Regan’s deputy, Tim Field. Field was doing a good job—good enough so that Regan was thinking of awarding him the title of Factor in another year or so.

Regan had cannibalized his own Global Factors staff to help him with the Fair. By October, his organization sheet looked very much like that of Global Factors, a steeply rising pyramid with himself at the summit, two or three trusted lieutenants just below him, half a dozen capable decision-makers on the next rung, and a broader staff structure at the bottom. His own ferocious energies were insufficient to see him through the double task of running the Fair and running the world’s biggest corporation single-handedly.

The problem of money obsessed him.

‘We need six billion bucks right away,“ Hal Martinelli reported. ”The Brazilians will be dunning us next month for the next installment, and we’ve got to get moving on the official pavilions.“

‘How will we raise it?“ Lyle Henderson asked.

‘Bond issue,“ Regan snapped. ”Three percent bonds, maturing serially between 1993 and 1998. Pay them off out of the profits of the Fair.“

Henderson goggled. “Six billion bucks in bonds? Nobody’s ever floated an issue of that size before!”

‘Nobody’s ever built a satellite like ours before either,“ Regan retorted. ”We’ll do it. Don’t worry about that. We’ll sell those bonds if I have to buy every damn one of them myself.“

The customary way of floating a bond issue of any size— say, half a billion dollars—was, Regan knew, to form a syndicate of underwriters. The dozen big factoring firms would go into the syndicate, and those of the Wall Street investment banks that had survived the Panic of ‘76 and the subsequent readjustments in the capitalist system. The members of the syndicate would then turn around and peddle the bonds to all and sundry.

That was the tried and true system, centuries old. But Regan didn’t care for it right now. It was wasteful—for, on a six-billion-dollar bond issue, goodly millions would slip into the hands of the underwriters as recompense for their promotional activities.

‘We’ll form our own corporation,“ Regan said, ”and sell the bonds ourselves.“

He flew to Denver and called a meeting of Global Factors to explain what he had in mind. The Board of Directors filed glumly into the sumptuous board room, and Regan’s Uncle Bruce, as Chairman of the Board, called the meeting to order.

Bruce Regan was a sallow-faced, stoop-shouldered man in his early sixties, scowling and embittered. He had good reason to look bitter, his nephew thought. Old Bruce had founded Appalachian Acceptance Corporation and had held it together through the worst business convulsion since 1929. He had transformed it into Global Factors, Inc., and had helped to make it the world’s most powerful corporation. Along the way, Bruce Regan had taken a viper to his bosom—. his nephew Claude, now Factor Regan, who had quietly and cunningly achieved a foothold in the directorate and who had, in the fall of 1989, given Uncle Bruce the heave-ho from his own corporation.

Regan had felt unhappy about deposing his uncle, but that had not stopped him from doing it. Bruce Regan had the right ideas, but he was getting old, he was becoming a vacillator. The world situation was too precarious for vacillation now. New, hungry nations were getting into the take-off stages of their economies. They were crowding around the old powers like sharks, nibbling away.

Bruce Regan hadn’t understood that. In his eyes, the United States was still the world’s greatest and wealthiest country, because it was impossible for him to imagine it being any other way. Nigeria? Brazil? Israel? China? The Congo Federation? Upstarts! What did they know about business? How could they hurt the United States?

So Claude had had to topple Uncle Bruce. It was a pity, for he genuinely liked the old fellow. But Bruce had failed to see how best to meet the challenge of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He was still Europe-oriented, twenty years after the fact. Claude could not afford to wait out his uncle’s life; Bruce was strong as a bull, and had a good twenty years left to him, at the minimum.

The proxy fight had been short and brutal. When the smoke cleared, Bruce Regan was Chairman of the Board—without any executive authority. He could still call himself Factor Regan, if he cared to, and he undeniably still owned twelve percent of the common stock of the company, which put him comfortably into the billionaire category. But power had departed from him.

Of the eleven men on the Global Factors Board of Directors, six were Claude Regan’s appointees. He owned them. The old guard faction comprised Uncle Bruce, Rex Bennett, and two other founders of the corporation. Claude himself was the eleventh man. He ran the show.

In token of that, Uncle Bruce speedily turned the meeting over to his nephew—not without a sour, sidelong glance of distaste.

Regan got quickly down to business. “You know about my plans for a World’s Fair bond issue. Six billion dollars bearing a three percent coupon. I’ve formed a corporation to underwrite the issue: Columbus Equities Corporation. Forty percent of the capital stock of Columbus Equities is being purchased by the 1992 Columbian Exposition, Inc., which is the corporation actually presenting the Fair. I’m offering Global Factors a chance to buy another forty percent of Columbus Equities.”

‘Who’ll own the rest?“ Rex Bennett asked.

‘I will,“ Regan answered. ”As a private investor, I’m taking twenty percent of the capital stock.“

‘In other words,“ Bruce Regan said slowly, ”the underwriting of these bonds will be handled jointly by the Exposition Corporation, by you as a private individual, and by Global Factors.“

‘That’s right,“ Regan said.

‘But neither you nor the Exposition corporation has any staff for distributing these bonds,“ Bruce Regan observed.

Regan nodded. “Right again.”

‘So it would seem that Global Factors will have to do one hundred percent of the donkey work—in exchange for being allowed forty percent of the profits.“

‘Wrong,“ Regan snapped. ”Global will contribute its financial contacts. I’ll contribute my individual money-raising talents. The Exposition corporation will contribute the prestige of the Fair itself. It’s eminently fairly divided.“

‘How much will Global have to pay for its interest in this underwriting outfit?“ Rex Bennett asked thinly.

‘I think a dollar a share is adequate,“ Regan replied. ”There are one hundred shares outstanding. Global can buy in for forty dollars.“

‘A nominal fee,“ Rex Bennett remarked. ”Fair enough for a dummy corporation. But what sort of profits can we hope for?“

Regan distributed mimeographed sheets. “I’ve worked it out on a basis of one percent for the underwriters. One percent of six billion bucks is sixty million. Of course, our expenses will have to come out of that. Say, ten million.”

‘The corporation stands to clear some fifty million on this bond issue?“ Bruce Regan said, startled.

‘Probably. Of which Global’s share will be forty percent. Twenty million.“

‘Suppose the bonds don’t all sell?“ someone asked.

‘They’ll sell,“ Regan said. ”Well? Shall we vote on acquiring stock in Columbus Equities?“

‘Wait,“ Rex Bennett said. ”I want to understand this. As underwriters, Columbus Equities will have to deliver a check for six billion to the 1992 Columbian Exposition Corporation. It’s then up to Columbus Equities to unload the bonds.“

‘Correct.“

‘But the capital of Columbus Equities will only be one hundred dollars, at the outset. How is it going to advance the money to 1992 Columbian if it doesn’t have it?“

Regan smiled. “Global Factors, as a forty percent stockholder in Columbus Equities, will advance the whole six billion. Obviously 1992 Columbian, though it also holds forty percent of the stock, doesn’t have the capital to make the advance. Nor do I. So Global will have to do it.”

‘Which is to say that Global is really assuming one hundred percent of the risk in hopes of gaining forty percent of the profits?“ Bennett persisted.

‘Yes,“ Regan said smoothly.

He sensed unrest in the room. It was pure flim-flam, and he had hoped to bull it through on the strength of his control of the directors. But these old men were being too coy with him. They resented his using Global Factors as though it were his own personal holding company. Regan began to think he might have overstepped himself. Could he hold together his seven-to-four majority on the board?

Tim Field—one of his own men—spoke up now. “Factor Regan, what assurance is there that Columbus Equities will be able to sell its six billion dollars’ worth of bonds? It’s only a three percent coupon, after all.”

Regan said, “In my estimation, Tim, there’s no risk. As of this moment, with the fund drive hardly under way, I have commitments for nearly a third of the total issue. It can’t miss, or I wouldn’t have involved Global in it at all. Global will have to extend the advance only for a very short while—and will pick up an easy twenty million for its trouble. I’ll stake my own good name that those bonds will be sold.”

‘Remember ’76,“ Rex Bennett grumbled.

Regan shrugged. He remembered, all right—the celebrated Philadelphia fiasco of 1976, the Bicentennial Exposition. That had been a much less ambitious fair; the bond issue floated in ‘73 had been a mere quarter of a billion. But then had come the Panic. The fair had never been held. The bondholders lost their entire investments.

‘Are you suggesting that people will shy away from these bonds because of the experience with the last major World’s Fair in this country?“

‘That’s what I’m suggesting, yes.“

‘Conditions have changed since 1976, Bennett It’s a brand new world. With the prestige of Global Factors behind these bonds, we’ll have no problems. I call for the vote.“

‘Seconded,“ Tim Field said.

They voted. Each board member nudged a stud in the table in front of him, and lights flashed on a panel set in the wall. Green lights for Yes, red lights for No. It was a straight division, Regan’s faction against his uncle’s. Seven green lights, three red ones. Bruce Regan, as Chairman, did not vote. There was no need for him to bother.

‘Motion carried,“ Bruce Regan said bleakly. ”All right. We now are committed to buy a forty percent interest in Columbus Equities. Is there anything else on the agenda, Claude?“

‘There is,“ Regan said. He took a deep breath. ”I now propose that Global Factors purchase one billion five hundred thousand dollars’ worth of World’s Fair bonds from Columbus Equities.“

The gasps that greeted this proposition were not altogether from the Bruce Regan faction of the board. Regan’s own men were gasping too, taken aback not so much by the magnitude of the sum as by the audacity of their chief.

Rex Bennett rose, his face livid, his lips trembling. The old banker pointed a shaky hand at Regan and said, “Just a moment ago you told us that you had obtained commitments for nearly a third of that total issue. Did you mean by that the commitment you just proposed?”

‘Yes,“ Regan said calmly. ”I did.“

‘But you had no such commitment! That commitment does not yet exist, and if I have anything to say about it, it never will exist! Regan, you’ve hoodwinked us into a gigantic swindle! You’ve talked us into advancing six billion dollars on the strength of a secret decision to throw away a billion and a half of our own money!“

‘I haven’t talked you into anything,“ Regan replied icily. ”You voted against the previous proposal. A majority of the board members supported it. That’s all.“

‘A billion and a half, Claude,“ Bruce Regan muttered in awe. ”We can’t afford to tie that much up at three percent!“

‘It’s a sounder investment than it looks on the surface,“ Regan said.

‘Explain yourself,“ Bennett snapped.

‘I’m afraid I can’t reveal what I mean at this time. But I tell you this: the billion and a half we put into the Fair now will be returned to us a hundredfold or better in the years to come.“

‘Nonsense,“ Bruce Regan husked. ”The Fair will run two years and close down. It’ll file for bankruptcy like every Fair in the past—and we’ll be out a billion and a half.“

‘No,“ Regan said. They were all talking at once, now, shouting, pounding the table. ”Listen to me! Will you take my word for it? Global Factors will not suffer! We’ll clear a fortune out of this!“

‘How? Explain!“

‘At a later date,“ Regan said crisply. ”I call for the vote.“

He waited for a seconder. There was long, brutal silence in the board room. Regan stared at the men of his faction— Field, Olcott, Harris, Slidell, Kennan, Orenstein. He had put them on the Board of Directors. He had made them rich men. If they failed him now, he was in serious trouble. His whole gaudy dream of a metal moon in the sky would come tumbling down—and with it, more likely than not, his control of Global Factors.

‘Seconded,“ Noel Slidell said after an endless wait.

Regan mentally ticked off the fact. Slidell would get paid back for that. He was the oldest of Regan’s appointees, fifty-two, not Regan’s generation at all. Yet he was willing to go along with Regan’s proposition. Out of boldness, Regan wondered? Foresight? Or simple fear of the boss?

They voted.

Regan eyed the panel. Three red lights glowed instantly— Bennett and his two cohorts. Two green lights—Claude Regan, Noel Slidell. As a seconder, Slidell had to vote in favor of the proposition.

What about the others?

One by one, the green lights appeared, two, three of them. Then, sickeningly, a red light. Someone had defected. Regan had no way of knowing which one; the vote was secret. Five in favor, four against, one man yet to be heard from. If he voted against, Bruce Regan would break the tie and the motion would be lost, and Claude Regan would be lost with it.

A green light!

‘The motion is carried,“ Bruce Regan whispered. He let the gavel drop to the table. The four old-guard members of the board stalked from the room. Regan remained, confronting his six supporters, wondering which one of them had cast the defecting vote that had come so close to undoing him. He could not tell. All six of them looked dazed by the rapid twists and turns of the meeting.

It had been a close one—but Regan had won.

Flushed with triumph, the Factor left the board room and the building, and headed for the privacy of home. A hundred feet below the ground, locked in his sanctuary, Claude Regan stared at his own pale, tension-drawn face, and suddenly began to laugh, and then to sing Novaes’ song of jubilation in wildly garbled Portuguese.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIVE
It was the middle of November.

Winter was settling in, east and west. Unseasonable snow fell on Washington, seasonable snow on Denver. The streets ran with rivulets as the thermal filaments melted the fall away. Shuttling back and forth across the continent, Claude Regan found fresh snow waiting for him wherever he went.

The Brazilians were not troubled by snow. It was coming along into summer for them, now, and rockets were rising daily, carrying girders into orbit. Fifty thousand miles up, a vast and heterogenous assortment of construction materials had been assembled, spread out over five or six miles and whirling round the Earth together. The ribs of the space satellite were taking shape. Regan could see them clearly through a telescope. Later, of course, the satellite would be visible to the naked eye, a gleaming wonderworld in the heavens.

Financially, things were moving along too, though not nearly so well. The bond issue was sluggish. Global Factors had duly bought the billion and a half’s worth for which Regan had obtained commitment. Private investors, prodded along mercilessly by Regan, had grudgingly and reluctantly bought up some $200,000,000 worth, grumbling all the while about the low rate of interest. Brazil had kindly purchased $100,000,000 of the bonds, over and above its earlier outright cash grant. The United Nations had voted to subscribe another $200,000,000.

That accounted for exactly a third of the bond issue. Columbus Equities was still stuck for the remaining four billion —which meant, essentially, that Global Factors was stuck for it, a contingent liability that would hardly look pretty on next year’s balance sheet.

Word was creeping through the financial community that Regan’s enthusiasm for the World’s Fair had led him injudiciously to overextend Global’s credit. Regan had tried to keep the story from leaking. Even the four dissident board members had kept silent, since by publicly protesting they could only hurt the price of Global stock, and thus cost themselves money, without gaining anything. Still, the story was getting out. And Global’s stock was dipping. Rumors filtered around.

‘Global Factors Common was off V/i in active trading yesterday,“ reported the Wall Street Journal for November 14, 1990. ”Analysts attributed the steady price pressure to rumors linking Global with the financing of the 1992 Columbian Exposition. Global has allegedly taken on heavy contingent liabilities in connection with the Exposition’s bond issue. The stock, closing yesterday at 138, is now down 22 from the historic high posted in August after the most recent dividend boost.“

The sharp drop in Global stock had cost Regan close to eighty million dollars on paper, but that did not trouble him. Stocks fluctuated in both directions, he knew. What did worry him was the long-term effect on events if Global got into real hot water. Had he miscalculated?

Global started to pull in its horns a little. It had five and a half billion dollars of its own money tied up in World’s Fair Bonds at the moment, and even the world’s largest corporation felt the strain of that. A hundred million dollars in callable loans had to be called. Another $80,000,000 in loans almost consummated were cancelled. With its own liquidity suddenly reduced, Global Factors was not in an easy position to make loans to anybody else.

Regan remained fairly calm. He set out on a world-wide tour to sell World’s Fair bonds.

His first port of call was Europe. The Europeans, basking in their new-found political unity, had plenty of cash to throw around, even though they were starting to tighten the belt as they felt the threat of African and Asian manufacturing industries. Europe would help, Regan thought. Europe had to help!

There was Spain, for example. Columbus had set sail from Spain. Spain would help finance the great Exposition that would commemorate the grandeur of Spain’s past, Regan knew.

And so he found himself standing on a balcony in Madrid just before Christmas, with King Alfonso XV beaming at his side. In the great square, thronging thousands roared their delight at being able to set eyes on that fabulous American, Factor Claude Regan.

‘It would be an honor to subscribe to the Exposition,“ Alfonso XV assured Regan solemnly.

Spain’s grandeur, alas, was all of the past. King and Cabinet met, consulted for hours, finally emerged with their decision. Spain would purchase three million dollars’ worth of the bonds!

‘I am deeply grateful,“ Regan declared in his best Castilian. But three million did not really go very far toward getting Global off the hook.

Then there was Italy. Columbus was a man of Genoa, though he had sailed under Spanish colors. Regan was given a state dinner in Rome, ceremonially toured the Forum and the Colosseum, shook hands with Pope Adrian. Italy pledged $15,000,000 toward the support of the Fair. The Pontiff added $500,000 of Vatican funds. But he did not take at all kindly to Regan’s suggestion that selected art treasures of the Vatican be put on display at the Fair.

‘Impossible, my friend,“ His Holiness declared in flawless English. ”Raphael, Michelangelo—they do not belong in space. I cannot authorize it. We cannot take the risk.“

Regan eyed the Pope thoughtfully. Adrian was a youngish man, only sixty, forceful and farsighted. It could not hurt to ask, Regan thought.

Delicately he broached the subject. “Would Your Holiness consent, then, to attend the Fair in person? If the Pope would be present on opening day, to provide his blessing—”

Adrian looked startled. “You must be joking!”

‘On the contrary. It’s in your power to become the first Pope to enter space. Think of the effect, Your Holiness. The eyes of every Catholic in the world turned Heavenward as you address them from space, televising your message to the entire world!“

‘But I must decline,“ the Pontiff said. ”I am quite close enough to Heaven where I am.“

Was there a suggestion of interest in the Pontifical expression, Regan wondered? Was Adrian just a wee bit tempted by the thought?

Regan did not press his position. He moved on, from capital to capital.

The results were uneven. No country, in this day of global prosperity, actually wanted to refuse. On the other hand, there was the general feeling that this Exposition was America’s business, and that America would have to foot the bulk of the bills. And, of course, not every member state of the United States of Europe was ready to dig down and contribute on the spot. Some had to deliberate lengthily first. It was still only a loose confederation, and each state had a large measure of sovereignty.

England was good for ten million, Germany for fifteen, Switzerland—not a member of the U.S.E., of course—for three. France, racked by a parliamentary crisis, could not see its way clear to buying any bonds, but expressed its hope of building a pavilion at the Fair. Luxembourg bought $30,000 worth of bonds. Monaco, piqued, doubled that. The Scandinavian nations contributed a million. The Netherlands, four million.

It was adding up, Regan thought. Slowly, painfully. But at this rate he’d never unload the whole four billion. All of Europe had accounted for less than a quarter of a billion. He had hoped for more.

He had hoped, too, for more assistance from the United Nations. The U.N. had come through for two hundred million, of course—but that was only a drop out of the treasury. Bloated with wealth from the lunar mines, the United Nations certainly could have managed half a billion dollars for the Fair, Regan thought. But something had slipped up.

Onward. It was 1991, now. Twenty-one months to opening day. The Brazilians were toiling gamely away. Surfeited on caviar and pheasant, Regan continued his money-raising tour of the world.

His big hope was the Afro-Asian bloc. The real money was here; with the factories of Africa turning out heavy-duty machinery for the world, with Brazzaville producing more cars than Detroit, there should be plenty of loose cash for the taking. Proud of their new wealth, the Afro-Asian countries would logically be expected to subscribe heavily to the bonds, by way of conspicuous consumption.

Regan discovered it wasn’t necessarily so.

He met with coolness in Addis Ababa, icy politeness in Cairo, cordial correctness in Monrovia. Everyone wished him well, but no one bought bonds. “We will erect pavilions at the Fair,” they told him. But they did not intend to lend money for the Fair’s own expenses.

Regan was a trifle disturbed by this. He continued onward, into black Africa. When he came to Nigeria, biggest and richest of the African nations, he began to understand something of the problem.

He was welcomed warmly enough in Lagos, that booming skyscraper city of seven and a half million people. In a glassy eyrie high above the sprawling city, the Nigerian Prime Minister, Sir Bawala Abukawa Ngdala, black as night and close to seven feet tall, clasped Regan’s hand in fraternal friendship.

Global Factors had developed strong ties in Nigeria within the last few years. The Nigerians were ambitious and skilled, and their universities were pouring forth a profusion of technicians. But Nigeria still lacked capital. As a new nation, it had not benefited from centuries of capital formation. Global Factors had entered, had made certain advances to the Nigerians, for which they were duly grateful.

‘I’m not here on behalf of Global Factors, Bobo,“ Regan stressed. ”My presence here is strictly on behalf of the 1992 Columbian Exposition. We know that Nigeria will be eager to support this endeavor.“

Prime Minister Ngdala peered solemnly down at Regan, and said gently, “We owe a great debt to you, Claude. You have helped us build modern Nigeria into the wealthy nation it has become.”

Regan modestly remained silent. Could he expect a hundred million, he wondered? Two hundred million?

The Prime Minister continued, his voice rich as an organ’s swelling diapason, “We are obligated to you in many ways, Claude. But yet, you must try to see this from our point of view.”

Regan glanced up in alarm. What was he getting at? “You see, Claude, this is the white man’s party. If Global Factors were presenting the Fair, we would be eager to help you. But it is the Fair of the United States of America. And my people are not fond of your nation as a whole. It is unfortunate, but we cannot forget your history, we cannot erase from our national conscience the names of Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina—”

Regan fidgeted. “All that’s gone, Bobo. We’ve changed in the past thirty years. I don’t need to tell you that the new Senator from Alabama is black, do I? Doesn’t that count for anything?”

Ngdala laughed mellowly. “One Senator, against three hundred years of slavery? No, Claude. We cannot help the white man advertise himself. Simply for us to build a pavilion at your Fair would cause agitation here. To buy your bonds might bring down my government.”

‘Aren’t you taking an extreme view?“

‘I am taking a realistic view,“ the Prime Minister said, with a finicky precision of tone that clearly conveyed absolute finality.

There was no Nigerian loan.

The Congo Federation bestirred itself to buy a million dollars’ worth of bonds—an absurdly low figure, for that wealthy nation. There, too, Regan encountered hostility, though none of it was ever voiced as honestly and as plainly as it had been in Nigeria. The East African Union was even cooler to the idea of supporting the Fair. Regan did not even dare to enter South Africa; if friendly states like Nigeria and the Congo were so uncooperative, he could hardly hope for sympathy from the rabid black racists of the Cape. White faces were rarely welcome there, these days, and certainly not those of white men asking for money.

The Middle East proved a little more interested in the idea of the Exposition. Sheikh Hassan of the Persian Gulf Republic, rich with oil, gladly pledged fifty million. President Ismail of the League of Arab States matched the pledge. Young King Abdullah of the Hashemite Union contributed thirty million. Israel did the same.

Richest of all the Arab states was Saudi Arabia, sitting atop its desert-locked treasures of oil and uranium and refractive metals. Regan journeyed to Medina, where King Feisal happened to be holding court, and was greeted effusively by the towering Wahhabi ruler. Speaking in flawless French, the desert monarch buoyed the Factor’s sagging spirits by announcing that his land would gladly buy half a billion dollars’ worth of World’s Fair bonds—the biggest single purchase, outside of that by Global Factors itself.

Regan called Washington that‘ evening to relay the good news. “We’re over the hump,” he told Martinelli. “I’ve sold close to a billion dollars’ worth, and I haven’t yet gotten to Asia. How’s the Latin American campaign coming along?“ ”So-so,“ the counsel said. ”A million here, half a million there. We’re trying to pry ten million out of Argentina, but they’re worried about the beef situation.“

‘Hold their hands,“ Regan advised. ”Tell them everything’s going to be all right. And hit them up for twenty million. God knows they’ve got it!“

There was a ceremonial feast for him, desert style, in Feisal’s air-conditioned palace. Regan ate sheep eyes and cracked wheat with the best of them. For half a billion dollars, there were few parts of a sheep he would not eat.

In the morning, the jet took him eastward.

Peking was his first Asiatic port of call. Only a few months before, representing Global Factors, Regan had negotiated an enormous loan for the People’s Republic. Now, wearing a different hat, he had come to get some of that money back.

Regan was not too confident. In August, he had been lending money to China at eight percent; now, as a borrower, he offered only three percent. The Chinese could hardly be expected to welcome such an arrangement. Still, they were making a show of their friendship toward the West these days. They could spare twenty or thirty million, Regan thought.

He was prepared to do a little conniving if they balked— to arrange for a slight mitigation of the interest terms on China’s loan from Global, if China would cooperate in the Fair’s bond drive. Cutting the rate on the loan from eight percent to, say, six, would cost Global some money, but would also release some of the capital tied up in World’s Fair bonds. The Factor was certain he could ram his indenture revision through the Board of Directors when he got back. He had rammed far more unlikely things past them.

But he did not get the opportunity.

He was left to cool his heels in Peking for two days before Chairman Ch’ien would see him, for one thing. That was a striking enough contrast to his treatment in August, which had been strictly red carpet. At length, Regan was conducted to the Flower Palace, and allowed into the presence of the Chairman.

Of all the heads of state In the world, none impressed ‘Regan more than Ch’ien Hsiu-ch’uan. He had held his post twenty years, a major accomplishment in itself, coming to the fore in 1971 after the China Troubles. Poet, scholar, archaeologist, diplomat, Ch’ien had rescued Communist China from the chaos that had beset it, and had transformed it into a leading industrial power whose old belligerent attitude now seemed only an uneasy memory in the West.

Regan and Ch’ien had met on cordial enough terms in August. But there was a certain stiffness in the Chinese leader’s manner now. Shorter even than Regan, seamed by the years, Ch’ien waited impassively, saying nothing, while the Factor explained why he had come.

At length Ch’ien remarked, “What is this Fair to us, Factor? Why should we be concerned with Columbus and his voyage?”

‘We are commemorating one of the supreme achievements of human courage,“ Regan said.

‘To sail westward and find land? Does this take bravery?“

‘It took bravery then, Chairman Ch’ien.“

‘There have been other feats of bravery in the world’s history, Factor. Is it necessary to spend billions of dollars to commemorate each one?“

‘We regard this particular feat as exceptional,“ Regan said tightly. ”It was the discovery of our hemisphere, after all.“

‘Was it?“ There was cool irony in the shining Oriental eyes. ”I remind you, Factor, of the voyage of Hoei-Shin. Is it of no significance to you?“

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.“

‘During the reign of the dynasty of Tsi,“ Ch’ien said, ”a Buddhist priest named Hoei-Shin voyaged eastward out of China for some twenty thousand Chinese miles, until he came to a land called Fusang. Fusang was quite probably Mexico or Peru. I can cite documents to support this, if you wish. Hoei-Shin’s voyage took place in a.d. 499. He was not the first Chinese visitor to the New World, Factor. You will kindly note that this took place one thousand years before the journey of Columbus.“

Regan kept a straight face. “I’ve heard stories of prior discovery, Chairman Ch’ien. Nonetheless, we feel that the voyage of Columbus deserves honor—”

‘We scarcely agree with you,“ Ch’ien said gently.

It was pure mockery, Regan knew. If China wanted to help the Fair, China would help, and no nonsense about the voyage of Hoei-Shin to Fusang in 499. China did not want to help. It had no craving to assist the Westerners in puffing their own discovery of themselves.

Regan left China empty-handed, though Ch’ien was kind enough to present him with a Sung Dynasty scroll as a personal gift, by way of consolation. It was a lovely enough scroll, with its dim, delicate depictions of mountains and waterfalls, but it did not help Global Factors at all to get off the hook on which Regan had so buoyantly impaled it.

Japan, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, the Polynesian Federation—Regan continued his tour inexorably from capital to capital. Japan was helpful, but only moderately. Australia and New Zealand subscribed with lukewarm zeal.

Regan sensed a world-wide lack of interest in backing the Fair. There was nothing organized about it, nothing conspiratorial. The nations of the world simply did not choose to underwrite the American show. They preferred to let America do a little squirming.

Or was it hostility toward him, he wondered dolefully?

Right now, the man who was squirming—with Global Factors in the hole for billions of dollars on the 1992 Columbian Exposition—was Claude Regan. And he was squirming most agonizingly.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SIX
‘Home at last?“ Nola asked him.

Regan nodded. It was late February. Denver still lay in winter’s grip. A field of ice stretched downward along the slopes of Regan’s hilltop. Nola looked wintry too. In his absence, she had grown thinner; the cheekbones slanted like knives embedded in the planes of her face. Beauticians had been at work on her, he knew. She was past thirty, but looked no more than twenty, except around the eyes. They were ancient eyes, Cleopatra’s eyes, viper’s eyes. Those eyes confronted him frigidly now. He had invited her to join him on his fund-raising tour, but she had declined, and now she seemed to be blaming him for the months of solitude.

She was tanned. Her skin sparkled faintly. A small ruby was glistening in the pit in the center of her forehead, making her look like some temple idol. Regan detested the fashion, thinking it grotesque, and perhaps that was why Nola embraced it. She changed jewels every three months. When he left, she had been wearing an emerald-cut diamond. She had the forehead for it, wide and high, a flawless expanse of skin for the insertion of the sliver of colored stone.

‘Home,“ he said. He walked past her, into the indoor garden. Hyacinths bloomed here, and sullen purple tulips, and daffodils with nodding heads. The perfume of the flowers was overwhelming after the winter sterility outside. He felt monumentally tired. He knew what had been going on in his absence, for he had never let eight hours go by without checking both his offices, the home office in Denver and the Fair office in Washington.

It had been a winter of discontent. Global stock had closed, the day before, at 111, the lowest in two years. The company’s 4Vz percent debentures of 2028 had sold off sharply, down to 99, on a rumor that Global would be seeking additional financing shortly at a higher interest rate. It was the first time since 1977 that any Global bond had sold below par.

The Brazilians, Martinelli had informed him yesterday when Regan was in Canberra, were proceeding on schedule with the satellite. Construction contracts for the space line that would take passengers to the Fair Satellite had been let, subject only to Regan’s final approval. The line would be built by a domestic firm, a subsidiary of Interworld Factoring. Regan hated to give the job to the competition, but there was no avoiding it. The wealth had to be shared.

A waterfall trickled gently through the garden room, endlessly recycling itself. It reminded Regan of the waterfall in the Sung scroll Ch’ien had given him. What had that old Sung painter of the eleventh century known of flowers in February? Of recycling devices? Of indoor waterfalls?

Nola strolled after him. She wore a black tunic, with ruffled webwork depending from the arms. Why did she always wear black, Regan wondered? Wishful thinking?

‘How did you spend your time?“ he asked her.

‘Idly.“

‘All of it?“

She shrugged. “I toured Antarctica with your uncle. He went to visit the Global base there, and he thought I might like to come along.”

‘Since when are you and Bruce such good friends?“

‘He knew I was alone here. It was very kind of him to invite me.“

Regan nodded. “Did you enjoy Antarctica?”

‘Very much,“ Nola said. ”It’s very clean there. The fields of snow—so pure. Virginal.“

‘Yes,“ he said. ”I’ve always found it a dull place to visit.“

‘I imagine you would,“ Nola said.

‘Did you spend your whole time down there?“

‘No,“ she said. ”I was on the Moon for two weeks.“

‘Were you? Alone?“

‘With Rex Bennett,“ Nola said. ”He joined your uncle and me in Antarctica, and suggested the Moon visit next. So we went, Rex and I. He’s an amusing old gentleman. Courtly and correct, very conservative. We had an enjoyable time together.“

‘You’ve been seeing a lot of the Old Guard, then.“

‘Yes. Is it wrong, Claude?“

‘Not at all. Not at all. Better that you travel around with doddering old squires than with handsome young men, if you’re going to travel at all.“

‘They seem very worried about you, Claude.“

‘Worried about me or about Global Factors?“

‘Both,“ Nola said. ”They think that you’re a sick man, and that you’re bringing the company down to destruction.“

‘Do you think I’m sick, Nola?“

‘You don’t look well.“

‘That isn’t how they’re using ’sick.‘ What they mean to say is that I’m insane. Do you think I’m insane, Nola? Come on. Tell me!“

She smiled obliquely. Reaching up casually, she plucked the ruby from her forehead and began to fondle the stone, an absent-minded gesture that Regan, in his tense and fatigued state, found unbearably grisly. He stared at the vacant socket above her eyes, then turned away.

Nola said, “What does insane mean, Claude?”

‘Skip the semantics. I can just see you and Bruce and Bennett, sitting down there in Little America, telling each other that I ought to be committed. You do think I’m nutty, don’t you?“

‘Do you feel persecuted, Claude? Do you feel surrounded by enemies?“

‘I feel tired. I feel like I’m coming apart at the seams. But I feel sane, Nola.“

‘Then you must be sane,“ she said. ”Q.E.D.“

He glanced up at her. “Put the stone back in your head, will you?”

‘I thought you didn’t like that fashion.“

‘I like looking at a ruby up there better than I do looking at the empty socket. Put it back!“

‘If you wish.“

She reinserted the ruby without turning around. Regan forced himself to watch. He realized he was trembling. A constricting band of tension gripped his belly. He walked toward her, his footsteps echoing on the tile. The waterfall gently burbled in the background. Flower-scents dazzled his nostrils. Nola stood still, black-garbed against a background of blazing azaleas.

He paused when he was a few steps away from her. Struggling to keep his voice level, Regan said. “Nola, I wish you hadn’t taken those trips with Bruce and Bennett. I wish you wouldn’t hobnob with them in the future.” “They’re both very sweet.”

‘Those men are my enemies, Nola. They are dedicated to my destruction. And you’re my wife. Pick your side and stay with it. Don’t try to shuttle back from one camp to the other.“ ”They’re very fond of you, Claude. They have your welfare at heart.“

‘They’d like to ship me to Antarctica for keeps,“ Regan said. ”Preferably in a coffin. Decide where your loyalty lies, Nola.“

She smiled. “With you, of course.” “Really?”

‘You’re my husband.“ ”Yes. Yes, that’s true, isn’t it?“

‘If you didn’t want me to spend time with those men, you should have told me so in advance.“

‘I never expected—I mean—oh, God, Nola, can’t you see? They’re out to break me!“

‘And what did you do to them last year?“ ”What I did was for the benefit of Global Factors as much as it was for me. What they’d like to do now is destruction for its own sake. They hate me for having pushed them aside, and so they want to knock me down—even though it would make them richer if I continued to run the company.“

‘They seem to think it’ll make them bankrupt,“ Nola said. ”They’re very worried about your tie-in with the Fair.“

‘I’ll come out ahead,“ Regan said grimly. ”I give you my word on that, just as I gave it to them. Nola, keep away from them! If you love me, keep away!“

He didn’t give her a chance to say anything further. He moved in on her, put his arms around her, just as though they were still in love and not merely tenants of the same house. For an instant, she resisted, but only for an instant. Her stiffness melted, and there she was, pliable and warm in his arms. He drew her close.

It seemed almost as though she were on his side. But he couldn’t be sure. With Nola, he could never be sure of anything, anymore—except that he could no longer trust her.

Regan released her, finally. Dots of color stippled her cheeks. Her expression was less chill. “Claude, let’s take a trip together.”

‘I’ve just come home, Nola.“

‘I don’t care. I’ve just come home, too. Let’s go away somewhere for two or three weeks.“

He shook his head. “I’d love to, Nola. But I can’t. I’ve got to stay on the firing line and see this thing through. You’ve got to understand that.”

‘Let’s go to Mars, Claude,“ she persisted. ”There aren’t many people who can afford to do that, but we can. Let’s go. When I was on the Moon with Rex Bennett, he took me to the observatory, and I saw Mars. Big and red, with the lines and the green spots at the poles. I want to go, Claude!“

‘Maybe later in the year.“

‘Why not now?“

‘I’ve been away for months,“ he said hoarsely. ”I can’t take another trip. Please understand it.“ He caught her hand. It was cold, cold and bloodlessly pale. ”We’ll go to Mars, Nola. That’s a promise. But not now. Give me a few months to get back into harness. We’ll go. Together. A little later in the year, Nola.“

 

The idea remained with him in the next few days. The thought of Mars haunted him. A second honeymoon? Well, why not? Somewhere along the way, during his rise to the executive suite at the Carlin Building, he and Nola had lost each other, but was that necessarily forever? The two of them, wandering the red dunes of Mars, perhaps visiting the Martians themselves—

Yes, he thought. The Martians! No one had known of them, the last time Regan had been to Mars. He had gone—alone —in ‘85, when he was still one of Uncle Bruce’s fair-haired boys, and no one had known of the desert dwellers then. It was time for a return visit. With Nola, he thought. Get her away from her plush world of couturiers and flatterers, get her off to the wilderness, to the real frontier.

But not now. . Now, there was work to do.

Problems were multiplying like toadstools underfoot. Trying to hold down two demanding jobs at once was proving impossible even for the Factor Regan. Tim Field, acting in his stead at Global, was doing a fine job—but even Field was showing the strain.

‘The price of Global stock keeps dropping,“ Field said.

‘We aren’t concerned with the price of the stock,“ Regan reminded him. ”We’re concerned only with the profits of the corporation. The stock price is subject to irrational popular whims. The corporation profits aren’t.“

Field’s boyish face looked drawn and pale. “Would you like to see the balance sheet, Factor? We’re running dry of cash.”

‘You mean we’re down to our last umpteen billion, is that it?“ Regan said, laughing with a merriment he did not inwardly feel.

‘I mean that the dividend we paid in October made a dent, and the dividend we paid in January made a big dent, and that if we were smart we’d pass the dividend entirely in April to conserve working capital.“

‘Tim, do you know what would happen to the stock market if Global Factors passed a dividend? We’d have the damnedest crash you could imagine.“

‘I suppose,“ Field said gloomily. ”But the alternative is to liquidate some of our own investments.“

‘Of course. You’ve been doing that, haven’t you?“

‘Whenever I can. But it’s got to be covered up all the time. If word ever got out that Global was selling off assets to cover the dividend, it wouldn’t be much better than if we’d passed the dividend entirely,“ Field said.

His trouble-rimmed dark eyes stared worriedly into Regan’s pale blue ones. Regan saw the terror in Tim Field, and wondered why the same terror had not yet struck him. They were both men riding a whirlwind. Both of them together were not yet as old as Bruce Regan, and yet it had fallen to them to rule an empire of capital greater than any the world had ever known before. And if Global Factors swayed even slightly, the entire capitalistic system would totter. It was a crushing responsibility that he had fought so bitterly to assume.

‘We’ll make out,“ Regan said.

‘If only those bonds could be sold—“

‘We’ll make out,“ Regan repeated, stressing each word harshly.”The bonds will sell, and any that don’t sell will stay with us. We’ll be paid off out of the profits of the Fair.“ He closed his eyes for a moment, and saw the Fair satellite in orbit, the whirling disk of metal, containing within its fragile skeleton the gleaming pavilions of fifty nations, the fancies and fantasies of the world’s most imaginative minds. And a steady stream of small spaceliners, carrying eager Earthmen skyward to view the wonders.

Was it all a pipe-dream, he wondered?

Suppose no one came to the Fair? Suppose the whirling satellite rusted in its orbit, unvisited and unknown? The bonds would default, of course. The Fair would go into bankruptcy. Global Factors would sustain the biggest investment loss in corporate history. And he might well be lynched by outraged stockholders.

‘I’m thinking of taking another trip soon,“ Regan said.

Field looked startled. “Sir?”

‘To Mars,“ the Factor murmured. ”My wife and I. A brief rest. You can hold the fort for a while without me, can’t you, Tim? Just for a while?“

Visibly shaken, Field said, “When will you be leaving, Factor Regan?”

‘It isn’t settled yet. May, June, perhaps as late as August. Perhaps never. I want to get the Fair properly launched, first, then I’ll get away for a little while.“

 

The stricken look in Tim Field’s face haunted Regan as he flew to Washington the next day. More stricken faces encountered him there—Hal Martinelli, Lyle Henderson. They looked harried, chivvied, overworked.

The man at the top is only as good as his lieutenants. Bruce Regan had cited that maxim to a twenty-two-year-old Nephew Claude, back in the Dark Ages. Claude Regan had never forgotten it. He had surrounded himself with young men, men of stamina, will, and endurance. They shared his rashness and they shared his boldness and, he hoped, they shared some of his determination as well. But could they match his pace, he wondered? He started to have his doubts. He tried to picture each of his most trusted men, in turn, taking his place, and failed utterly. They had the energy, but not the coolness. Tim Field was practically the same age as Regan, but yet seemed terribly, terribly young all of a sudden. So did Martinelli seem young. And Lyle Henderson. Their faces were clean-cut, their eyes clear, their jaws honest and determined. But—

But they were boys.

Are they too young, he wondered, or am I just aging fast?

He needed Field to carry the load of Global Factors during the organizational period of the World’s Fair. But if Field cracked, who would replace him? The lieutenants could not begin caving in, not without jeopardizing the strength of the Factor himself.

He threw himself into his work in Washington with frenzied energy. There were problems—always problems—and he dealt with them as he had always dealt with problems, by grabbing them one at a time, clutching them by the throat, and shaking them hard until they lost their teeth. The national pavilions were beginning to take shape on the drafting boards, and of course every nation wanted fifty acres for its display. The Congo alone had requested close to fourteen percent of the entire display area. How to refuse these bold, self-confident new powers? Martinelli was too tactful. Regan had to do it.

‘No nation is to have more than four acres of display space,“ Regan declared. ”If any of them don’t like it, they’re welcome to build a space satellite of their own. We don’t have room.“

There was some grumbling, as Regan had expected. The Congo withdrew from the Fair altogether. Nigeria, India, and China filed formal protests objecting to the size of the space that had been allotted to their pavilions. Considering the expense of building any sort of pavilion at all fifty thousand miles out in space, it struck Regan as amusing that those countries least willing to subscribe to Fair debentures were the ones most eager to erect splashy pavilions. He stuck to his decision, though. The new nations were not going to be allowed to hog the necessarily limited area of the Fair.

On his third day back in Washington, word reached him that His Excellency, Emir Talal ibn Abdullah, Saudi Arabian Minister Plenipotentiary to the United States of America, sought the honor of an interview with Factor Regan. Regan was elated. Saudi Arabia had not yet made good on its pledge to purchase five hundred million dollars’ worth of Fair bonds, but payment was expected imminently. Obviously the Minister Plenipotentiary was coming to deliver the check.

Obviously.

‘Shall we call a press conference?“ Martinelli wanted to know.

‘We’d better not,“ Regan said. ”The Emir Talal doesn’t think much of American journalistic methods. I think he’d be happier just to hand the check over in a private ceremony, without any fanfare.“

The Emir Talal arrived, ten minutes late, clad in flowing desert robes that must have given him some discomfort in the bitingly cold weather. He did not show it. He was a sturdy, olive-skinned man in his late forties, flashing of eye, imposing of mien—every inch the Arabian chieftain, Regan thought.

The Factor greeted Talal effusively. There was a reserve, almost a chill about the Emir’s manner, but that was only to be expected from someone of such dignity. What Regan was not expecting was the Emir’s opening statement.

‘Factor Regan, why did you not tell King Feisal that this festival of yours was in honor of a Jew?“

Regan had rolled with many a punch in his day, but this one nearly floored him. Recovering after a second or two, he said falteringly, “Your Excellency, the Fair honors the exploit of Christopher Columbus.”

‘Precisely. Columbus was a Jew.“

Regan’s eyes bulged. “Are you making a serious statement, Your Excellency? Columbus was an Italian.”

It was the wrong thing to say. The Emir drew himself up to an improbable height, and his brilliant eyes blazed with fire. Regan half expected him to draw a scimitar from his voluminous robes and send the infidel’s head flicking into the dust for daring to contradict him.

Talal said with monumental hauteur, “We have checked this very carefully, Factor. Columbus was of Jewish descent His own religious preference is of no concern to us. A Jew is one with Jewish blood. Columbus was a Jew. Surely you cannot expect us to advance money for the support of an exposition in honor of a Jew, Factor Regan!”

It’s a joke, Regan thought. It has to be! The man has a great little sense of humor.

As mildly as he could manage it, Regan said, “There must be some mistake here, Your Excellency. I understand the political considerations involved, but I find it hard to accept the idea that Columbus—Columbus—”

‘Under the circumstances,“ the Emir Talal declared, ”It will hardly be possible for us to honor our pledge. King Feisal was not in full possession of the facts when he spoke wth you. We trust you will understand.“

Nodding curtly, the Minister Plenipotentiary took his leave.

Regan stared after him, utterly aghast. Columbus a Jew? What kind of nonsense was that?

And half a billion dollars in bonds cancelled, just like that, poof! Where am I going to find another half a billion dollars, Regan wondered?

For the first time since he had embarked on this enterprise, he felt fear. Not uneasiness, not uncertainty, but fear—live, crawling fear.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SEVEN
Some hasty research work by members of Regan’s staff turned up the information, within an hour, that the legend of Christopher Columbus’ Hebraic ancestry was just that: a legend. It was part of the apocryphal ragbag of miscellaneous untruth and half-truth that had become attached to the Admiral of the Ocean Sea in the past five centuries—a speculative interlude in the work of a none too reliable biographer.

But none of that mattered. Regan could not very well put through a call to King Feisal in Jidda, telling him to reconsider, imploring him to accept the findings of historical science that Columbus and Columbus’ ancestors unto the tenth generation were good Catholics and no more Jewish than the Pope himself, or Mohammed.

Some chance. Feisal’s mind was made up—or had been made up for him—and that was that. The Emir Talal’s word had been final. There would be no purchase of bonds for the Fair by Saudi Arabia.

It was a body blow. Regan had been able to tolerate Chairman Ch’ien’s tale of Hoei-Shin’s voyage of 499, because he had not really expected much in the way of cash from the People’s Republic of China in the first place. But to have $500,000,000 practically in his grasp, only to lose it for the most preposterous of reasons—that hurt.

There was no way Regan could hide from the world the news of the cancellation. He had already announced the Saudi Arabian commitment; now, he would have to make public the change of heart. This he duly did—without specifying the reason for the switch. By two o’clock, the story was coming across the stock market tickers.

Regan braced himself and waited for Global Factors to drop another fistful of points. The stock was at 109. Stock market theorists, gravely tending their charts, had opined in yesterday’s oracles that 107 was a “resistance point” for Global stock. If it crossed 107 on high volume, heading downward, it might very well head down into the low 80’s before it stopped dropping.

‘Perhaps a syndicate can be organized to keep the price of the stock up,“ Hal Martinelli suggested, at the tense meeting in Fair headquarters that afternoon.

Regan shook his head. “Can’t do. The chief contributor to the syndicate would have to be me, and most of my capital is tied up in Global stock. In order to get cash to buy Global on the Exchange, I’d have to sell Global. Self-defeating.”

‘But if there’s a stock-market break—“ Lyle Henderson said ominously.

‘Then we’re fried,“ Regan finished for him. He paced the room, paused to peer out through the window at the falling snow, and opaqued the window with a savage poke of his index finger. He didn’t want to see the snow. He didn’t want to see anything, right now.

He was staring ruin right in the face.

If Global stock collapsed as a result of the Saudi cancellation, the whole stock market would collapse right along with it, because Global had been the market leader for years. A general crash would feed on itself; investors faced with margin calls would be forced to sell, new supplies of stock would be dumped on the market for sacrifices at any cost, stocks would go down and down and down without a bottom.

Regan had seen it all happen once before, in 1976. He hadn’t been personally involved, so he had simply watched the process from the outside, with a certain detachment and morbid fascination. After all, the present power of Global Factors had come about largely as a result of the reshuffle-ment following that economic collapse.

But this was different. He was right in the thick of it. He had started it, in fact.

If the market crashed and a general depression resulted, nonessential expenditures would be cut back pronto—meaning any commitments nations or corporations might have to build pavilions at the 1992 Columbian Exposition. Without exhibitors, there would be no Fair. If the Fair flopped, there would be no profits with which to pay off the bondholders, not even any assets to divide. The bondholders would lose their entire investments, or perhaps would recover as much as one mill on the dollar.

And the chief bondholder—to the tune of about four and a half billion dollars!—was Global Factors. Thanks to Regan’s high-pressure tactics, Global had invested in a billion and a half’s worth of bonds on its own account, and was also stuck for some three billion more in unsold bonds technically owned by Columbus Equities Corporation. If and when the Fair collapsed, Global Factors would suffer a grave wound, perhaps a mortal one. And then the jackals would move in on the stricken titan, eager for their slices of fat meat.

Regan had built a pyramid of corporations. The destinies of Global Factors and of the 1992 Columbian Exposition were inextricably interwoven by the bond issue. The failure of one component meant the collapse of the whole pyramid. And the Saudi pullout might very well have set that collapse in motion.

‘What are the quotations?“ Regan asked glumly.

‘Global’s being traded heavily,“ Martinelli reported. ”A block of thirty thousand just crossed the tape at 108V£.“

‘Not so bad,“ Henderson murmured. ”Only off half a dollar so far.“

‘There’s still forty minutes of trading time left,“ Martinelli said.

‘And three hours left on the Pacific Exchange,“ Regan added. ”Enough time for plenty to happen.“

Hypnotically drawn, Regar kept his eye on the ticker tape that was spelling out his own downfall. Global was suddenly the most active stock on the Exchange. He wondered what sort of pandemonium the Exchange floor had turned into. A block crossed the tape at 108%, then a small order at 108Vi, then a thousand shares at 108Vs. Sinking fast.

‘Will there really be a panic if it breaks through 107?“ Henderson asked, of no one in particular.

‘That’s what the theory says,“ Martinelli told him. ”If a stock breaks its resistance level, it seeks support at the next stop down. For Global, that’s around 83.“

‘Jesus,“ Henderson said.

Regan was silent. The switchboard was blazing with calls, but he was taking none of them. Perhaps the time called for dramatic action, but he felt suddenly paralyzed, numbed by the flow of events. No one can keep up the pressure all the time. Right now he was tired of fighting. He had fought his way to the top, had teetered there dizzily for a few months, had apparently over-reached himself, and now, it appeared, he was about to topple.

‘Eight hundred shares at 107%,“ Martinelli intoned.

Wasn’t there any bottom? Would the stock fall right through?

Regan wondered what would happen if it did. Say, if it closed at 80 tonight. Many men who had been millionaires yesterday would be back where they started, tonight. Those rash enough to have staked their Global stock as collateral for loans might be wiped out. Men Regan had appointed, who owed their wealth and therefore their loyalty to him, would no longer have that wealth—because of his foolhardiness. Would they still have their loyalty, then?

He wondered. There was already one defector among his appointees to the Board of Directors. Another turncoat and Brace’s faction would have a six-five majority, enough to vote him out of control. To get back on top, he would have to mount another proxy battle. But would the stockholders care to give him a vote of confidence after his flyer in the World’s Fair? Or would they decide to turn the company back to the sound, sanely conservative administration that had guided it through its years of greatest growth?

‘Seven hundred shares at 107V4,“ Martinelli sang out.

Still sinking. Only half a point from the mystic resistance point that spelled doom. All over the nation, no doubt, troubled stockholders were reaching for their telephones, calling their brokers to put in sell orders before Global fell much further. Stop-loss orders would be touched off. A selling wave would hit the whole market. There would be panic in Wall Street, panic spreading westward from time zone to time zone.

No matter what happened, Claude Regan would still be a millionaire when the day ended. Unlike the men around him, he had no personal fears of hardship; what he was losing now was paper profit, but there was plenty left. He dreaded loss of power. To have risen so high, and failed at thirty-five, that was the shame. What did you do, for the fifty or sixty years of life left to you? Where did you hide?

‘A thousand shares at 107%,“ Martinelli said, his voice quivering, almost cracking.

Foolish to talk of hiding, Regan told himself. If the catastro-phe occurred—as it seemed certain to do, now—he would simply start over. What he had attained once, he could attain again, sadder, wiser, but no less potent. Before he was forty, he promised himself, he would once again be where he had been today.

The vow made him feel calmer. He had written off his losses mentally, now. They could not hurt him anymore. Let Global break through its resistance! Let it go to 106, to 99, to 83, to 50, to 12! Let the storm break!

He would endure. Somehow he would endure.

Emboldened, he strode over to have a look at the ticker himself. It clicked away frantically. He glanced down, saw the familiar symbol for Global.

‘A thousand shares at 107%,“ he said. ”Looks like it’s stabilizing a little.“

A minute ticked by. The ticker was running late, now. Even the shiny new, high-speed ticker, driven by its computer brain deep in the bowels of Manhattan, was unable to keep pace with the scene on the market floor. But something Very odd was happening. Global had stopped falling. 107% had been the bottom. As the clock crawled on to the three o’clock closing bell, the quotations hovered at 107V4, flickering downward an eighth of a point now and then, but then gaming, gaining, from moment to moment, from one trade to the next.

‘Denver calling, Factor Regan!“ someone cried.

‘Tell them to wait,“ Regan snapped.

107 3/4!

107 7/8! 

Rising. Rising.

Three o’clock came and went. The ticker, eight, ten minutes behind the actual transactions, spewed forth its data, and Regan watched, with Henderson and Martinelli silent behind him. The last quote came, finally. Global had closed on the New York Stock Exchange at 108, off 1V6 on the day.

Not bad, considering.

‘Get the West Coast quotes now,“ Regan ordered.

What was happening out there was even more startling. Global was being traded in San Francisco on heavy volume, but it was showing signs of definite strength. By four o’clock, Washington time, the stock had recovered all of the day’s loss so far. Ten minutes later, a block crossed the tape at IO91/2—up % for the day.

‘It’s insane“ Regan said. ”They’ve all lost their minds. Why is the stock rallying?“

Henderson shook his head. Martinelli simply gaped in disbelief. Why? Why, indeed? Why go up, on the worst of all bad news, after scraping the brink of disaster? “Denver calling, Factor Regan!”

‘All right,“ Regan said irritably. ”I’ll take the call now.“ He activated the screen. Tim Field appeared, face tense, lips working in little nervous nibbles and suckings.

‘Have you been following the price of the stock?“ Regan shot at him.

‘Yes, Factor Regan. I have.“

‘Down, then up. I know why it’s gone down, but why did it start to rally?“

‘It does seem a little odd,“ Field said. ”It seems damned odd. Did you release any news in the afternoon to counteract the Saudi Arabian business?“ ”No,“ Field said. ”I didn’t.“

‘Then why’s it going up? Hell, why did you call me, anyway? What’s happening?“

‘I wanted to tell you about the special meeting of the Board of Directors, sir.“ ”What special meeting?“ ”Tomorrow. Here, in Denver.“ ”Who called it?“

‘Your uncle and Bennett,“ Field said. ”They rounded up six votes. Six is enough to call a special meeting, sir.“

Regan thought the top of his skull would lift off. “I know that,” he said. “What’s the reason for the meeting, though? Trouble with the dividend?”

Field shook his head. “No,” he said. He seemed about to collapse. “The meeting, Factor Regan—well, sir—you see, this rally, we suspect it started because Bennett and his bunch began to buy stock heavily when it got near 107.” “To support the price?”

‘No,“ Field said. ”To strengthen their hands in voting. You see, this meeting tomorrow—they’ve called it to vote on dismissing you as head of the company.“


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

EIGHT
Early the next morning, a delta-winged jet liner streaked westward across the face of the United States, outracing the rising sun. Its lone passenger, the Factor Claude Regan, moodily gobbled stimmo pills and looked forward in cold anticipation to the battle that lay ahead.

World’s Fair, he thought dourly. Who needed it?

A silly show. An extravaganza of vanity. Bread and circuses, nothing more. A display of pride. Desperate men had conceived the Fair to shore up the estate of a desperate nation, and now he, called in to save the enterprise, had impaled himself on his own ambitions.

Regan scowled. Had it been worth it? For months, he had driven himself to the brink of extinction, not for his own personal profit but for the greater glory of the 1992 Columbian Exposition. He had gained nothing, and it now seemed that he had lost a great deal. If the Old Guard succeeded in deposing him, it would only be on account of the Fair.

Who needed it?

He grappled with his doubts. Agreed, the Fair was an absurdity. Agreed, it was a display of cosmic vanity. But there was another side of it, wasn’t there? It took valor, bravery, to fling a metal moon into the sky in honor of a long-gone seaman. Columbus had half feared going off the edge of the world; the Fair in Columbus’ honor would literally go off that edge. It was an accomplishment, a hymn to boldness.

Regan found his spirits lifting as the plunging jet began its twenty-mile descent toward Greater Denver Airport. A sleepless night had tricked him into momentary depression, but his energies reasserted themselves now. The Fair was at once silly and grand, but its grandeur was all that mattered. The Fair would be a major event in human history .-And one man, only one man, was capable of seeing it through to completion. Regan knew he must not let himself fall vic-tim to his own fears now, nor allow himself to be toppled by the little men snapping at his heels.

It was a perfect landing. Regan emerged into a crisp, clear morning. The first blue was cutting into the iron gray sky of dawn. The first breath of Denver air hit his lungs, rarefied, invigorating, and he felt instantly more alive than he had for days.

A limousine waited for him, turbines thrumming, at the edge of the field.

‘Take me home,“ Regan said crisply.

 

The meeting came to order at ten that morning. Once again, Regan confronted the faces of Global Factors’ Board of Directors, four old men, six younger ones. Bruce and his satellites looked like fat cats this morning, Regan thought— cats who had already eaten the canary. He could practically see the blood on their jowls. His blood.

They were all exaggeratedly polite to him, Bruce and Rex Bennett and Lloyd Holt and David Emery, the four old men who had come here this morning not to praise Claude Regan but to bury him. They were all smiles, shaking hands with him, effusive and buoyant.

Regan’s own faction seemed grimmer, as well they might be. Two of them had every right to look grim—which two, Regan wondered?—because they were the turncoats who had joined the four veterans in demanding this special meeting. The rest of Regan’s men had good reason to show tension, too, for if they stuck by their loyalty to him, they might very well find themselves jobless tomorrow—while if they betrayed him, and he somehow prevailed anyway, they would suffer for it. A wrong guess at this stage could be expensive.

Sitting quietly, waiting for the meeting to open, Claude Regan computed the odds.

He began with a seven-four majority on the Board of Directors. One of his men had voted against him the last time, and probably would do the same today. That cut the majority to six-five. Another of his men had turned against him at least to the extent of voting to call this special meeting. If that same man voted with Bruce’s faction on Regan’s ouster, that made it five-six the other way, after Bruce, as chairman, broke the tie.

Therefore, Regan realized, he would be out of a job by lunchtime, barring a miracle.

But not finished. There had been a time, only last year, when Bruce had controlled the entire Board, eleven men out of eleven. Claude Regan had been a director then, but he, like the others, had always voted as Bruce asked. Yet Regan had surmounted that. Outnumbered one to ten, he had swept away six of the old directors, put his own slate in office, and taken over as Chief Executive Officer. A proxy battle had been the method. The stockholders had put him there.

He had done it once, and perhaps he could do it again. There were about a hundred million shares outstanding of Global Factors common stock. Regan owned three and a half million shares outright—three and a half percent. Friends and associates of his controlled another seven million shares. That gave him about a ten percent interest in the company.

The Old Guard faction had him badly there. Bruce himself, the largest single stockholder with 12,000,000 shares, could outvote Regan and all his backers. Bennett, Holt, Emery, and their supporters, adding their votes, could give Bruce a fat twenty-four percent interest.

The rest of the shares—75,000,000 of them—were in public hands, ranging from million-share blocks down to ten-share holdings. The votes of these stockholders would decide any battle for control. Fifteen million of the publicly-owned shares were registered in the name of a single brokerage house, the giant Merrill Lynch-Hutton combine. Merrill Lynch did not own the shares itself, of course; it simply held them for the accounts of thousands of its clients. But it recommended to its clients the way it thought those shares ought to be voted. The last time around, the whole block had gone solidly for Regan, because the Merrill Lynch-Hutton people felt that young blood was what Global needed. That dumped a whopping fifteen percent into Regan’s hands. But would they vote that way again? Or would they decide that the younger Regan had shown himself to be fiscally irresponsible in his brief stay at the summit, and had best be deposed?

That was the sticking point, Regan knew. In 1989 he had been able to muster more than sixty-five percent of the outstanding shares, through proxies, and he had elected six men to the Board of Directors. Here, in 1991, he might not be able to put together more than twenty-five percent of the voting stockholders, if that many—which would leave him unable to regain control.

‘I hereby call this meeting to order,“ Bruce Regan declared sonorously.

 

So it had begun.

Regan glanced tightly across the table and said, “Mr. Chairman, I’d like to know which of the directors voted in favor of calling this special meeting.”

‘Certainly,“ Bruce said, and a riffle of tension ran through the younger men at the table. He consulted a list at his elbow, strictly for show. ”Petition for special meeting was signed by directors Bennett, Holt, Emery, Olcott, Harris, and B. Regan, comprising a majority of the Board of Directors. Pursuant to Article XII of the corporation’s charter, such a meeting has been therefore called.“

Regan nodded. Now he knew the names of the two defectors, at least. Olcott and Harris. He eyed them now.

Henry Olcott was the firm’s comptroller: a thin, dry-voiced, prosy little man in his middle forties, with a flair for finance that belied his drab exterior. Regan had never regarded Olcott as a personal friend, but they had worked well together for a long time. Olcott had begun as a ninety-dollar-a-week accountant, and now, largely thanks to Regan, he was a millionaire less than ten years later. Why, then, had he turned to the opposition?

Regan thought he knew. Above all else, Olcott was a dol-lars-and-cents man. He believed in profitable operations and in sound financing. Loyal as he was to the man who had made him wealthy, he had a higher loyalty to the company. He would turn against Regan only if he felt the Factor’s policies were leading Global toward fiscal disaster. Olcott’s change of sides must have been the result of profound meditation, since Olcott certainly knew that by deserting Regan he was making a powerful enemy.

The thought that Olcott must believe he was irresponsible did not cheer Regan.

The other defection was harder to understand. Sid Harris was the one out-and-out puppet on the Board of Directors. He was Nola’s brother, and it was nepotism, pure and simple, that had put him there. He was ostensibly a lawyer, but his practice had never amounted to much. Regan had put him on the Global payroll—he was getting no fortune, but more than he deserved—and had made him a director as well. It was a hell of a situation, Regan thought, when a man’s own brother-in-law turned against him. But perhaps Bruce Regan had felt the same way when his nephew had slipped the stiletto into his back a year and a half ago.

Harris looked troubled by his decision. He was a soft-faced man, and right now he was tugging at his doughy cheeks in obvious distress. Olcott looked more composed, at least outwardly.

Bruce Regan said, “There’s only one matter on the agenda for discussion at this meeting. That’s the leadership problem. It’s the feeling of several members of this board that the controlling officers of the company have taken an increasingly wayward and irresponsible course.”

‘Several members of this board have felt that way for a year and a half,“ Claude Regan said.

His uncle nodded amiably. “Yes, but they comprised a minority. However, recent events have obviously produced some soul-searching among the other members of the board.” Bruce Regan stared straight at his nephew. “Claude, I won’t mince words. I’ve got a majority here that thinks you’re wrecking the company. The public at large seems to think so too, considering that the price of Global stock has fallen more than fifty points in the last six months. I want to ask you to resign as Chief Executive Officer, Claude. I’d rather you did it gracefully, without forcing us to throw you out with a vote.”

Regan shook his head. “I don’t plan on resigning. And you can’t throw me out.”

‘I’m sorry to inform you that we can, Claude. As you well know. I now control a majority of the Board. We can remove you. Wouldn’t it be pleasanter if you simply stepped down voluntarily, Claude?“

‘Pleasanter for whom?“ Regan asked.

Bruce steepled his fingers and said, “Last fall, you blackjacked us into investing a billion and a half dollars in World’s Fair bonds, and you simultaneously got us into a posiiton where we were committed to absorb any bonds that this dummy underwriter of yours failed to get rid of. The bond sale was a flop and we are now creditors of the 1992 Columbian Exposition to the tune of many billions of dollars. We’ll be lucky to recover ten cents on the dollar of that. In addition, our working capital has been badly strained. We’ve had to liquidate profitable investments and to turn down interesting new opportunities, simply to keep the operation going with our treasury depleted. The next quarter’s earnings will be seriously affected by this situation. Henry Olcott tells me we’ll be lucky to cover our dividend at all. Which means we’ll have to dip into the earned surplus for part of the dividend payment, and thus further strain our capital position.” The old man’s smile was a frosty one. “Claude, you’ve made a blunder. In most companies, when the executive officer makes a mistake of this magnitude, he doesn’t need two hints to get out.”

‘I haven’t made any mistake,“ Regan said doggedly. ”I admit I counted on wider support for the World’s Fair bonds. But the Fair is still a year and a half away. I predict we’ll unload most of the bonds before then. Furthermore, I predict that the Fair will be a great success and that we’ll recoup our entire investment—with dividends. And—“

‘It’s hopeless,“ Bruce Regan said. ”You’re a paranoid, Claude. A megalomaniac fool. You’re blindly bringing a mighty company down to destruction and you can’t even see what you’re doing.“

“I’m the blind one, am I?” Regan retorted. “It’s less than a decade to the twenty-first century, and you’re still stuck in the nineteenth! The real disaster would be to let you get control of the company again. We—”

Bruce sighed. “Time is wasting. There’s a press conference called for noon, and I want to have this settled by then. I’ll entertain a motion from the floor.”

Rex Bennett said, “Be it moved that Claude Regan be removed from the post of Chief Executive Officer of Global Factors, Inc., at the close of business on April 1, 1991. The said Claude Regan to continue to draw his salary until the expiration of his contract with Global Factors, Inc., at which time—”

‘Wait,“ Regan said. ”Let me talk!“

‘Out of order,“ Bruce snapped.

Bennett droned his way through the rest of the motion.

Bruce instantly called for a second, and Lloyd Holt’s hand shot up.

‘Is there any discussion?“ Bruce asked.

‘Damned right there is!“ Regan said. The Factor got to his feet and faced his uncle squarely. ”I’d like to point out what will happen if you go through with this thing. Public confidence in Claude Regan is going to be very severely undermined. He’ll be openly branded as financially irresponsible. Now, I don’t deny that this will be an awkward tiling for Claude Regan, but it’s also going to be terribly serious for Global Factors. It could cost the company a hell of a lot of money.“

‘I fail to see—“

Regan cut his uncle off sharply. “Hear me out! I’m identified with the Fair. For better or for worse, it’s a one-man Claude Regan project. If I go under, the whole Fair will go under. If I’m thrown out of here, exhibitors will start withdrawing from the Fair, bond pledges will be cancelled, the whole show will go into receivership. Since there are no assets to be divided, just a mess of liabilities, Global's investment in the bond issue will be a total loss. It’ll cost Global better than four billion dollars to fire me now. Is that a risk worth taking?”

Rex Bennett smiled and said gently, “You’re overlooking one point, Factor. If the World’s Fair gets into financial trouble, as I have no doubt it will with you at its head, you will be replaced. Some cooler, wiser head will take charge and see the project through, and the bondholders will not lose their investment.”

Regan coughed discreetly. “I’d like to meet that cooler, wiser head, Mr. Bennett.”

‘Perhaps you will.“

‘I doubt it. Let me tell you something, Bennett, and it’s going to sound paranoid and megalomaniac. There’s only one man in the world who can make that Fair a going proposition, and it’s me. Claude Regan, Factor. I can bull the thing through, but nobody else can. So if you destroy my public image, you’re destroying the Fair, and wiping out Global’s heavy investment in that Fair.“

‘So you regard yourself as the indispensable man?“ Bennett asked.

‘Right.“

Regan had never seen a real, genuine sneer before, except in televised movies almost a century old. He saw a sneer now. Bennett said, “You’re crazy, Claude.”

‘Perhaps I am.“

‘And what’s more, you must think we’re crazy. Having gotten us into a devilish mess through your rashness, you now want us to back you to the hilt—because you say you’re the only man who can get us out of that mess!“

‘You’ve stated it exactly,“ Regan said. He swung around and faced the lower end of the table—faced the men he had thought of as ”his“ until not very long ago. He stared at Olcott, who met his gaze evenly, and then at Harris, who fidgeted. Regan said, ”There’s something else you’ve failed to consider, all of you, and that’s the profit Global stands to make out of this Fair.“

‘I don’t see any profit,“ Bennett said cavernously.

‘That’s because you’re not looking,“ Regan said, with his back still turned on the Old Guard. ”Look here. Because of my megalomaniac, paranoid ways of doing things, I’ve dispensed with the committee system for running the Fair. I’ve got a lot of big names on the letterhead of my committee, but I make all the decisions. Those were the terms under which I took on the job, when the Fair was just about at the point of collapsing, and they agreed.“

Harris blinked. Olcott scratched his chin.

Regan said, “What we’re building up there is a pleasure satellite. A resort world in the sky. It’ll have everything— sideshows, gladiators, you name it. It runs for two years, and then it liquidates and pays off its bondholders. In the past, it was customary to demolish a World’s Fair when it was over. It’s a stupid and wasteful thing to do, like most of the things done in the past. Why spend good money to smash that satellite up? Why not sell it to a private corporation, and let it stay up there as a permanent exposition?”

He saw some eyes widen. He continued to stare at the two waverers.

‘I’m the boss of the Fair. Megalomaniac me. I decide who purchases what. Suppose I undertake to sell the satellite to Global Factors, Inc. Let’s say I sell it for a million dollars. It cost billions to build, but that’s all been paid for out of Fair profits. Now we liquidate, fast. Global picks up a fabulous entertainment property for a song. Nobody can yell, since Global did underwrite most of the cost of building the Fair, and took a hell of a risk, and deserves some kind of reward. It may not be ethical, maybe, but it’s perfectly legal for me, as head of the Fair, to do whatever I damned please with that satellite after the Fair closes.“

Olcott’s eyes were gleaming. Regan could practically see the dollar signs dancing in the little comptroller’s canny brain.

‘Next point,“ Regan barked. ”The Fair is also building a space line to take people to the satellite. A bunch of neat little spaceships costing a few billion bucks all told. When I sell the satellite, I’H naturally throw in the space line too. Wouldn’t that be nice? A pleasure world and a brand new space line, dropping into Global’s lap? Partly subsidized by the exhibitors at the Fair, partly subsidized by Global—but all Global’s to keep. It’s pleasant to contemplate. We ought to be able to gross a few billion a year out of that operation after we take title. Of course, it’s never going to come off, because you’re going to fire me, and I’ll be so discredited that the Fair will collapse into bankruptcy and what’s already been constructed will have to be dismantled and sold for scrap.“

He turned around, glancing at his uncle and his uncle’s supporters. Even Bruce Regan looked a little bemused by this new line of argument.

Regan said, “None of you ever thought about any of this, did you? Of course not. You silver-haired captains of industry can’t see beyond the next quarter’s earnings. You’ve got no idea of planning ahead. It’s a chess game, don’t you see, and I’m three moves ahead of everybody else. But you can’t stand that, so you have to tear me down. All right. Go ahead. I’ve said all I’m going to say. Take your vote, throw me out, hold your press conference. I wish you the best of everything, believe me.”

Regan slumped into his seat. He was flushed, sweating, drained.

There was a long silence in the room.

Finally Bruce Regan said, in a barely audible voice, “Are there any further statements?”

There were none. He waited a long, long time, but no one seemed to want to say anything.

‘I call for the vote, then.“

The electronic panel came to life. Green for Yes and ouster, red for No and retention. Idly, Regan moved his stud toward the red, and a light appeared. A moment later, two green lights appeared—Bruce and Bennett, unconvinced—and an instant afterward, a second red light flashed on. Tim Field, loyal to the last.

A moment passed. Somebody started to vote for ouster and changed his mind, a green light flickering on and abruptly flickering off. An instant later it went on again. A final decision—or somebody else’s vote?

Two more red lights. Slidell and Kennan, Regan guessed. A third red light. Orenstein. Regan had five votes in his favor, now. I’ve had it, he thought. Unless I swayed Olcott and Harris both, I’m cooked!

One thing puzzled him. So far, there were only three votes against him. Bruce and Bennett, undoubtedly, and probably Holt afterward. But why not four? Bruce, Bennett, Holt, and Emery always voted in a block, practically simultaneously. One member of Bruce’s faction seemed to be hesitating.

My God, don’t tell me I’ve converted one of them, Regan thought in shock.

He watched the panel. Three votes for ouster, five for retention. He waited for the remaining three votes against him to flash on. No doubt Olcott and Harris were weighing the odds and waiting for the others to make their moves. And one of the other faction too.

Another red light flashed, and Regan came to the startled realization that he had won. A fraction of a second later there were two more votes in his column. He had won and he had actually gained a vote from the opposition!

Bruce Regan looked suddenly like a man of a hundred and twenty years. “Three votes in favor of ouster, eight against,” he said hollowly. “There is no other business on the agenda of this special meeting. I—I declare the meeting—adjourned.”


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NINE
Regan was back in Washington by nightfall, weary but more confident than ever. He had weathered the storm, had held onto control of Global Factors. But he had won not a war but a skirmish, and on a secondary front at that. His display of self-confidence had wowed the Board of Directors, but it didn’t necessarily mean that the 1992 Columbian Exposition was ipso facto a going proposition. The Saudi Arabian pullout had been crushing in its effect on Global Factors’ relationship to the holding company that had underwritten the bonds, not to the Fair itself—but he needed much more support to get the Fair moving.

The Brazilians were doing nobly. They were actually five days ahead of the official construction schedule. The main struts and trusses of the Fair Satellite were in place, and it was possible now to view the orbiting moonlet through a telescope and get a reasonable idea of how it would look when completed, seventeen months from now.

Signs of public interest were growing, too. Visiting New York one day, Regan was delighted to see a man in Times Square selling telescope peeks at a dime apiece—offering views not of Saturn’s rings or the canals of Mars, but of the new World’s Fair Satellite. “See the World’s Fair orbiter!” he was yelling, and he was doing good business.

If people were willing to pay a dime in the spring of 1991 for a peek at the Satellite, Regan thought, they ought to be willing to pay a few hundred dollars in the fall of 1992 for a visit to the Fair itself. Yes?

It remained to be seen, of course. Commercial space travel was a relatively new thing. Commercial space lines, with routes to the Moon and Mars, went back only to 1985. It cost five thousand dollars one way to the Moon, ten times as much to Mars, and only an infinitesimal fraction of the world’s population had ever been on a space trip. Space travel was as much of a novelty now as commercial air travel had been in, say, 1928.

How many people had gone for airline rides in 1928, Regan wondered?

Not very many. And not many were likely to hop a rocket to the World’s Fair, either. A Fair staged on Earth could expect hundreds of thousands of visitors a day, while he anticipated no more than five thousand a day visiting the satellite. But the Fair would draw only the big spenders. The station-wagon crowds who would come to a terrestrial Fair would leave no money behind; those who made the initial heavy investment of buying a rocket ticket would be more free with their funds once up there. The Fair would rise and fall on the success of its concessions, after all.

The prospects looked good, anyway, if people were interested enough in the Fair to pay a dime to see its site. But there was plenty of work ahead, and no time for counting chickens in advance.

The Brazilians had to be paid. That money came out of the bond proceeds—inexorable millions flowing towards Brasilia at a steady pace. There was an interest payment to meet; even on a three percent bond, the semiannual interest cost amounted to a cool $90,000,000. That had to be paid, too.

The Fair corporation did not have much of an income, as yet. Contracts were being signed for display space, and advance rental began to trickle in from the exhibitors and concessionaires—not much, yet, but it was enough. Enough to cover the payrolls of Regan’s staff, which grew from day to day as new chores made then: demands.

He kept busy. In his capacity as head of the Fair, he was occupied in lining up exhibitors. In bis capacity as head of Columbus Equities Corporation—and a twenty percent stockholder—he devoted a fair amount of his time to peddling World’s Fair bonds in order to get Global Factors off that particular hook. The bonds sold. Not heavily, but steadily, and that was some comfort. And finally, as head of Global Factors, Inc., Regan had plenty to do, delegated authority notwithstanding.

There was progress on all fronts.

There were also some setbacks, both big and small. The big troubles included a one-day strike of construction workers in Brazil, which was settled by a hasty pay increase, and then by an even hastier visit by high Aero do Brasil officers to Regan’s Washington headquarters.

‘We will lose money on the contract,“ they told Regan. ”This strike has crippled us. We must renegotiate the terms at once!“

Regan lifted an eyebrow. “I don’t remember any renegotiation clause in our contract.”

‘Nonetheless—simple equity demands—“

‘We have our financing problems too,“ Regan declared blandly. ”I can’t help but sympathize, but all the same, there’s a contract between us, and I think it should be abided by. Perhaps later on, once the Fair has begun to turn a profit, we can work out some kind of compensation for the losses you’ve suffered as a result of this strike.“

The Brazilians left, muttering and grumbling. Construction continued. Regan felt only faintly sorry for them. He had known from the start, even if they hadn’t, that they would lose money building the satellite—maybe as much as two billion dollars. It was their hard luck if they hadn’t been able to foresee that. And if they had foreseen it, but had hoped somehow to muddle through and wring a little extra out of the Fair as time went along—well, hard lines, Aero do Brasil, hard lines!

Regan’s aides were a little troubled by the visit of the Brazilians. “Suppose they break the contract?” Lyle Henderson suggested. “Suppose they just quit dead rather than take further losses?”

‘It would mean the end of the Brazilian space industry,“ Regan said. ”They wouldn’t get another contract from anybody, and they know it. Besides, we’d sue them for umpty-ump billion at the World Court.“

‘And if they simply go bankrupt?“ Henderson asked, his long face somber.

‘You gloomy bastard! Do you think they’re likely to go bankrupt? Would General Motors go bankrupt? DuPont? Global Factors?“

‘A two-billion dollar loss—“

‘They’ve got a subsidy from their government,“ Regan said. ”They won’t fold up. Listen, stop feeling so sorry for them. What they’re getting on publicity for this job will more than pay them back for out-of-pocket losses. They’ll make out all right.“

That was a typical big crisis—something that threatened the success of the entire enterprise. The small crises were more frequent, and less harrowing. But they could be troublesome, too.

There was, for example, the visit of a gray-haired, gray-eyed gentleman who identified himself as Thorkell Thorvald-son, a businessman of Reykjavik. Mr. Thorvaldson arrived in Regan’s office with a letter of introduction from the Icelandic Ambassador to the United Nations, and, although Iceland was not expected to have a pavilion at the World’s Fair, it seemed to Regan that the least he could do was give the gentleman a few minutes of his time.

Thorkell Thorvaldson had come, it developed, to do some special pleading for countrymen of his.

‘I represent a substantial body of opinion in Iceland,“ Thorvaldson said in lilting, agreeable-sounding English. ”We are eager to have a long-standing injustice undone. You plan this World’s Fair to honor Columbus’ discovery of America. But, as is well known, Columbus did not discover America. He was quite late for that.“

Regan briefly closed his eyes. Another crank, he thought!

He had been through Hoei-Shin’s voyage to Fusang with Chairman Ch’ien, and he had heard of Columbus’ Jewish ancestry as expounded by the Emir Talal. And now…

‘Yes,“ Regan said politely, ”I’m aware of the stories of Leif Ericsson. It seems to me that there’s a certain amount of justice there, but—“

‘You misundersand,“ Thorvaldson said. ”Leif Ericsson preceded Columbus, yes. But he was by no means the first discoverer of the Americas.“

‘No?“

‘No. May I offer these documents? This is an account of the voyage of Ari Marson from Iceland to North America, a.d. 982. Here is the chronicle of Ari. ’He was driven by a tempest to Hvitramannaland, which some call Great Ireland; it lies to the west in the sea, near to Vinland the Good, and six days’ sailing west from Ireland.‘ I offer here the account of Bjarni Herjulfsson, who in the year 986 set out from Iceland to Greenland, but was blown off course and reached your Cape Cod. Then, of course, there is the familiar tale of Leif Ericsson, also a settler in New England, who in the year 1003—“

Very gently, Regan interrupted. “Mr. Thorvaldson?” “Yes, Factor?”

‘I know the Vikings are supposed to have discovered America. The Chinese have made an earlier claim. A Buddhist priest named Hoei-Shin, in 499 a.d.—“

‘Undocumented, Mr. Factor. A total fabrication. I have gone into this very carefully, and I can tell you plainly that the Chinese did not reach North or South or even Central America. Perhaps they reached the Philippines, or Hawaii, but not the Americas!“

‘All right, then. The Vikings—“

‘Are the first documented discoverers. See, read these, Mr. Factor! They give you proof.“ ”But what am I supposed to do?“

‘Perhaps give these discoveries some official recognition in your World’s Fair,“ Thorvaldson suggested hopefully. ”1992 is the one thousand and tenth anniversary of Ari Marson’s voyage to the New World. Perhaps the Fair could be renamed so as to honor Ari Marson, instead of—“

‘We customarily hold these celebrations to honor a round-figured anniversary, Mr. Thorvaldson. Since we’re ten years too late for Ari Marson, it’s probably better to honor Columbus instead.“

‘But not as discoverer! Not as discoverer! Rediscoverer, Mr. Factor. That must be stressed in your official propaganda. Rediscoverer!“

The descendant of the Vikings grew red in the face. He slapped the sheaf of documents on Regan’s desk and repeated his theories several times, more insistently each time. He grew confused, lapsed occasionally into Icelandic, or what Regan assumed was Icelandic.

Regan buzzed for help. Lyle Henderson appeared and tactfully escorted Thorvaldson out, murmuring reassuring things and getting replied to with thick staccato bursts of Norse. When he was gone, Regan gathered up the sheaf of impressive-looking documents the Icelander had given him, and called in a young, diligent member of his public-relations staff.

‘Jim, take these things and read them through carefully. Then get hold of all the literature on pre-Columbian discoveries of America. Saint Whatsis, and the Welsh prince, and Leif Ericsson, and the Chinese, and all the rest. Do up a brochure on the subject. A nice thick press release in which we study the claims of all the others and simultaneously conclude, a) that every pre-Columbian claimant has a great deal of merit worth noting, and b) Columbus still discovered America. Can you do that?“

‘I’ll give it a try, Factor Regan.“

‘Give it a damned good try. And get copies off to all the libraries, the newsfax sheets, the American consulate in Iceland, and anybody else you think deserves one. From now on I don’t want to hear any more on the subject. It’s your baby, all the way.“

 

The Fair was moving along. The sheer size of the operation was beginning to arouse fascination, even among those who were originally opposed to the whole idea. It confirmed a long-standing belief of Regan’s, to the effect that the difference between a crackpot and a genius is simply a failure on the crackpot’s part to think big. A crackpot, faced with the need to find a site for a World’s Fair in a hurry, might suggest a floating island in the Atlantic. A genius would toss the whole Fair into a sky-high orbit—and then make- it happen.

With things going more smoothly at the Washington headquarters, Regan could afford to devote a little more time to the activities of Global Factors, Inc.—and even to think a bit about the vacation Nola had half-committed him to taking on Mars.

There was some unfinished business in Denver, having to do with the loyalty of certain members of the corporation’s Board of Directors. Regan took no action for several weeks after the vote that had confirmed him in control of the company. But finally he decided to have face-to-face chats with Messrs. Olcott and Harris.

He sent for Olcott first.

The wiry comptroller looked unworried. “I’ve been expecting this meeting for some time now, Factor.”

‘Oh?“

‘You want to talk to me about that Board of Directors’ meeting, I suppose.“

‘You suppose correctly.“ Regan rose, paced around his vast office, turned to confront the other. ”Olcott, you were part of the group that voted to hold the meeting. Obviously you were eager to have me removed as Chief Executive Officer.“

‘No, sir.“

‘No?“

Olcott said, “I was anxious to have the issues aired. I don’t mind telling you I was seriously worried about the company’s finances. That bond issue—”

‘Yes, I knew. It horrifies you to think of how many billions we’ve tied up speculatively at a three percent yield.“

‘Yes, sir. It does horrify me. Or it did. I wanted to hear how you could justify it. So when your uncle came to me and solicited my support for the special meeting. I signed the petition.“

‘You thought I was leading the company down the road to ruin,“ Regan said. ”Eh?“

Olcott did not smile. “I’m afraid I did, Factor Regan.”

‘Do you still feel that way?“

‘I’m willing to wait and see. Your speech at the meeting persuaded me that it was premature to act against you. I voted in favor of your retention.“

‘I figured that you did.“ Regan shook his head. ”You’re braver than I thought, Olcott. You had the guts to cooperate in hauling me on the carpet, and now you tell me to my face that you had grave doubts about my competence. That’s a novelty. The only people in this company who ever tell me anything to my face are my uncle and Rex Bennett, and what they tell me is not stuff I like to hear.“

Olcott moistened his thin lips. “If you feel that our working relationship has been undermined by my actions against you, Factor, I’ll be glad to tender my resignation. There are other employment opportunities which—”

‘No, Olcott. Your job is to keep watch on the company finances, and if you think things are going wrong, it’s your job to yell. Even if you step on my corns in the process. I’m not firing you. The idea of your going to work for Interworld or one of the other competitors doesn’t appeal to me, and I like your independence, besides.“

‘Thank you, sir.“

‘One thing, though. Bruce may try to oust me again before the Fair is open. Stick with me, will you, Olcott? I think I know where I’m heading—and I think the company will benefit from it.“

Olcott left. Regan was satisfied with the man’s honesty, impressed with Olcott’s willingness to put company loyalty above personal loyalty. They understood each other now. Regan nudged the intercom. “Send in Harris.” Nola’s brother entered, haltingly, walking in a sideways crablike scuttle as though he really preferred to be going in the other direction, which was probably true. He came to a halt in front of Regan’s desk and stood there, soft-bodied, thick-middled, ill at ease. Regan had never understood how someone as hard and cool as Nola could have such a flabby, spiritless older brother.

‘Are you going to fire me?“ Harris asked, blurting the question out a moment after he entered.

‘I just want to talk to you,“ Regan said. ”Sit down, Sid. Relax. Let’s talk.“ ”About what?“

‘The Board of Directors’ meeting.“ ”I voted for keeping you, didn’t I!“

‘I assume so,“ Regan said. ”For all I know, you were one of the three negative votes, though that’s not too likely. Okay, you voted for me. But you also helped to bring the meeting about in the first place. There wouldn’t have been any special meeting if you hadn’t signed that petition. Sid, why did you sign it?“

‘Your uncle asked me to.“

‘Did my uncle have any call on you? Did he put you on the payroll? Did he give you stock options?“ Regan glared at the soft man. ”I bought you, Sid. Why the hell didn’t you stay bought?“

Harris’ expression was woeful to behold. He showed no indignation at the Factor’s blunt words. Looking vacantly past Regan’s left shoulder, he said hoarsely, “Old man Regan offered me a thousand shares to sign the petition.”

‘That’s better than a hundred thousand bucks,“ Regan said. ”Even at the present deflated price. Not bad. Not bad at all. So of course you accepted.“

‘It was only a meeting,“ Harris said miserably. ”I didn’t actually vote against you, Claude. I just let Bruce use my name on the petition. You wouldn’t get hurt any, and I’d be a hundred grand ahead. It seemed safe.“

‘And if, thanks to you, I had been thrown out of my job by the vote of other people at that meeting—“

‘I didn’t think it would happen.“

‘You didn’t think. You didn’t think.“ Regan scowled at him. ”You let Bruce buy you, and you didn’t think! Sid, you’re a damned idiot! Didn’t you have enough sense to realize that if I go, you’d go? Bruce bought your signature, but he’d fire you the day after I left. He’s got no use for you. The only reason you’re here is that you’re Nola’s brother, and Nola’s my wife, and I’m the top man. That’s all.“

Harris reddened. He shifted uncomfortably.

Regan went on, “You were cutting your own throat by letting Bruce buy you. Couldn’t you see that?”

‘It didn’t look that way to me, Claude,“ Harris said hazily. ”I thought it all through. It couldn’t hurt to take the stock from Bruce and then vote for you. I didn’t just jump into the decision. I talked it all over with Nola first, and—“

‘You what?“ Regan gasped.

‘Talked it all over with Nola. She said I’d be a damned fool not to take the stock.“

Regan’s eyes widened. “She advised you to help Bruce throw me out?”

‘You’ve got to understand, Claude, I was never actually going to vote against you.“

‘Forget that. You talked to Nola, and she told you to go along with Bruce. Jesus. Jesus Everlasting Christ!“

‘Claude—“

‘Get out of here!“ Regan spat savagely.

‘Am I fired?“

‘No,“ Regan said. ”Not yet. You’re still Nola’s brother, and as far as I know I’m keeping you here out of pure nepotism. But I’m not sure anymore. I’m not sure of anything. Go on, Sid. Get out!“

Harris got.

Regan sat stunned at his desk. Nola! That trip to Antarctica with Bruce, and to the Moon with Bennett—what sort of poison had they poured into her ear? She was behind the ouster move, then. She had influenced Harris. And in all probability Harris had planned to vote for the ouster, too, despite his claims to the contrary. He had simply chickened out at the last moment, after Olcott’s switch of vote, because he realized Regan was going to win.

So Nola had angled for the ouster. That was interesting. That was very interesting indeed.

Regan decided to have a long talk with his wife. Not in Denver, though. Secluded surroundings were best.

They would take that vacation on Mars, after all. Right away.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TEN
The spaceport had a raw, unfinished look to it. It was six years old, and that had been time enough only to put in the launching pads and the temporary administration buildings. The frills would come later, the landscaping and the murals and the sculpture.

Here, in the summer of 1991, commercial space travel was a long way from being a booming enterprise. The Nevada Spaceport, from which Regan and Nola were departing, was the busiest in the world, but only six Moon flights and two Mars flights departed every month. The air of tranquility and leisure that stamped the spaceport atmosphere already marked it as not of this world. It was too peaceful here to be Earth.

Important as he was, Regan had to check in even as mere mortals did—to be weighed, to be examined, to be checked through. His luggage was searched for bombs, and searched most meticulously.

‘Really,“ Nola said, ”I don’t see why we should have to put up with—“

‘I do,“ Regan snapped. ”I see every reason. Lives are in danger. They can’t take chances.“

‘Would a Factor have a bomb in his luggage?“

‘He might have more reason to than other people,“ Regan replied. ”When a big man decides to end it all, he ought to end it in a big way.“

Nola snorted. They passed on, through the check-in rooms.

The ship waited, alone in the middle of a bare field, upright like a gleaming fish performing a weird balancing act on its tail. The gantry’s tentacles enfolded it. Regan smiled. The ship represented power, and he appreciated power. There were colossal reserves of power held ready in those blast tubes. A commercial ship made the trip to Mars in less than a week, which called for steady, wasteful acceleration of a kind that would have bewildered the space pioneers of Regan’s boyhood. Military ships took longer, because their passengers’ time was generally cheap and fuel wasn’t.

Technicians bustled around, checking the ship through its final hours of countdown as the passengers boarded. Regan and Nola had a first class cabin—hardly luxurious, but the best that was available.

Strapped in, waiting for the crush of acceleration, Regan wondered idly if the ship would make it safely. Probably. In commercial space travel’s brief history there had been only two ships lost, and that was a remarkable record by any score. Rocketing to Mars was, statistically, safer than taking an ordinary jet from New York to London. But still…

Regan smiled. He hoped all went well with the voyage. It would be a pity if he missed the opening of the Fair.

 

‘Will there be a brass band waiting?“ Nola asked.

‘You might call him that,“ Regan said.

‘Him?“

‘Dick Avery. He’s our man in Marsport. He’s supposed to meet us.“

They were waiting in Quarantine. The ship had landed, and sand-crawlers were clustered outside the main lock, waiting for the passengers to disembark. Medics were making their way through ship, beginning with the crew, moving on to the first class passengers next.

It was half an hour before the Regans were free to leave. The sand-crawler carried them across the spaceport and into the waiting dome of Marsport.

No brass band awaited them. Only a chunky, florid-faced man absurdly rigged out in purple tights and a pale green tunic. He was vast, enormously broad across the withers, and his bushy red beard gave him a comically piratical look. A massive hand enfolded Regan’s.

‘Good trip, Factor?“

‘Not bad at all. Dick, meet my wife, Nola. Nola, Dick Avery, Global’s representative on Mars.“

Avery and Nola exchanged remote glances. The big man clapped an arm around the Factor’s shoulders in a jovial, comradely way that no Global employee would have dared to attempt on Earth, and boomed, “Well, Factor, want to drop down to the office for a look around?” “I’d rather go to our hotel first,” Regan said thinly. “I’ll be along to inspect the office in time. This is a vacation for me, supposedly.“

‘Sure thing! Well, I’ll drive you to your quarters. I guess you’ll want to take a tour, like all the tourists, eh? This is your first trip up in quite a while.“

‘I haven’t been here since ’85.“

‘Lots of things different now.“

‘I imagine,“ Regan said. ”Such as the Martians themselves. I’d like to ride out and visit them in a day or so.“

‘I’ll talk to the anthropologists. They’ll arrange it.“

‘You do that,“ Regan said.

Nola was silent as Avery drove them through the streets of Marsport toward the transient hotel. Regan glanced at her. She was staring through the bubble top of Avery’s little car at the ramshackle tin buildings, the unpaved streets, the raw shabbiness of it all.

‘Disappointed?“ he asked.

‘A little.“

‘What did you expect? Paris?“

‘It’s all so ugly, Claude!“

‘It’s new. Jesus, Nola, it’s only sixteen years since the first manned ship landed here at all. They’ve come a long way in a short while.“

‘I suppose,“ Nola said with a restless sigh.

‘Remember, it was your idea to come here.“

She nodded and turned toward the window again. It was ugly, Regan had to admit. But it was the ugliness of energetic growth, the ugliness of a leggy colt, the ugliness of a skeleton that someday would be the core of something majestic. It was just a boom-town, now. A soaring dome covered a few square miles of red desert, and beneath that dome was layer after layer of brand new city—extending downward into the planet’s flesh, because it was cheaper to build that way than to extend the size of the dome.

The colony was under United Nations’ administration, but it had been developed by private capital—in contrast to the Moon base, which was U.N. all the way. A consortium of American and European firms had financed the project in 1979, with no one stockholder permitted to buy more than a one percent interest. That had been a direct slap at Global Factors, which, then under Bruce Regan’s still vigorous direction, had angled for a major share in the development of Mars.

Marsport was not alone on Mars. Five hundred miles away, in the Aurorae Sinus just north of the equator, was the Russian dome—languishing, now, from what Regan had heard. The Russkies had reached Mars first, early in ‘75, and their dome was the oldest on Mars. But the general economic problems of the Soviet bloc had hampered its expansion, and the Russian dome was unimportant, currently manned only by a skeleton crew of Czech technicians and a few geologists.

A third dome was rising now—three years old, and already of major importance. China, Brazil, and Nigeria were building it as a joint project, state-owned and state-run. A few U.N. men were on hand as window-dressing, as required by international law, but they had little say in the operation of the colony. In a few years it would be bigger than Marsport, Regan knew, and it was not a pleasant thing to contemplate.

 

What passed for a hotel in Marsport was not terribly pleasant to contemplate either—even the Presidential Suite, which Regan was lucky enough to have been able to reserve. It was six levels down, for one thing. There were no windows. The ceiling was eight and a half feet high, which would not have greatly disturbed the average apartment-dwelling Earthman, but which distressed Nola, mansion-accustomed, no end. The “suite” consisted of just two rooms.

‘It wasn’t like this on the Moon,“ Nola kept saying. ”It was much more comfortable there.“

‘The Moon base can afford luxury,“ Regan told her tightly. ”It’s a quarter of a million miles from Earth and chock full of exotic fuel sources. With the profit the U.N. makes out of the Lunar mines every year they could afford to build a Taj Mahal for visitors,“

‘The Taj Mahal was a tomb, darling.“

‘You know what I mean! Well, there’s no money to spare for frills up here, Nola. This is a pioneer world.“

Nola yawned. “I suppose. When do we visit the Old Martians, Claude?”

‘In a day or two. Why?“

‘I’m curious about them. And it’ll be an excuse to get out of this filthy town.“ She stared at the dull metallic ceiling, a yard above her head. ”I feel like a mole, crammed away down here! If this is the Presidential Suite, what’s an ordinary room like?“

‘Like a cell in a beehive, Nola.“

Regan didn’t mind her carping. It was to be expected from her, and he was determined not to let it interfere with his visit. She was adaptable enough to get used to it in a day or two, he figured. If she didn’t—well, too bad. It was his vacation.

He had a busy time of it. The Marsport Board of Governors tendered him an official banquet that night; he munched on tough chlorella steaks, drank algae wine, listened to speeches in praise of Global Factors, took some ribbing about the World’s Fair, and handed back some ribbing of his own about the local hotel accommodations. In the morning, Dick Avery took them on a tour of Marsport, Nola silent, visibly bored with the whole thing. “And this is our food-processing plant,” Avery would say. “That’s the atmosphere-generator building, over there. And this—”

‘The brothel?“ Nola suggested acidly.

‘No, Ma’am. That’s over on Washington Street. This is the public library, here. Ten thousand books on scanner disks so far, and growing all the time.“

‘How nice,“ Nola said. ”I’d like to borrow War and Peace for bedtime reading, if it’s available.“

‘That a history book?“ Avery asked.

‘A novel,“ Nola said. ”By a Russian. A dead Russian.“

‘That’s the best kind,“ Avery said, and they drove on.

Regan drank it all in. There was a sense of growth here, of bursting, shackle-breaking growth, that fascinated him. Simply to compare what had been done in the six years between his visits thrilled him. Let Nola toss her sarcasms around; let her feel jaded and cramped. She could never understand what was happening here. Here was a world that had been dead, and now was coming to life. Hydroponic gardens were turning the brick-red deserts green. Vast hydrolysis plants poured out synthetic rivers of real water. New colonists arrived, a hundred a month, and every day saw new tunnels built far below, new homes constructed. The hospitals were crowded, not with the sick but with the newly born.

A coppery taste of feverish excitement was in Regan’s mouth. He had caught the Mars fever, this time. To build, to plan, to expand—no need to fight the Board of Directors, there were no reactionaries here—to lay the groundwork for a stunning new outpost of humanity…

The colony directors arranged courtesy tours of the other two domes for him. A jet helicopter carried him through the thin air, high above a barren red plain dotted here and there by the clumps of lichenoid vegetation. They called at the Russian dome first. It was a depressing place, half-populated, echoing. Touring it, Regan felt a certain morbid satisfaction at its failure. Sad-eyed, lean-faced Czechs gloomily showed off their power plant and their hydroponics works. A plump Rumanian leaned close to Regan and whispered in bad French, “You know? You could buy this place for ten kopecks! Just ask, and they would sell it. And glad of it!”

Regan spent half a day there, and the copter took him onward. “You’ll see a different story at the next dome,” Dick Avery warned him.

‘I imagine I will,“ Regan said.

‘Those poor Russkies! What a flop!“

Avery sounded gleeful. But Regan found it impossible to rejoice in what he had just seen. The decline of Soviet economic strength was simply the handwriting on the wall for his own country. An overextended, overdeveloped nation, shackled by debt, thrown into turmoil by a sudden awareness of adversity, could collapse fast. Ten bad harvests in a row had done the Russians in. Their international and interplanetary commitments had become millstones round their necks once bellies went empty. The trend was running the same way in the United States—a national debt in the trillions, farm shortages where once there had been unmanageable surpluses, persistent unemployment—none of them pleasant things to regard. They could all be overcome, Regan thought. But would they be?

No. Not so long as fat-cat prosperity replaced aggressive dynamism. Some spark had winked out, in the United States. He wondered if a simple thing like a World’s Fair could light that spark again. A rallying point, a symbol, a gleam in the sky—would it work?

The copter spiralled down. A bronze sand-crawler of Congolese make was waiting to take the visitors into New Dome.

It was small, smaller than Marsport and just as scruffy. But it was growing fast. The hum of construction work approached an uncomfortable level. Black and yellow and brown men sweated in the artificial warmth. Everything was flimsy, everything done on the cheap, for these new nations were financing their dome on shoestrings and matchsticks. But no matter. The dome was growing, and one of these decades the colony would be self-sufficient, and the investment would pay off.

‘They work hard here,“ Avery murmured. ”Whenever our boys start slacking off, we ship them over here for a visit It scares them enough to go on double shifts.“

‘How are the relationships between the two colonies?“ Regan asked.

‘Friendly enough,“ Avery said. ”They’re willing to let us have our little chunk of Mars, because they know they’re going to take over all the rest. And we feel the same way.“ ”Any attempt at coordination?“

‘Some. We’re trying to arrange things so we don’t duplicate each other’s research and production. Let them grow tomatoes, we’ll grow cabbage, that sort of thing. But it’s hard to arrive at any agreements. They’re such touchy bastards. Terribly proud of being here at all, you know, and so they take a pretty lofty attitude toward us.“

‘They’ve got a right to be proud,“ Regan said. ”Look where they started from fifty years ago, and look where they are now. And where they’ll be fifty years from now.“

‘I suppose you’re right,“ Avery said, and for once a look of distress crossed his jowly, beaming face.

A Nigerian named Jason Mbondze showed the Regans around. He was a six-footer, black as space itself, with daz-zlingly white teeth gleaming in his purplish face. He wore tribal robes, and carried himself with military stiffness. His attitude toward the Factor was a mixture of arrogance and deference; he seemed fearfully pleased with himself and with the achievement here, but yet he was well aware that millions of dollars in Global Factors loans had helped to build this dome. He seemed to be saying silently, We needed you and you helped us, and we are grateful. But we will soon pay our debt to you, and then good riddance to you!

‘Here is our water plant,“ Mbondze declared. ”Capacity is five million gallons a day, but next month we double that. Would you like a bath?“

Regan forced himself not to laugh. “Not just now, thanks.”

‘You and your lady may bathe at our expense. It will be our pleasure.“

‘We’re deeply honored,“ Regan said. ”I appreciate the sacrifice.“

‘No sacrifice at all,“ the Nigerian said, a trifle sharply. ”We have plenty of water. Plenty! It is no sacrifice!“

They got past that sticky moment, and went on. Nola was quiet, as if sensing her sarcasms might be unwanted here. The tour reached its climax atop a three-story building that looked out beyond the dome wall to the desert.

‘Our atmosphere-generating plant will be there,“ Mbondze said sweepingly. ”Five years, we build it. You know our dream? Real air on Mars! No domes! We have the plans drawn. Generators every hundred miles. Create a carbon dioxide belt around the planet—greenhouse effect, raise the temperature. Plant forests everywhere. It will take seventy-five years. The cost, one hundred billion dollars. We cannot finance it alone, but Marsport will help. We are talking to them about it. No more domes on Mars! A self-sustaining atmosphere in seventy-five years!“ Mbondze’s eyes glittered. ”It will be paradise here!“

Regan nodded. Unaccountably, his legs began to tremble. No domes? A hundred billion dollars? Call it a hundred fifty, before they finished. It wasn’t much, really, considering what it cost to build these domes, to tunnel downward into the ground for new accommodations. How much was the World’s Fair costing, anyway? Maybe forty billion, figuring in everybody’s expenses. For a sideshow. And to breathe fresh air under the open skies on Mars… “Yes,” Regan said. “It will be wonderful here.”

 

By nightfall they were back in Marsport—nightfall being simply the disappearance of the absurdly tiny sun. Regan used up a few thousand dollars phoning Earth, checking on the Fair, on the doings of Global. All was well. Bolivia and Belgium had paid advance rent on their pavilions. Reservations were being booked now for flights to the Fair Satellite. Global Factors stock was up to 116. The inventory of unsold World’s Fair bonds had been reduced by $35,000,000 more.

Regan slept badly that night. He was overstimulated, overexcited by the things he had seen, the plans that had been put forth to him. Lying awake, he clenched his fists, pressed them together until the knuckles popped. There was so much to do here, he thought! So much. And they were doing it, too. A bespectacled, bland-faced anthropologist named Curtis called for them in the morning, after their austere breakfast in the hotel dining room. He was young and earnest-looking, and, as he promptly explained, he was only a part-time anthropologist. “I’m studying the Old Martians twenty hours a week, but I’m also a fork-lift operator.” He laughed, selfconsciously. “Anthropology is more or less of a luxury up here. But somebody’s got to study the Old Martians while they’re still around.”

‘Is it far to their village?“ Nola asked.

‘We can be there in an hour,“ Curtis said.

The crawler moved at anything but a crawl—eighty miles an hour over the hard-packed sand. There were no roads in the desert, but none were needed. The fierce wind and tumbling sand had worn every hill flat over thousands of years, in this part of Mars. A few rocks studded the desert, sturdy boulders of incredibly brilliant colors, blues and reds and greens, that had somehow resisted the constant weathering process. Larger bluffs rose here and there. Splotches of Vegetation, grayish-green, stained the red landscape.

‘The Martians were practically in our back yard,“ Curtis said. ”Less than a hundred miles from Marsport, but how were we to know? We had found plenty of their ruins, but the Carbon fourteen datings told us they hadn’t been occupied for ten thousand years or more. And then one day a prospector walked into a cave and there they were!“

‘Are there many of them?“ Regan asked.

‘Oh, maybe a hundred in this cave. There are some other caves, of course. We guess there’s an Old Martian population of maybe ten thousand all told. Most of them keep well out of sight.“

‘I don’t blame them,“ Regan said. ”How do they take to you people coming up here and colonizing their planet?“

‘They don’t seem to mind that. It isn’t really theirs any more, you see. There are so few of them left that they think of themselves as a dead race, and so we’re welcome to the place, if we’ll only be kind enough to leave them alone. Best as we can figure, there was a total Martian population of a couple of million, ten or twenty thousand years ago. It was never what you’d call crowded up here. But then the birth rate went into a tailspin, and as best as we can figure it they’ve never recovered from that. At their present rate of decline they’ll probably be gone in another few hundred years.“

‘Can’t something be done to make them increase instead of decrease?“ Regan asked.

Curtis looked amused. “We can’t breed them, Factor. They aren’t cattle. They’re people.”

‘Do they speak English?“ Nola wanted to know.

‘A few of them do,“ Curtis said. ”They aren’t terribly interested in learning, most of them.“

‘Can you speak their language?“

‘In a way. They aren’t terribly interested in teaching us, either. I’d say that generally they aren’t terribly interested in us at all. They just sort of tolerate us, more or less. Mostly less.“

The country grew hillier. Gaping caverns were visible in the mica-flecked sandstone hills. The sand-crawler whirred to a halt.

‘We’re here,“ Curtis announced.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

ELEVEN
Helmeted, carrying their atmosphere on their backs, the three intruders entered the cave. Regan’s flesh crawled. He had a sensation of being an archaeologist, of entering Tut-Ankh-Amen’s tomb only to find the Pharaoh alive and waiting for him.

The mustiness of the tomb hung over the cave. It had the stillness and the dryness of death. Regan had seen films of these caves—the world had gone wild over the Old Martians, of course, when they had been discovered less than two years back. The first known extraterrestrial life! It had been the greatest scientific sensation since the beginning of the space age. But the films were nothing like the creepy reality. Regan stood at the cave mouth, narrowing his eyes and squinting into the dimness, and the millennia seemed to roll back as the Old Martians came out to view the visitors.

There were six of them. They looked like gnomes, no more than three feet high, their gray skins dry and leathery, their arms and legs fragile, pipestem-thin. Large hairless globular heads seemed to be on the verge of toppling right off the flimsy necks. Two enormous eyes, a tiny nose, and a slit of a mouth comprised the Martian features.

They stared impassively, showing little sign of interest. Curtis advanced and said something in a clicking, guttural language that sounded like the scraping of insect wings. The Martians did not reply for a moment; then one who seemed to be the leader inclined his head and said—in unmistakable English—“We do not mind.”

‘Come on,“ Curtis said. ”They’ll let us look at the cave.“

A row of tiny steps led downward a few feet, and the cave swung around at right angles to go deeper into the rock. Curtis led the way, Regan and Nola following, silent as two babes in Toyland. Small chambers carved from the living rock branched of! from the main passageway. They were furnished simply, with little beds of plant fibers, Japanese-fashion on the floor. Some of the rooms were decorated with wall paintings, the pigment pale, the designs abstract and incomprehensible.

Each room contained a pot in which grew a grayish plant. The broad leaves gave off a faint yellowish glow. “Biolu-minescence,” Curtis whispered. “They don’t have electricity. This is how they light the caves.”

‘And their air and water?“ Nola asked.

Curtis pointed, indicating stubby whitish plants with thick drooping leaves. “The plants give off oxygen. Enough for the Martians, anyway. We’re studying them. We hope to put in big plantations of them all over the surface.” He nodded at another plant, in a different chamber of the cave. A great many ropelike stems grew from the center stem, and at the end of each was a swollen pod, about the size of a child’s fist. One of the Martians nodded to Curtis, who picked up a stem and pinched the pod from its end. Droplets of water ran out. Curtis gave the pod to a Martian, who put it to his thin-lipped mouth and squeezed it.

‘But where does it find water?“ Regan asked.

‘There are underground springs here—a hundred, two hundred feet down. The plant’s roots go right down there. It stores water in the pods. Not much, but the Martians don’t need much. They’re adapted to get along on a couple of ounces of water a day.“

‘And food!“ Nola asked. ”What do they eat?“

‘Other plants. They’re completely self-sufficient. But marginal. They’ve got exactly what they need to survive, no more. It’s probably the only pure Malthusian community that ever existed. They don’t dare expand their numbers, or they’ll die of starvation and thirst.“

Regan glanced at the Martians, who accompanied them unobtrusively, slinking along like phantoms. The wonder of their survival stirred him. This was the counterpart to that other wonder, the growth of the Earth colonies on Mars. Over there was energy, dynamism, all the qualities Regan valued most highly. Here was the resignation, withdrawal, age—incredible age—fragility. Youth and age sharing the same world, the dying race and the coming breed of masters.

The Old Martians fascinated him. And an idea was sprouting in his fertile mind.

‘Curtis?“

‘Sir?“

‘Do you think some of these Martians would mind making a little trip?“

‘Sir? I don’t understand.“

‘We’re having a World’s Fair, Curtis. Perhaps you’ve heard. Next year, to celebrate Columbus’ discovery of the New World.“

‘Yes, sir. But—“

‘You may know that I’m the head of the Fair. I’m trying to make it the greatest show the world has ever seen. A kind of summary of five hundred years of progress in the Western Hemisphere. Now, it just struck me that a Martian pavilion at the Fair would be an extremely desirable thing to have.“

The face behind the helmet sagged in an astonished gasp. “You mean—take Martians to Earth, sir?”

‘Not to Earth. We’re building a special satellite to house the Fair. We’ll set the Martians up there—say, half a dozen of them, in their own little section, duplicating their atmosphere exactly. A little bit of Mars, you might say. We’ll copy this cave down to the nth degree, paintings and all.“

‘Claude, you can’t—“ Nola began.

‘Quiet,“ he said. ”Curtis, would that be feasible?“

The anthropologist stared. “You aren’t serious, sir?”

‘Of course I am.“

‘The Martian’s won’t even leave their caves to visit each other. You don’t think they’ll let themselves be taken from Mars, do you?“

‘It’s worth a try. Can I put it to them? Will they understand me?“

‘The leader will. But—if you’ll pardon me, sir—I don’t think you even ought to bring it up. It’s a pretty fantastic idea. It’ll cost you a mint, first of all—“

‘Let me worry about that.“

‘And it’s not really safe. There are so few of them left that it’s not right to risk them, Factor. Disturbing them, moving them around—even five or six of them, that’s a sizable fraction of the whole Martian population!“

‘We will exercise every precaution,“ Regan said, inflamed by the idea now. ”Listen to me. You can’t understand how interested the people of Earth are in these Martians. It’s the biggest thing to bit Earth since the first space satellites. But it costs thousands of dollars to come to Mars. There isn’t one person in a million who can afford to see these creatures— these people—in their native habitat. On the other hand, if we bring a few Martians down to the Fair, where nearly everyone can see them—why, it may be the only chance humanity will ever get to see them in the flesh!“

Curtis shook his head. “It’s really not proper, sir.”

‘But if they’re willing to go—“

‘Try it and see, then. Talk to them. I’ll be your interpreter, if you like.“

 

By the time Regan finished explaining to the Martians what he had in mind, he was dripping wet, and trembling from the strain of communicating. It was no go, of course. The few English-speaking Martians had listened unblinkingly to Regan’s awkward sales pitch, bolstered by occasional interjections in Martian by the anthropologist. And finally, when the whole proposition had been made clear, the answer came, unambiguous, unarguable: “We do not wish to leave our homes.”

Regan gave it the old college try. He explained how eager the people of Earth were to meet their Martian friends. He offered huge sums to make the Martian caves more comfortable. He suggested a tour of Earth itself, painting the neighbor planet in glowing colors.

The Martians were unimpressed. They had not the remotest desire to go anywhere, neither to Earth nor to the World’s Fair, not even to the cave a hundred yards away. And so alien were their values that no persuasion Regan could use would change their minds.

He talked himself hoarse.

‘We do not wish to leave our homes,“ they answered.

After the visitors had left the cave, Curtis said, “I knew they wouldn’t go for it, sir.”

‘Well, it was an idea,“ Regan muttered.

He was disgruntled at its failure. To have Martians at the Fair would be the making of the Fan-, he knew. But, still, they had said no, and that was that. He hadn’t really expected them to agree to be rocketed off toward some distant world. They weren’t the type to travel.

Back in Marsport, Regan settled down for a few days of observation and rest, before returning to Earth and getting back into harness. But he found himself edgy, unable to relax. He bubbled with half-understood needs. Here was Mars, the old Mars and the new, and he longed to do something with it. To harness all this vigorous energy, and to make some use of the wistful alien beings. But what? What could he do with Mars and the Martians? No answer.

There was something here, something that powerfully captured Claude Regan’s imagination. But the Factor was at a loss to put it to use. His first idea—bringing Old Martians to the Fair—had died aborning. And he was unable to evolve any other concrete plan dealing with the Mars of the colonists or the Mars of the Old Martians.

The day before departure seemed to him as good a time as any to broach a certain topic of discussion with Nola. They had been out for a drive in the desert, in a chauffeured sand-crawler provided by the local Global Factors office— and, on busy Mars, chauffeurs were greater luxuries than caviar. Now, as they returned to the dome, Regan glanced at his wife and said, “I had a talk with your brother Sid just before we left.”

‘Really, darling?“

‘Really and truly. You know that he was part of the group that tried to oust me last month.“

Nola frowned. “I’m sure that’s not right.” “He signed Uncle Bruce’s petition calling for a special meeting of the Board. If he had said no, there wouldn’t have been any meeting. But he said yes.”

Nola turned away, stared languidly at the desert. “I’m sure he must have had some good reason for doing it, darling. Maybe he thought it was for the best” “Nola?” “Yes, dear?” “Look at me, Nola!”

‘But it’s practically my last chance to see Martian scenery. I can look at you later.“

His hand shot out, clamped around her wrist “Look at me,” he said in a voice quivering with rage. “You’re hurting me!” “That’s a pity. Look at me!” “All right. I’m looking. Stop squeezing my wrist.” Regan glared at her. He said bluntly, “Sid signed that petition because Bruce offered him a thousand shares of Global stock to do it.“

‘Is that so?“

‘That’s so. Considering that I’ve made that ass a millionaire, it seems pretty ungrateful of him to try to sell me out for a lousy hundred thousand.“

‘Maybe he’s had reverses,“ Nola suggested. ”You know he likes to gamble. A bad week at the track—“

‘Nola, Sid also told me that he discussed the whole deal with you beforehand. And he said that you advised him to go ahead, sign the petition, take the stock.“

There was a nicker of anger in Nola’s glittering eyes. “He said that, did he?”

‘Yes.“

‘He was lying!“

‘I don’t think so, Nola,“ Regan said. ”Sid doesn’t have the guts to lie to my face. You do, but he’s not you. You advised him to take a step that might have dumped me out of control. Why did you do that, Nola? Is that the way a wife is supposed to look out for her husband’s interests?“

Nola shrugged. She looked now like a little girl caught stealing from the candy bowl. “I didn’t think the meeting could hurt you, and I didn’t see why Sid shouldn’t take that stock if it was offered.”

‘Wouldn’t it have hurt me if I got dismissed from my post?“

‘You’d still be rich as Croesus, darling.“

‘Money isn’t power,“ Regan snapped. ”If all I wanted out of life was money, I’d have retired three years ago. I’d spend all my time sleeping in the sun, getting up just to clip my coupons. I need more than a fat bank account to keep going. You know that. Yet you advised Sid to help get me dumped.“

Nola’s expression was serene again. “All right, Claude. I plead guilty. I conspired against you with Sid, at the urging of your Uncle Bruce. Bruce would like to get back on top, and he’s not at all pleased with the way you’ve been running the company. He asked me for help. I decided that you were ruining your health working this hard, and so when Sid came to me, I told him yes, sign the petition. It would enable you to take some time off and rest.”

‘Very considerate of you. How much did Uncle Bruce offer to pay you for stabbing me in the back?“

‘Never mind.“

‘He did pay you, of course. And you put the money in some private bank account of your own, just in case our marriage should split up and you needed a few spare millions over and above what I’ve given you already.“

‘Are you filing for divorce?“ Nola said sweetly. ”There are no grounds, you know. I lead a blameless life. I did go to the Moon with Rex Bennett, but he’s very old, and I’m sure a medical report on him would show—“

‘No, I’m not divorcing you,“ Regan said. ”It’s not very jolly to share my bed with a snake, but I’ll go on doing it. God only knows why.“ He glared at her. ”It’s been a long time since I was in love with you, Nola. But I never realized before how much I hated you.“

 

The spaceliner hovered in orbit, and descended Earthward. Below, the tawny expanse of the Nevada desert waited for the kiss of the rocket flame. It seemed to Regan that he had been moving endlessly from desert to desert lately. Compared with Mars, though, Nevada was a lush tropical jungle.

He was in Denver two hours after touchdown. There were loose ends to tie up. It was getting into summer, now. Months were moving by. The Factor lingered in Denver long enough to familiarize himself with all that had taken place in his month-long absence. It was heartwarming to see the way Tim Field was growing into the job there. After his first uncertainties and hesitations, Field was beginning to look very much the executive. It eased the strain on Regan to know that Global Factors was in such capable hands while he was preoccupied elsewhere.

Three days in Denver proved enough. He went over the accounts, looked through some reports. Field was full of en thusiasm. “We’ve turned the corner on the working capital problem,” he said. “Those bonds still have us over a barrel, but we’re profiting from the general pickup in business conditions.”

‘I’m sure Uncle Bruce is sore about that,“ Regan said.

Field grinned. “I don’t see much of him. Since that Board meeting, he’s been keeping away. Licking his wounds, I guess. Poor fellow.“

‘I bleed for him,“ Regan said. ”Listen, Tim, how soon can you get yourself free for a month?“

‘Why?“

‘I’d like you to go up to Mars. Have a look around. It’s worth the trip.“

‘Well, I don’t know, Factor. We’re only just starting to get organized here.“

‘I want you to get a look at New Dome. It’s quite a place. Wave of the future, all that kind of thing. There’s scope for investment there. I’d like to divert as much of our capital as possible toward investment in Mars.“

‘In New Dome, or in Marsport?“ Field asked.

‘Both. But it’s tricky, both places. At Marsport we’re up against the legal restriction on one company having more than a thin slice of the operation. Got to lobby for a relaxation of that. And over at New Dome, there’s the problem of their willingness to take our money and their unwillingness to let us get any kind of share in ownership. Work on it, Tim. Those colonists up there have big plans. I’d hate for Global Factors to be left out of the Mars boom. I want to be in it to the hilt.“

 

The cherry blossoms had come and gone, in Washington. The city thronged with high school students, visiting the national shrines. Damp, muggy heat blanketed the whole eastern half of the country.

Regan plunged back into the complexities of the 1992 Columbian Exposition.

Somehow, now, the Fair had palled on him. It had come to seem an irrelevancy, simply a responsibility that he had taken on and had to discharge. It no longer engaged his imagination and enthusiasm as it once had. Up there, the red world glowing in the night sky—that was something worth getting excited over, he thought! Thriving, restless new cities sprouting on the tired soil of an ancient world. But a Fair? A Punch-and-Judy show for the amusement of mankind’s swarming millions? It dismayed Regan to think of the expense of spirit that he had involved himself in, the outlay of energy.

A day or two back in harness, though, and his mood changed. Mars was forty million miles away; the Fair was here, and represented an immediate challenge. The news, he learned, was mixed. Eighteen nations and seven corporations were definitely committed to exhibit, now. Leases had been signed, binders had been paid over.

‘That takes care of about a hundred acres of exhibit space,“ Lyle Henderson told him. ”We’ve still got two hundred acres to fill. Then the concessions and the accommodations, and we’re done.“

‘How do we stand on tentative commitments for those two hundred acres?“ Regan asked.

‘Fine. We’re overbooked by a hundred fifty- acres at the moment. But nothing’s signed. Countries keep changing their minds all the time. The list is different from one day to the next.“

‘Get them nailed down,“ Regan ordered. ”We’ve only got fifteen months left. Those pavilions have to be constructed and finished by next October 12, or else. How are you doing with the concessions?“

‘Fifty-fifty,“ Henderson said. ”It’s moving along.“

‘And the satellite itself?“

‘The shell will be finished on August 15. Construction of the shuttle line is right on schedule. We can begin moving workmen in to start building the pavilions themselves by September 1. Martinelli is up there inspecting the place right now. There’ll be eleven months for pavilion construction, and that should be plenty.“

Regan nodded. “Have you checked into the cost of insuring the Fair?”

‘Uh-huh.“

‘And?“

‘It makes me feel sick to tell you,“ Henderson said. ”I’ve got a brochure. It’s going to cost a million bucks a week for the first six months, and then they’ll knock a hundred thousand off the premium each six months thereafter.“

Goggling, Regan said, “Is that the best you could do?”

‘The very best. They point out that there’ll be thousands of people in the Satellite at any one time, and that an accident could lead to damage suits totalling up in the billions. On an actuarial basis—“

‘Did you get an estimate from Stellar Casualty?“

‘No, sir. Stellar’s a Global subsidiary, and I thought you had decided we weren’t going to deal with Global except where unavoidable.“

‘It’s unavoidable here,“ Regan said. ”We can’t afford to fork out fifty million a year for insurance. Talk to Mike Dominick at Stellar. I’ll talk to him too. We can get that premium down to ten, twenty million, I’ll bet.“

‘If you say so, sir.“

‘I say so.“

Regan turned away. He felt slightly queasy. If some lunatic decided to blow up the World’s Fair, it would result in the biggest insurance claim in history. Did he really want a Global subsidiary on the hook for that kind of risk? Wasn’t Global in deep enough as it was?

He moistened his lips. The Fair couldn’t afford outside insurance. Stellar, meaning Global, would underwrite it. Let Stellar off-load the risk somewhere else, if it wanted to. The solvency of the Fair came first. And if the Fair blew up —well, Regan thought, Stellar would have to pay off, Global would be strained to the rivets, and Factor Claude Regan would—well, he preferred not to think about that. If the Fair blew up, he’d have to trust to luck that he went up with it. There wouldn’t be much room on Earth for him after that.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TWELVE
In November, with opening day now less than a year away, Regan paid his first visit to the space satellite that was to house the 1992 Columbian Exposition.

The shell was complete, and had already become a landmark in the night sky, gleaming, coin-sized, easily visible even with low-powered field glasses. It was sealed tight, pressurized, the atmosphere generators already at work recycling air through the globe. Centrifugal spin provided artificial gravity, one G to keep everybody comfortable. Regan had toyed with the idea of pegging the Satellite at half-gravity to make every visitor feel more bouncy and lively, but had decided against it finally. A plan periodically to halt the spin entirely to give everyone aboard a brief no-grav interlude had also been scrapped; it would have been too much trouble to tie down everything portable during those interludes. Visitors to the Fair would get a sufficient taste of free fall while in transit, anyway.

Regan went to the Fair even as an ordinary citizen would have to do when it opened: via one of the new ships. He boarded it at Denver. The idea was to have half a dozen of the little ships deployed at each of Earth’s main spaceports, for the convenience of travelers. If demand warranted it, more of the ships could be constructed during the Fair itself.

The vessel was strictly economy class. It had been built as rapidly as prudence allowed, with one eye cocked toward the Federal safety regulations at all times. It was a double shell of aluminum, with rocket engines generating a few million pounds of thrust. The passenger cradles were Spartan, rudimentary. The baggage limit was eight pounds a passenger, permitting a couple of changes of underwear and not much more. Most of the visitors to the Fair would be spending no more than twenty-four hours there. Overnight accommodations were limited, and deliberately expensive; two hundred and fifty dollars entitled you to a single night’s use of a bare cubicle hardly big enough to lie down in. It was not an arrangement calculated to win many friends for the Fair, but it was dictated by the economics of the situation. The only way the Fair could show a profit was through high turnover, thousands of people paying admission fees, wandering around, and leaving. Space was limited; they weren’t running a resort up there.

At least, not yet, Regan thought.

There were thirty passengers aboard the ship Regan took: aside from the Factor himself, they included three members of Regan’s staff, several representatives of exhibitor nations, and a flock of reporters getting a free ride. Regan got the red-carpet welcome at the spaceport, but once aboard the ship, his cradle was no fancier than anyone else’s.

‘It’s not a bad ride, Factor,“ the steward told him. ”You just have to relax and stay loose. It’s over before you know it, sir.“

Regan grinned and strapped himself in. The warning gong sounded, and the ground personnel left the ship. The budget provided for a crew of just two, pilot and co-pilot. Stewards did not remain on board after blast-off. Too expensive to ferry hired hands back and forth.

The seconds ticked away. Regan waited, swaying gently in the hammock-like acceleration cradle.

Blast-off came. The ship groaned and lurched.

It reminded Regan of his very first space flight, a business trip to the Moon, aboard an old clinker of a rocket that went back almost to the ‘70’s. He had felt every jolt of the blast-off then, and he was feeling it now. Well, it was no luxury liner, he thought. Not at fifty bucks a ride! “

Gravity dragged at him. Five, six, seven G’s. His face distorted under the strain. But it was only momentary. It was too expensive, and too rough on the passengers, to push the acceleration any higher. The people aboard wouldn’t be trained astronauts. They’d be ordinary joes—though of course they’d all need medical certificates testifying that they could stand the gaff. The weak-hearted as well as the faint-hearted would get only secondhand impressions of this World’s Fair.

The engines cut out as the ship reached orbital velocity. Regan was used to the phenomenon of no-grav by this time, but he smiled at the thought of the thousands upon thousands of visitors to the Fair who would be experiencing it as something brand new and startling.

They drifted through the darkness. Somewhere nearby was the Satellite. Regan had no porthole to view by—economy!— and so all he could do was slump back in the cradle, relax, wait.

Hardly any time at all had elapsed. It was quicker to reach a satellite fifty thousand miles up than it was to drive from New York to Boston. That was the point that had to be hammered on in the promotional campaign: that it was just a short, easy hop, skip, and jump from your nearest spaceport to the World’s Fair.

There was still no sensation of motion. And then, briefly, there was: the blast of lateral jets as the ship matched orbits with the Fair Satellite. Regan waited. There was a second jolt as the starboard jets were fired. This rendezvous maneuver was the most time-consuming part of all; two objects moving at thousands of miles an hour had to be brought together in such a way that the airlock of one and the airlock of the other could be joined.

A tricky maneuver, but not really a difficult one. And, under the circumstances, the only possible way of getting Fair visitors inside the Fair. Just as for practical reasons it was impossible to equip passengers aboard jet airliners with their own parachutes, so, too, it was unthinkable to provide a spacesuit and the training to use it for everyone who came to the Fair. Professional spacemen could suit up and cross a rope ladder through space to get inside the Fair Satellite; Earth-lubbers would have to move from airlock to airlock without once leaving an atmosphere.

The ship and the Satellite were joined. The locks opened. For the first time, Claude Regan set foot in the home of the 1992 Columbian Exposition.

He was impressed.

He found himself in a high vaulted chamber, brightly lit, walled on three sides. In the middle distance he saw workmen welding something, sparks showering gaily in casual disregard for the environment. Further off, a giant crane was being inched into position.

The welcoming committee came rushing up to greet him.

A Brazilian named Castelanho pumped his hand. “So glad to see you, Senhor Factor. So very glad!” Castelanho was in charge of construction and maintenance; he was the top-ranking Aero do Brasil man on the job. “We have everything ready for you to see,” Castelanho exclaimed. “I hardly know what to show you first, Senhor Factor!”

Regan grinned amiably. “It doesn’t matter. I want to see it all.”

 

It was quite a sight.

Even with everything half-completed or worse, it was possible to discern the outlines of the Fair that would be. The globular Satellite was divided into many levels for greater floor space, and the pavilions of the nations and the great companies were rising in every part of the huge orbiter. Workmen shouted across echoing voids; cables trailed everywhere; booms and cranes, assembled out here in space, swung in awesome majesty from one level to another.

There was little or no sensation of actually being in space. The normal gravity, the atmosphere, the solidity of everything around, gave one the feeling of still being on Earth, and yet not really in any familiar place, for one was definitely inside something, some vast enclosed space, and there were no five-hundred-acre enclosed spaces of this sort to be found on Earth. The Satellite was unique.

There were few portholes opening onto the blackness of space without. This was deliberate. Cutting down on the number of portholes reduced the structural weakness in the shell of the Satellite itself, and cut construction costs. All to the good, of course. Still more to the point was the fact that revenue could be promoted from the almost total absence of windows.

There were some windows—half a dozen of them, large plate-glass panels. They were to be operated as concessions. Anyone who wanted a squint of the starry void—and Regan imagined that would have to be just about everyone who came to the Fair—would have to hand over fifty cents or so to enter a window area. Penny by penny, the Fair would somehow pay its way.

Regan roamed on. His busy imagination transformed what he saw into completed pavilions, and he liked the effect. It would not, of course, resemble any of the World’s Fairs of the past except in general purpose. Regan could remember being taken, as a boy of nine, to the New York World’s Fair of 1964. He remembered the green meadows, the reflecting pools, the gay Lunar Fountain, the colossal Unisphere towering fifty yards high, the tree-bordered malls. It had seemed like a dazzling wonder-world, and he had never forgotten its glittering gaiety, its spectacular abundance.

Here therfe were no malls, no trees, no meadows. A single fountain fed water endlessly into a pool, but there was none of the elaborate machinery that had marked the fountains of that other fair. Nor were the pavilions the palaces of delight that Regan remembered from his childhood.

Everything was simpler, here. Of course. This was a tiny world iff space, and what was built there was built at mind-staggering expense. Duplicating a terrestrial World’s Fair was beyond question. They had created something new here, something the world had never seen before.

Regan spent half an hour at the Global Factors pavilion, bordering on the main plaza. It was more nearly complete than any of the others, of course, since Regan had bulled the appropriation through the Board of Directors very early in the game. A Global engineer—one of the men who usually helped build dams in underdeveloped parts of Earth— spotted Regan out front, recognized him, and came out to meet the Factor.

‘Looks pretty good, doesn’t it, Factor Regan?“

‘It looks grand,“ Regan said. ”The whole thing. It’s just terrific.“

 

Dawn was breaking over the Atlantic as Regan reached Washington, bone-tired. The vision of the World’s Fair Satellite still tingled in his brain. He had been unable to sleep on the trip back, down to the Denver Spaceport and then across the continent by jet to Washington. Images raced through his mind—of the Fair completed, of people patiently queuing up to board the little ships, of wide-eyed visitors strolling the aisles of the Satellite in wonder.

He managed to get a little sleep at the Georgetown home he had rented as his residence while in the Capital. At noon, he was at the Fair office, and he was not there more than minutes when Lyle Henderson came stalking into Regan’s room, tight-lipped, gaunt-faced, practically quivering with suppressed rage.

‘Good morning, Lyle,“ Regan began, pleasantly enough.

Henderson was in no mood for pleasantries. The aide put a newsfax sheet down on the Factor’s desk and blurted, “Look at this, Factor! Just look!”

Regan looked.

It was a clipping from a gossip column in one of the New York tabloids. Regan frowned, scanned the Sheet, waded through tales of Broadway nonsense. He wondered why Henderson was so irate. Perhaps the gossip columnist had said something nasty about Claude Regan’s marital problems, eh? On the surface, Nola was still his wife, and nobody officially knew there was trouble between them, but still, these snoopers…

Only why should Henderson be so sore about that?

Regan didn’t know. He read his way three quarters down the column, and then he saw what the trouble was. It had nothing to do with him and Nola.

It said:

F.B.I, agents are running around in circles trying to confirm a story which says that a certain foreign power is going to bomb the World’s Fair on opening day. As it comes to us, the Fair is slated to go Boom next October 12, when it’ll be chock full of notables from all over the world. Just where the fatal missile is going to take off from is slated to remain secret forever if the perpetrators can manage it. Our guess is that a certain heavily populated Oriental power is cooking up the big blast by way of dealing the deathblow to American prestige once and for all.

Regan looked up. He felt as though someone had just rammed him in the gut with a jackhammer.

‘Oh, Christ,“ he said. ”Christ! When did this garbage get published?“

‘Yesterday, Factor. It came through the machine at noon, and we started getting phone calls about five minutes later. And of course you had taken off for space, and there was no way we could reach you.“

‘How did you follow up?“

‘We had the story killed,“ Henderson said. ”I phoned the Graphic in your name, and let them know that we’d bring a libel action if that story didn’t get cut out. They dropped it from all editions starting twelve-thirty.“

Regan grinned wryly. “Did you get legal opinion on the libel angle?”

‘I asked Martinelli. He said it probably wasn’t actionable, but that I ought to call anyway.“

‘Good man. Who’d you talk to?“

‘The publisher,“ Henderson said. ’Tony Coughlin himself. He was pretty badly shaken up about it. He said he had no idea such a thing was running in his paper, and he was firing the columnist right away.”

‘A lot of good that does us,“ Regan muttered. ”Well, I don’t blame Coughlin for getting scared. Global holds notes on his lousy sheet. I could put him out of business tomorrow, if I wanted to, and he knows it.“

‘That won’t help, sir.“

‘Don’t I know that?“ Regan scowled. ”I wish I had put him out of business the day before yesterday! What a stinking business!“ He stared at the yellowish fax sheet on his desk, and the offending words seemed to blaze at him like beacons. ”How many people do you figure saw this thing?“

‘The Graphic has about seven hundred fifty thousand subscribers, sir.“ Henderson shook his head. ”The story ran for only half an hour. That’s a probable exposure of maybe fifty thousand readers. But you know how a thing like that spreads. Somebody reads the Fair is going to be blown up, and he tells three of his friends, and they turn around and tell—“

‘I know. Yes.“ Regan hammered on his desk. ”Have you talked to the F.B.I.?“

‘Yes, sir. They don’t know a thing about it.“

‘It’s all a figment of this bastard’s imagination, then,“ Regan said. He rose, paced around the office. He wanted to break things, to smash, to rend and tear. ”Some hundred-buck-a-week moron is trying to write a column, and he’s a hundred words short when he’s through gabbing about who’s sleeping with whom. So he pops a stimmo and inspiration strikes and he fakes a story about the bombing of the World’s Fair, and suddenly we’re in a mess because nobody wants to risk coming to see us. Damn! Damn damn damn!“

‘I haven’t issued any retractions, sir,“ Henderson murmured. ”I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Perhaps the best thing is just to let it die of its own accord.“

Regan peered out. Dark November clouds scudded across the horizon. It was a bleak, miserable day, and he felt bleak and miserable inside. “If we don’t deny it,” he said. ‘people are going to keep thinking that there’s a Chinese plot to H-bomb the Fair. If we do deny it, we’ll not only sound unconvincing, but we’ll thereby bring the story to the attention of a lot of people who may not have heard it in the first place. So we’re fried whatever we do. Eh, Lyle?“ ”I was thinking the same thing.“ ”How does the staff feel about this?“

‘Divided, sir. Martinelli and a few others think we should get the Graphic to issue an immediate retraction. The rest seem to believe we ought to let the matter drop without raising a fuss about it.“ ”And you?“ Regan said. ”I don’t know, sir. I don’t know at all.“ Regan closed his eyes for a moment, trying to group his defenses. This was a low blow, a totally unexpected blow from the gutter.

He was silent a while. A muscle flicked in his cheek. He longed to get his hands on the man who had written that story. But what good would that do? So long as there were tabloid newsfax sheets, there would be mud thrown, lies given out as solemn truth, and all the rest. There is a kind of person, Regan reflected, whose role in the universe seems to be to destroy, and if not to destroy then to tarnish.

At length he said, “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll have the Graphic run a little squib saying that yesterday’s story was pure fabrication. Just a column inch or so, so it won’t draw attention. Then you and your staff will get on the phone and talk to the boss of every communication medium in the country—every newsfax chain, every video network, every news magazine. You will give out the word that the bomb story was vicious, irresponsible, and baseless, and that Claude Regan feels it should be allowed to die without further discussion. That he believes there should not even be a report of the incident, no matter if the story says six times that there won’t be any bombing. I want it killed.”

Henderson frowned. “Suppose it backfires, sir? Suppose somebody decides that the news must be published without external interference, and makes a cause celebre out of this? I mean, they might begin by reprinting the original story, and then cover your attempt to kill it.” “It’s the chance we take,” Regan said. “Global Factors holds the mortgage on everybody, Lyle. I’ve never tried to use that as a lever to control the news media before. I’ve studied history and I know all about the Zenger case and the rest But there’s too much at stake, here. Somebody has played dirty with us, and I’ve got to play dirty in return. I don’t like it, Lyle, but I’ve got to do it. Get started.”

Henderson left. Regan remained standing near his window, clenching and unclenching his fists.

The filthy bastards, he thought.

Somebody should have killed that story in the womb. But it was out, and no amount of behind-the-scenes suppression would really succeed in quashing it now.

People would talk. It was risky enough to get into a spaceship and fly off to a satellite in the sky. It was risky enough to spend time aboard a satellite. Hadn’t a satellite blown up in 1977 and taken four lives? Suddenly everybody would remember that incident, irrelevant to the present situation as it was. Okay. Given those risks, should one go on to take the further risk of being aboard a target for a Chinese warhead?

Regan felt like weeping. How could he tell people that the chance was one in a billion that anything would go wrong with the Satellite? How could he stand up and say that the world was at peace, that it was ten years since anybody had last detonated a nuclear bomb even for testing purposes, that economic competition cutthroat-style had come to serve at long last as the much-mooted Moral Equivalent of War? The Chinese wouldn’t blow up the Fair. Hell, Ch’ien himself would be on board, opening day. Nobody would blow up the Fair, neither the Chinese nor the Russians nor the Congolese nor the Lithuanians nor the Andorrans. Nations didn’t think in terms of blowing each other up anymore. They had subtler ways of fighting. The only one who would dream up such an idea was a tired, typewriter-happy rummy fighting a deadline in a newsfax office.

The damage was done;

May he roast in hell, whoever he was, Regan prayed.

Already, in defense, Regan had been forced to meddle with the freedom of the press—thus violating his own ethics, using Global’s power immorally. It was a descent. And perhaps a pointless one.

Who knew but that those hundred words might not have already ruined the Fair? And ruined with it Global Factors, and Claude Regan as well?

Who knew?

Wait and see, that was all Regan could do at this point Just wait and see, wait and see.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

THIRTEEN
The old year waned. December trickled away in snow and slush, Regan commuting back and forth across the continent as another man might commute from city to suburb. Washington, Denver; Denver, Washington—the two cities were beginning to blur in his mind, and the only surrounding that had reality for him was the cabin of his company jet.

The press of work grew greater, now that the Fair was only ten months off. There were contracts to close, bills to pay, money to collect. Bond sales went on, slowly but surely. Half the issue had been disposed of now. Global Factors was committed for three billion—a billion and a half as its own direct investment, and the other billion and a half as an advance to the dummy underwriting company, Columbus Equity Corporation. Not bad, but not good, either. If the Fair went under, Global would still suffer a severe loss.

No longer a crippling loss, though. The critical stage was past: the Satellite itself, and the spaceline linked with it, had been constructed and were in the finishing stages. So if the Fair failed, Global, as the chief creditor, could move in and attach the physical assets. The loss would not be total. Global would simply operate the Fair Satellite as a pleasure resort for its own account. Regan was confident that over the long run the place would be a gold mine.

The short run, though, looked a little thornier than his first projections had anticipated. The bomb-scare business had been soft-pedaled, but, even so, advance reservations were not running as anticipated. The first week of the Fair was sold out solid, of course. Everybody who was anybody had booked passage on one of the ships going to the Fair during those first seven days.

But after that it wasn’t so good. The Fair couldn’t hope to survive on the patronage of celebrities alone. The only way it could get through the two years was if John Doe came eagerly forward, dollar bills clutched in his grimy little hand, to get in on what was being extensively billed on six continents as “The Experience of a Lifetime.”

And, the way things were going now, John Doe was adopting a wait-and-see attitude. He wasn’t rushing up to buy his tickets, not just yet. He was letting the other guy go first. But the other guy was waiting for him.

 

Year Day, 1991.

The last day of the year. Once called December 31, in the barbaric old days of the Gregorian Calendar. Now, under the World Calendar, no month but the first of each quarter had thirty-one days. January, April, July, October, yes. The others, only thirty, including February. Goodbye to December 31. It was a day without a number, Year Day. It had been that way since 1980, which, being a leap year, had had a second bonus day between June 30 and July 1.

The Regans were at the White House for President Hammond’s New Year’s party. A select group of a hundred had gathered at the President’s invitation. United Nations’ Secretary-General Hannikainen was there, and a chosen assemblage of ambassadors, most of them, through no coincidence, from Asian and African countries. The twelve Factors of the great companies were there—the first time in years they had been under the same roof. A sprinkling of Senators attended, and two Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice Steinfeld.

The world of the arts had not been neglected. A poet or two, a composer, a painter had been invited. Regan listened to a lanky pianist with an astounding shock of white hair play Chopin at the First Lady’s request.

‘He plays well,“ Regan said. ”What’s his name?“

‘Van Cliburn,“ the Chief Justice whispered in surprise.

‘Oh. Of course,“ Regan said, and chuckled.

The Factor mingled. Ten years ago, if he had been pushed into a gathering like this one, he would have moved through it on sheer bluff and bravado. Today, after two years as Factor, he accepted this kind of company calmly, as his equals. It was easy enough to slip into the dual frame of mind when you drew a Factor’s pay. Regan smiled knowingly at men twice his age, men who had been making headlines since before his birth. One of the first seven Astronauts was there, smiling faintly under his white crew cut. Regan shook his hand, exchanged a word or two, moved on. Nola was talking to a famous old conductor, while President Hammond stood by, nodding and occasionally guffawing. Regan accepted a glass of champagne. Across the room, Factor Davidson of Interworld, second only to Regan in busines importance, caught Regan’s eye, smiled pleasantly. Regan returned the smile. It was easy to be cordial in a tuxedo, the Factor thought. There was little enough love lost between Global and Interworld, but one had to maintain the surfaces.

Regan sipped his champagne. President Hammond ambled over.

‘How’s the Fair coming along?“ Hammond asked. ”It’s moving, Tom.“

‘I bet you hate me for having tangled you up in it, eh?“ Regan shook his head. ”It’s been a very interesting experience, Tom. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.“

‘Glad you think so. You know, the Fair’s going to be a great success, Claude. It’ll make you famous forever.“

Regan smiled uncomfortably. He had just the tiniest doubts about the Fair’s success. And the kind of fame it might bring him was perhaps not altogether to be desired.

He took a canape from a passing tray. He caught sight of Nola, laughing at some remark of Secretary-General Han-nikainen. Regan walked toward them. Nola looked dazzlingly beautiful tonight, easily the most attractive woman in the room. Half a dozen other men had said so. They had no way of knowing, of course, that the Regans had occupied separate wings of their house since the summer. Again and again, people complimented Regan on Nola, envied him bis possession of such a jewel of a wife.

Believe me, he thought, if you want her, you can have her!

He kept those thoughts to himself. Rain drummed on the White House roof. Toward midnight, the rain turned to snow, and Regan glanced out the window at a world fresh and clean and new-looking.

‘Happy New Year!“ somebody yelled. Television cameras stared into the room—for, of course, the President’s party was being shared vicariously by the whole nation. Regan turned, forced a smile for the benefit of the watching multitudes.

He wondered what sort of parties they were having in Marsport tonight. Probably, he thought, they were too busy to bother at all. Year Day was just another working day for them.

‘Happy New Year, Claude!“

It was Nola. She looked a little drunk. Her face was flushed, her dark eyes unnaturally glossy.

‘Hooray for 1992!“ she yelled. ”Kiss me, Claude!“ ”We’re on television.“

‘Don’t be a stuffed shirt. The President is making his New Year speech. Kiss me for New Year’s.“

Her lips touched his. She seemed to sway a little. He drew away quickly. She was more than a little drunk, he realized. She was stoned.

‘Happy New Year!“ Nola yelled, and wrapped her arm around the Factor Irwin Davidson. Interworld’s head looked a little startled. Then, grinning at Regan and at his own wife, the elderly Factor gravely kissed Nola.

‘Happy New Year,“ Factor Davidson said. Regan filled his glass. The champagne tasted like water to him. An orchestra was playing Auld Lang Syne. The distinguished guests were laughing and singing, just a trifle raucously. Regan’s head pounded. He had to get away, if only just for a moment.

He passed through a double doorway and found himself at the entrance to a balcony. He wrenched open the French doors and stepped out. The thirty-degree cold did not trouble him. He looked up, hoping to catch a glimpse of ruddy Mars, or of the metal moon he had put in the sky.

The swirling snow was too thick. Regan was unable to see anything. After a moment, he went back inside, rejoined the party. A smiling waiter handed him more champagne. He accepted it gladly—Mumm’s, ‘85 brut. A vintage year. It still tasted like water to him. The fault, he knew, was not with the champagne.

 

March, 1992.

Seven months to Opening Day.

‘Do you think it’s that bomb-scare article that’s keeping them away?“ Hal Martinelli asked.

Lyle Henderson shook his head. “That’s part of it, but only a very small part.”

‘Yes,“ Regan said. ”Only a small part.“

‘What’s the trouble, then?“ Martinelli demanded. ”Why aren’t they booking reservations?“

Regan stared at his assistants solemnly. “Half of them are afraid,” he said. “They don’t want to get into a spaceship and go anywhere. And the other half, well, maybe they don’t want to spend the money. A trip to the Fair can cost five, six hundred dollars, figuring the cost of getting to the spaceport, the space fare, admission, and all the rest. Maybe we guessed wrong. Maybe there just aren’t that many people around who are willing to go to that kind of expense.”

‘The polls we took—“ Henderson began.

Regan scowled. “Polls! What can they prove?”

His temper was starting to fray. He had been riding the whirlwind for a year and a half, and he was coming close to his breaking point now. He was beginning to doubt that he would make it through the remaimng seven months.

Everything was on schedule. The Satellite was finished, and so was the spaceline. Every pavilion was contracted for. Several of them had been completed, most were well along, and all would be ready by October 12. The concessions had been sold. The Fair’s bills were mostly paid. The claims of pre-Columbian discoverers of America had not greatly interfered with the progress of the Fair.

Everything was fine.

The only thing wrong was that people were not buying tickets to attend.

The Fair’s finances were predicated on a healthy advance sale. Many of the concessionaires and exhibitors had contracts calling for rent reductions if advance ticket sales fell below a certain point. The failure to make advance sales thus had a doubly crippling effect on the Fair’s budget. Not only was less money coming in than anticipated from ticket sales, but that led directly to a drop in rent money received. It was a situation that could quickly set in motion a snowball effect of disastrous proportions.

The Fair had obligations to meet. It had day-by-day expenses, payrolls, fees, publicity costs. Regan had long since used the money raised the year before for capital expenditures. The six billion dollars obtained through the sale of bonds, and the additional money received as outright grants from several governments—that was all gone.

The bond issue would soon be coming back to haunt. Under the sinking-fund clause of the debenture issue, the World’s Fair corporation had to begin redeeming those bonds in June, 1993. A billion dollars’ worth of bonds had to be bought in then, and the same amount each June until 1998, when the entire issue would have been redeemed. Regan had planned to pay off those bondholders out of Fair profits. But if there were no profits to distribute, the creditors would close in, the assets would be dismembered, and the Fair would spiral down into bankruptcy before it was a year old.

‘We’ve got to sell more tickets,“ Regan declared.

But selling them was harder than making declarations. No one wanted to dig down. It was understood that space was limited aboard the ships, it was well advertised that only the fortunate few who hurried, hurried, hurried would get to see the Fair at all. And yet nobody was doing much hurrying.

Some corporations had taken tickets to distribute to their employees. That accounted for most of the sales so far. The general public had not yet begun to buy tickets in any significant number.

‘They’re waiting for it to open,“ Lyle Henderson muttered. ”There’ll be a rush once we’re in business.“

‘But we can’t work it that way,“ Martinelli answered. ”We’ve got to sell the tickets in an orderly way. And that means we’ve got to be selling them steadily, month by month, all spring and summer.“

Regan had been silent a long while. Now the Factor turned and said, slowly, “I know what the trouble is. We need some kind of smash exhibit, something to pull ‘em in like a magnet. We’ve got a bunch of fancy pavilions, plenty of interesting stuff, but there’s got to be more.”

‘What, though?“ Henderson asked.

Regan said, “They’ve got to be able to see something at the Fair that they can’t possibly see on Earth, and I don’t mean just a view of space. We’re selling them novelty, uniqueness. They can see museums and pavilions on Earth. But there’s one thing we can give them that isn’t in the plan now, something millions of people will pay to see.”

‘Bubble-dancers?“ Henderson said. ”Sensie shows? Gladiators? We’ve got all that planned already.“

‘You aren’t listening,“ Regan said. ”They can see all those things on Earth, in their own home towns. I’ve got something else in mind. Martians.“

Henderson and Martinelli blinked. “Martians?” they said, almost in unison.

Regan nodded. “The Martian Pavilion. Sure! Well put it on Level Five, right next to the Global Factors Pavilion. Five or six Old Martians in their native habitat. A cave, some Martian plants, a Martian family. People will fall all over themselves to get to see them.”

‘Real Martians?“ Martinelli asked.

‘What else?“ Regan replied. ”The genuine articles.“

‘Can we get them?“

‘I think so,“ Regan said. He fought back the writhings of his conscience. ”When I was on Mars last summer, I visited the Martian caves, as you know. This idea of a Martian Pavilion occurred to me then, and I broached the idea to some of the Martians. They seemed to understand, but they were cool to the idea, so I let it drop.“

‘And now you think you can talk them into coming?“

‘No,“ Regan said. ”I don’t.“ He looked at Martinelli. ”Hal, what’s the legal status of the Old Martians?“

‘I don’t understand, sir.“

‘Are they protected by law? Are they wards of the United Nations, or anything like that?“

Martinelli shook his head. “I could check it, sir. But I don’t think there’s been any decision concerning them. They’re still too new to us.”

‘All right,“ Regan said. ”You research it for a day or so. In the meanwhile I’ll operate under the assumption that we have a clear shot at them. Lyle, call in half a dozen technical boys and an ecologist or two and we’ll start planning this thing. I want a habitat group so perfect that a Martian won’t be able to tell it from his own cave. The same temperature, the same atmosphere, the same relative humidity—the works. I don’t care if it costs fifty million bucks. We’re in a desperate position now, and we’ve got to shoot the works.“

Regan moistened his lips. His heart was racing, his hands felt cold.

Everything within him rebelled against doing this. But his back was against the wall. The Fair was in danger of collapsing before it even opened. And he had staked everything on keeping it open and making it a success.

He cursed the day he had ever gotten involved in this whole misbegotten project. The Factor had engaged in slippery dealings in his day, but he had never before done anything that he considered downright contemptible.

Not until now.

Martinelli and Lyle Henderson were staring at him with expressions of shock and bewilderment on their open, youthful faces. Regan waited for the inevitable question.

Martinelli supplied it.

‘Sir, may I clarify something?“

‘Go ahead.“

‘It seems to me—I just want to get clear in my own mind, sir—“ He hesitated. ”You said that you spoke to the Martians in the summer, and that they refused to let themselves be exhibited at the Fair.“

Regan nodded. 

Martinelli went on, “Now you say that we’re going to have a Martian Pavilion anyway. Does that mean—sir—that the Martians are going to be brought to the Fair forcibly?”

‘That’s right,“ Regan said in a weary voice. ”That’s exactly right. We’re going to kidnap them, Hal. We’re going to kidnap them.“


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FOURTEEN
This was one part of the show that Regan knew he had to run all by himself. There was no other way. It was a slimy, foul business, and he could not casually delegate it to someone else to carry out.

Before he could go ahead with it, he had to quell a small rebellion in his own ranks. Both Martinelli and Henderson wanted to resign rather than become accomplices. Regan talked them out of it. It took time, and took all of his rhetorical skills, but the man who could talk a flinty Board of Directors out of firing him could also talk two young aides into staying on the job. He let them see that he loathed the project as much as they did—and he showed them how, in the course of human events, it was sometimes necessary to do absolutely loathsome things. If the Fair went bankrupt, millions of people would suffer. Half a dozen Martians could make the difference between profit and loss. Ergo—Q.E.D…

Martinelli and Henderson stayed. But they insisted that Regan maintain direct responsibility for the Martian Pavilion, and Regan agreed.

There was little enough time to waste. Quickly, and in great secrecy, the preparations commenced.

It was going to be expensive. “It’ll cost you a mint,” the Marsport anthropologist Curtis had said, and Curtis had been right. Regan sent three technicians off to Mars to make a study of the Martian caves. He commandeered a space freighter in Global’s fleet, renting it at a nominal sum for the Fair, and sent it off to the yard to have its guts ripped out and replaced by a sealed chamber in which Martians could live. He put engineers to work reading everything that had been published on the Martian physiology.

The Martians breathed air. It was an oxygen-nitrogen mixture, not unlike what Earthmen breathed, but the proportions were different, higher on the nitro, lower on the oxy. They drank water, and this, thank the Lord, was good old-fashioned H2O. With residual impurities, though, drawn up from the depths of Mars in the roots of the water-plants. Would the Martians survive if their water-plants brought them non-Martian water supplies? In the opinion of medical counsel, yes.

‘We’ll risk it,“ Regan said.

Everything had to be top secret. If so much as a syllable leaked out beforehand, there would be vociferous protests from scientific bodies, from the settlers on Mars, from the SPCA, from various pressure groups on Earth. The hue and cry would certainly prevent Regan from carrying out his plan.

No, it had to be a fait accompli. “Here they are,” Regan would announce. “Martians in their native habitat!” Let the world gasp. It would be too late to do anything to stop him. And the public, fascinated by the strange alien creatures, would flock to see them. Regan had read the accounts of American Indians taken to Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They had caused a sensation, these visitors from a new world. Unhappily, most of the Indians exhibited in the courts of Europe had swiftly perished, of smallpox, measles, venereal infection, alcoholism, or simple overex-citement. It would be decidedly troublesome if any of Regan’s Martians passed away while on exhibit. But there was no reason why that should happen, if only the proper precautions were taken.

Regan took the precautions. The ship that would carry the Martians off would be adapted to their environment. If they lived the week or so it took to get them from Mars to the Fair Satellite, they would be transferred to an equally congenial snuggery there.

Would they live? Would they die?

They wouldn’t dare die, Regan vowed. He would lavish every attention on them. Day by day medical examinations. The best of everything. It was the least he could do, on behalf of his hapless victims.

So Regan went to Mars. Not as a sightseer, this time, but as a thief.

The chartered ship landed at the Marsport spacefield. No one was waiting to greet Regan, nobody offered him the keys to the city, because he had not advertised in advance that he was coming. This was to be a quick trip, a quiet trip.

Dick Avery drove out to the field. As Global’s representative on Mars, he had been tipped off on the purpose of the expedition. He looked a little doubtful about it.

‘Are you serious, Factor?“

‘As serious as I’ll ever be.“

‘There’s going to be one hell of a stink about this, Factor,“ Avery warned.

‘I’ll risk it.“

‘You won’t be a popular man on Mars. The settlers here are very fond of the Old Martians.“

‘I’m not planning to exterminate them,“ Regan said. ”I’m just going to borrow a few of them for a while.“

Avery started to say something, but obviously thought better of it, and choked it back. After a pause he simply nodded his head and said, “All right, Factor. I’m ready whenever you are.”

 

The convoy wound across the desert.

Avery and Regan, in a sand-crawler, led the way. Behind them was the mobile wagon in which the Martians were to be transported. Bringing lip the rear was another crawler in which rode Regan’s technicians and medics.

Regan said nothing as the caravan moved outward, through the cold red flatlands, toward the caves. He did not feel cheerful about what he was going to do. He told himself, over and over again, that stark necessity was driving him to take this desperate step. But his protestations had that hollow, hollow ring.

‘Here we are,“ Regan said.

‘No,“ Avery said. ”Sorry, Factor. This isn’t the cave you visited. It’s the next one over.“

‘Oh. All right.“

They drove on. A mile beyond, they halted and left the crawlers. Regan felt trapped in his breathing-helmet. The sand crunched nastily beneath his feet, as though he were the first one to bear down on it in a hundred million years. They crossed the patch of flatland in front of the cave. The mobile wagon drew up close, like some bulky dinosaur ready to launch an attack on the beings within.

Regan entered, accompanied only by Avery. The others remained at the mouth of the cave.

Martians appeared. The little leathery gnomes peered at the intruders without curiosity, without interest. Such things had long since eroded from their personalities. They were in-furiatingly passive, maddeningly remote.

Regan pointed to one. “You. I spoke to you before, didn’t I?”

‘Yes.“

‘About coming to the World’s Fair.“

Blankness.

‘You know. To be exhibited.“ Regan spoke loudly, as though it would somehow help in communication. ”We will pay well. We will give you whatever you want.“

‘We do not wish to leave home.“

‘A permanent water supply,“ Regan said. ”A reservoir all your own. An electric generator. Do you know what that is? It makes light.“

‘We have light.“

‘This is brighter. Safer. Listen, I'll give you anything you want. Just name it. Medicines, food, equipment, money, anything at all. What do you want?“

‘Nothing.“

‘You must want something!“

‘We want to be left in peace,“ the Martian said.

Regan sighed. “I beg you—”

Avery murmured, “It’s no use, Factor. Can’t you see that? It’s no goddam use at all.”

‘You’re right,“ Regan said. He looked sadly at the little group of solemn-faced Martians. Then he turned away, walked back to the mouth of the cave, where his technicians and medics waited. Regan nodded at them.

‘Okay,“ he said. ”Six of them. Two adult males, two adult females, one child of each sex. Don’t be rough with them. That’s an order.“

They went in.

He went out.

He walked away, a hundred yards into the desert, and stood there, scuffing his boot into the sand. He couldn’t bear to face the Martians as they were dragged from the security of their cave.

Right now he couldn’t even bear to face himself.

 

Lyle Henderson said, “As of July 30, 1992, the first three months of the Fair are completely sold out. There isn’t a booking to be had on any of the flights to the Fair.”

Regan nodded. “How’s construction coming on those extra sections?”

‘First one will be ready in February,“ Henderson said. ”And then a new one every three weeks through May. That ought to be enough.“

‘Let’s hope so. What are the figures for the second three months?“

Henderson glanced at the tally sheet. “Every weekend flight is sold out between October 12 and the following June. In addition, seventy-three and six-tenths percent of the weekday flights in the months of January 12-April 12 are sold out. The rest are going fast. I estimate that by Opening Day the Fair will be booked solid for at least its first year.”

‘There’s a black market in tickets already,“ Hal Martinelli put in. ”A seat on one of the flights in the first two months is quoted at around five hundred dollars.“

Regan smiled thinly. “Things are breaking our way finally, aren’t they?”

‘It’s because of the Martians,“ Henderson said. ”Yes. The Martians.“

‘How are they taking it?“ Martinelli asked. Regan shrugged. ”They don’t seem to mind,“ he said. ”Frankly, they don’t seem to give a damn.“

It was true enough. Regan had visited the Satellite two days before, a routine business visit. He had stopped off at the Martian Pavilion, which was completed now. The Martians had been installed eight weeks before.

They were living in the pavilion as though it were their own cave. It looked like their cave, all right, a perfect copy, except that one wall was one-way glass to permit the spectators to get a close look at the alien beings. Regan had suited up, had gone into the cave to talk to his prisoners. They had given him what he by now had come to think of as the Martian Stare: a completely noncommittal look, expressionless and blank.

‘I wanted to find out if you were getting good treatment,“ Regan said.

‘We are comfortable.“

‘That’s terribly important,“ Regan said. ”I want you to be absolutely comfortable here. I want it to seem just like home to you.“

‘We are comfortable.“

They didn’t seem angry with him for having kidnaped him. There was no reproach in their eyes. They seemed perfectly happy where they were. They just didn’t seem to care.

Which didn’t ease Regan’s conscience any. Simply because his prisoners weren’t visibly suffering, the Factor thought, that didn’t make him any the less a louse.

But then the presence of the Martians aboard the Satellite had made all the difference between the success or failure“ of the 1992 Columbian Exposition. There was no getting around that. The day Regan had made the announcement, a wave of excitement had swept over the world almost un-equaled in his memory. Suddenly everybody wanted tickets to the Fair. Regan flew a cadre of selected media correspondents up to the Satellite for a preview of the Martian Pavilion, and they returned with photographs that stirred the imagination of the world. Live Martians! On view at the Fair! Who could resist?

Nobody could resist.

Oddly, there was less of a furor over the kidnaping of the Martians than Regan had anticipated. Chiefly, this was because nobody realized the Martians had been kidnaped. They seemed perfectly happy in their pavilion. The Martians back on Mars were not signing any petitions. In their passive way, they were taking no notice of the disappearance of six of their number. The colonists on Mars expressed surprise that Martians had been willing to leave their caves to become sideshow exhibits, but if anyone guessed the truth about their departure, Regan never heard it.

The Fair was made.

The Martians were the biggest gate attraction since Barnum’s day. Everybody was talking about them. Everybody wanted to see them. As a result, the Fair’s economic projections were beginning to look rosy for the first time. On the basis of advance ticket sales and pavilion rentals, it was now safe to say that the Fair would at least break even, which was all it was intended to do. Regan’s balance sheet showed that the bonds could be liquidated on schedule, the Fair’s assets sold off at a good price, and the Exposition wound up without a loss to the investors. American prestige would have been enhanced, and the public would have had a hell of a good show. If that wasn’t success, Regan didn’t know what kind of word to use.

The directors of Global Factors began to look more kindly upon their impetuous Chief Executive Officer. Even Rex Bennett began to smile at him now and then, as the finances of the World’s Fair grew brighter.

Tim Field buttonholed Regan and said, “Factor, are you still planning to sell the Fair Satellite to Global when the Fair ends in ‘93?”

‘Sure.“

‘And the Martians,“ Field said. ”Will they remain with the Satellite?“

‘Absolutely not,“ Regan snapped. ”My agreement with them covers only the Fair. They can’t remain on exhibit forever. When the Fair closes, they go back home to Mars.“

‘But it’s greatly to Global’s advantage to keep Martians as a permanent exhibit,“ Field protested. ”If we’re going to run the Satellite as a kind of pleasure resort, wouldn’t it be profitable to show Martians there?“

Regan shook his head. “It may be to Global’s advantage, but it won’t be to the advantage of the Martians. They don’t belong in a zoo forever. They go back. Global will have to find some other way of getting people to come to the Satellite, Tim.”

Field looked startled at the thought that the Factor Regan might possibly place the welfare of a few Martians above that of Global Factors. Regan smiled. “What’s the matter, Tim?”

‘N-nothing, Factor.“

‘Sure. You think I’m being disloyal to the good old company, don’t you?“

‘Well, sir—“

‘The Martians go back to Mars. That’s final, Tim. Absolutely final. As soon as the Fair ends—back they go.“

Field seemed to accept that. The matter was allowed to drop. The days ticked by. Regan visited his Martians once more, just to make sure they were still comfortable.

They had no complaints. They seemed neither happy nor unhappy. They seemed—well, like Martians.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

FIFTEEN
October 12, 1992.

Five hundred years before, at two hours past midnight, a cannon had boomed out across the quiet Caribbean, and a five-week journey across the uncharted Atlantic reached its climax. A leather-lunged seaman yelled, “Tierra! Tierra!” as he sighted land. A Genoese sea-captain named Cristoforo Colombo thereby attained a permanent place in history, despite the claims of such earlier travelers as Hoei-Shin of China, Ari Marson of Iceland, Leif Ericsson, and Prince Madoc of Wales.

Five centuries later, three small spaceships soared skyward shortly after dawn, Mountain Standard Time. Some clown in the World’s Fair publicity office had named the ships the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, and Claude Regan had let the whimsy stand.

The passenger lists of those three ships glittered with the names of celebrities. The Santa Maria, as the flagship, carried the most resplendent cargo of all: the Secretary-General of the United Nations, the President of the United States of America, the Premier of the United States of Europe, and the heads of such states as the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Brazil, Nigeria, the Congo, Argentina. The Factor Claude Regan was aboard, also.

A galaxy of notables made up the complement of the three ships. One wayward nihilist with a nuclear-tipped warhead could thus decapitate the world at a blow, ridding it of every leader of importance. Kings and Prime Ministers, actors and musicians, athletes and financiers—all had come to see the official opening of the 1992 Columbian Exposition.

Claude Regan felt a certain tightness in his throat, a certain hollowness in the pit of his stomach. For almost two years he had been working toward this day. Would something go wrong? Would the atmosphere system fail? Would the Satellite swerve from its orbit? Would a blazing meteor puncture the metal skin? Would the honored guests be bored with the wonders he had assembled?

In his heart of hearts, Regan knew that they would not be bored, that there would be no calamities. All was well. He had inspected the Fair himself, the day before, and he knew it would be a success. Everyone who had seen it so far was impressed by it. The ones who had congratulated him the most effusively were the hardest-headed of the lot, the media men, the reporters and cameramen. The Satellite was full of journalists, now, on hand to cover the opening ceremonies. The whole business would be bounced along to Earth by the television relay satellites, so that the millions could participate.

Regan settled back against the harness of his cradle. He lightly closed his eyes. The lateral jets roared. The Santa Maria was docking.

The Fair was about to open.

 

‘A symbol of the dynamic energy, hard work, and far-sighted vision that is so uniquely American…“

That was Secretary-General Hannikainen, eulogizing the planners of the Fair.

‘Five centuries of adventure culminate here today, in this spectacular recapitulation of the American dream…“

President Hammond, orating sonorously as was his wont.

‘A stunning scientific achievement, an historic high-water mark in mankind’s conquest of his environment…“

Premier Falaise of Europe, lauding generously the guiding spirits of the Exposition.

Claude Regan forced himself to sit patiently through the speeches. No one was allowed to talk more than five minutes —and what a protocol headache it had been to get that idea across!—but, even so, every important world leader had to be allowed to get his oar in. And, of course, there were the religious invocations, not to be overlooked. The Pope had decided not to come, which was a pity, but he had sent an Apostolic Delegate all the same. Regan gave him equal time with a rabbi, a Presbyterian minister (chosen by lot to represent all the non-Catholic Christian denominations), and an assortment of Hindu, Moslem, and Buddhist leaders.

And then, at long last, Claude Regan himself was at the dais. He smiled graciously into the television cameras, raked his glance across the assembled global titans before him, looked down the colonnade of the Hall of the Worlds, with the Martian Pavilion straight ahead of him, and said, in a mild, gentle voice, “There’s not much I care to add after what’s already been said. I simply want to extend to the whole universe, on behalf of the Americas, my invitation to come and help us celebrate our five-hundredth birthday. That’s all. I now officially declare the 1992 Columbian Exposition to be open.”

There was applause. Regan snipped the silk ribbon. The celebrities thronged forward.

Regan went with them. The great rush was to the Martian Pavilion, of course. Even world leaders are susceptible to the fascinations of the Sunday supplement.

‘Remarkable,“ the Secretary-General observed.

‘Incredible,“ declared the President of the United States.

‘Such wonderful little gnomes!“ commented Chancellor Schmidt of the German Federal Union.

Regan beamed. The assorted celebrities peered through the wall of one-way glass. The Martians within, unaware of the crowd outside, went about the routines of their daily lives. Even if they had known, they would not have cared much about the goggle-eyed watchers on the far side of the wall.

With difficulty, Regan detached some members of the group and conveyed them onward to the other pavilions.

‘Here are the gladiators,“ Regan said, and two muscle-bound young men bowed. ”We’ll be watching them later.“

‘Will they fight to the death?“ Chairman Ch’ien wanted to know.

Regan shook his head. “I’m afraid not. Humanity is past that point, Chairman Ch’ien. They’ll simply batter each other around. Net and trident, that sort of thing.” Regan did not add that contests to the death had been very seriously under consideration in the earlier, shakier days of the Fair. Almost anything had been under consideration then that would have been likely to bolster attendance. After all, the Satellite was beyond the jurisdiction of any Earthly government. Gambling casinos, gladiators, bullfights, bubble-dancers—Regan had pondered them all.

But no sensationalism had been necessary. Not after the coup of landing the Martians. It was easy to be virtuous, Regan thought, with a sold-out house.

As he guided his intrepid band of notables from pavil-ion to pavilion, it was impossible not to sense that they were impressed. Regan was impressed with it all himself. The pavilions gleamed. Level after level was bright with the artifice of man—handsome, unusual one-story buildings, compressed but somehow elegant, displaying the wonders of science, technology, nature. And, periodically, a window looking outward, giving a spectacular view (for a price) of the starry firmament.

Everything was on the house today. These were not paying customers. The Secretary-General of the United Nations could gaze at the constellations without charge today. Next week, it would be different, of course.

It became impossible to hold the group together. They wandered everywhere—to the Hall of the Worlds, where vast models of the planets moved in stately orbits; to the midway, with its concessions and barkers; to the three-dee sensie shows, tactile and all, sponsored by the Hollywood studios; to the commercial exhibits and the national pavilions; to the fountain, the reflecting pool; to the windows onto the universe.

And, naturally, to the Martians.

The Martians drew the biggest crowd. Some of the dignitaries scarcely bothered to look at the rest of the World’s Fair. They remained glued in front of the window into Mars, staring openmouthed at the gnomish beings from the red planet.

People kept coming up to Regan to pump his hand and congratulate him. Even Nola, who had scarcely spoken to him at all in months, but whose presence had been necessary at the opening ceremonies for reasons of public relations, managed to smile and say, “It’s quite a show, Claude. Really terrific.”

Regan was surprised at the sincerity of her warm approval.

But he had a little surprise up his sleeve for Nola, too.

 

Friday, October 13.

The World’s Fair was twenty-four hours old, and the public was milling through it, those lucky few who had been there first when tickets went on sale. Cash registers were chiming. It had been necessary to institute a time limit in front of the Martian Pavilion; every half hour, the place was cleared, and anybody who wanted to see the little creatures again would need to buy a new ticket.

The Fair was a success, and Claude Regan felt that this was his lucky day. Friday the 13th, true, but that couldn’t be helped; the new calendar provided four of them every year. He had been awake for twenty-eight hours, now, and fatigue had not yet nailed him. He needed his strength for another hour, now. He was holding a press conference in the auditorium of the Global Factors’ Pavilion.

The place was full of reporters. As Regan strode in, they began to yell questions at him, but he silenced them with his hands.

‘No questions,“ he said. ”I’ve got a few statements to make.“

They grew quiet. Regan cleared his throat solemnly.

He said, “First of all, I’d like to express my gratitude to all the people who helped make this 1992 Columbian Exposition the success it has turned out to be. To Hal Martinelli and Lyle Henderson of my staff, to Tim Field of Global Factors, who helped me in many ways, to President Thomas Hammond of the United States, to the fine craftsmen of Aero do Brasil who built this magnificent satellite for us—to those people, and to hundreds of others, my heartfelt thanks.

‘As you know, it’s a little over two years since I took over the task of promoting the 1992 Columbian Exposition. It’s been a hectic two years, and not always a cheerful two years—but it’s never been dull, and I’m glad to say that the work has been worth-while. We have had a remarkable advance sale for the Fair, and we will be placing more tickets on sale just as soon as we can build the ships to get people here. The people of Earth are eager to come and see what we have here, and, believe me, we’re eager to welcome them.

‘There’s little doubt in my mind that the high point of this World’s Fair is the Martian Pavilion. It’s encouraging to see the interest that these visitors from our neighbor world have generated. Their presence here is terribly exciting to me. Having the Martians here has a wonderful symbolic value —for, just as Christopher Columbus gave Europe a New World populated by strange and unusual beings, so too does this World’s Fair, commemorating Columbus’ great achievement, bring close to Earth the inhabitants of a modern-day New World.

‘Which brings me to an important point: this is the last World’s Fair that can ever be held. We have to move that apostrophe, from now on. They’ll be Worlds’ Fairs—Fairs of the Worlds. A wonderful new world is rising on Mars, a world of colonies, and we must never forget the Old Martians. I’m privileged to announce that Global Factors, Inc., has decided to sponsor a long-range, multibillion dollar project to contact intelligent life in every part of the universe, so that future Worlds’ Fairs can be truly intergalactic in scope.“

Regan paused. He toyed with the microphone, listened to the hum of the tiny recorders taking down his words. No doubt Global Factors would be a little startled by this new project to which he had just committed the company. Regan had discussed it, after all, only with Tim Field, on an unofficial basis. But Global Factors was in for bigger surprises, Regan thought.

He moistened his lips.

‘Now for a personal announcement,“ he said, and the assembled reporters snapped to attention. ”I regard the successful launching of this World’s Fair as the culmination of my career. Yes, that’s right. Even though I’m only thirty-six, I feel that I’ve achieved all I can achieve on Earth. Power, wealth, and now great creative satisfaction—what more can a man want?

‘Therefore, effective November 1,“ Regan went on, ”I’m resigning my post as Chief Executive Officer of Global Factors, Inc.—“

He heard the gasp, rising like a booming hiss from the audience. He simply smiled.

‘Resigning my post,“ he repeated. ”I’ve designated as my successor the Factor Tim Field, who I’m sure will guide the destinies of this great corporation capably and well. I am at the same time severing all of my connections with the financial world. I am emigrating to Marsport, where I’ll live the humble life of a colonist.“

Eyebrows were rising en masse.

‘The first of next month will see me there. I expect to serve any need the colony may have for me. As for my personal wealth, I am making it over to the Claude Regan Foundation, a nonprofit organization whose function will be the protection and preservation of the way of life of the Old Martians. It’s my hope that this money will guarantee peace and safety to these people throughout the rest of their days.“

There was uproar in the hall.

‘Factor Regan! Factor Regan!“ they were shouting. ”We’d like to know—“

Regan silenced them. “As I said, there will be no questions answered at this press conference, nor will I hold any further press conferences. My reasons for taking this step are strictly private, and I do not intend to amplify them. Thank you.”

He strode from the hall, leaving them shouting and arguing among themselves. Outside, in the anteroom, Nola rushed up to him. She had heard the whole conference.

‘Are you crazy?“ she cried. ”Giving all your money away?

Resigning!“

‘You wanted me to resign, Nola. For my health. You said I was working too hard.“

‘But setting up a foundation for Martians? Claude, it’s insane! You couldn’t really have meant it, about becoming a colonist on Mars.“

‘I did mean it,“ he said. ”It’s true.“

Her eyes were wide. “What about me, then?”

Regan shrugged. “You’re my wife. Will you come with me to Mars?”

‘And live in that horrid little slum? Don’t be foolish!“

‘That’s about what I expected. All right, Nola. You stay here, and I’ll go to Mars. You won’t starve. Your personal funds are still your own. And after seven years the law will allow you to divorce me for desertion. You can marry my Uncle Bruce, if you like. He’ll only be seventy, then. Or your friend Rex Bennett. Excuse me.“

He turned away from her, and made his way out of the building. The sounds of confusion echoed behind him. He wondered how Global Factors would react to the news. He hadn’t told anyone, not even Tim Field. Better that they find out about it all at once, with the rest of the world.

It was just a short walk from the Global Pavilion to the Martians. Regan cut his way through the mob outside the cave. “Excuse me,” he said, savagely shouldering them to the side.

‘Who the hell does he think he is?“ someone demanded hotly.

‘It’s Regan!“ somebody else answered. ”It’s the Factor!“

He entered the pavilion. Two Fair employees were on guard—Regan kept a round-the-clock watch on the Martians, so that a medic could be summoned if any of the captives looked sickly. Regan gestured at the men.

‘Open the lock,“ he said. ”I’m going in.“

‘Factor Regan!“ they gasped. ”The air in there—’

‘I can breathe it for a little while,“ Regan said. ”It won’t kill me. Open it up!“

Numbed, dazed, they let Regan enter the Martian cave through the airlock. It closed behind him, and the atmosphere went whistling out, and a moment later the thin, acrid Martian atmosphere filtered in. The inner door opened. Regan entered. His head started to pound. He could feel his heart throbbing at an accelerated rate. It was cold in here, and the air was deficient in oxygen. But he could survive. It was like breathing mountain air. He stood there, confronting the six Martians. They regarded him without interest.

He said, “I just wanted to tell you something. I wanted to offer my apologies for bringing you people here. I had to do that. It was necessary. It was cruel and brutal, but I had no choice, and I want you to forgive me. Will you forgive me?”

They didn’t answer. Perhaps they hadn’t even understood. He thought he had spoken clearly, but maybe in the low pressure, the thin atmosphere…

He swayed. He felt dizzy. This was Martian environment, all but the gravity. Unable to duplicate Mars’ low gravity in the pavilion, Regan had simply had the whole Fair satellite adjusted to about seventy percent of Earth gravity—making things a little odd for everybody, but sparing the Martians from hardship.

He said, into the teeth of their silence, “I want to tell you what I’ve done for you. I’ve turned all my money over to your people. I’ve set up a foundation to protect you. Nobody will ever exploit you. Nobody will ever do to you what I did to you, not again. It’s my atonement. Will you accept it? Will you forgive me?”

No answer. They took his announcement coolly, passively. They were not impressed. They were beyond reacting to anything, these survivors of a long-dead race.

‘I’m going to Mars!“ he shouted at them. ”I’m going to live there, to work there. I’m going to dedicate myself to the Martian people—the Old Martians and the New. Can you follow that? In another two years, you’ll be brought back to Mars. You’ll have done a great thing for your world, by consenting to come here. But I want you not to think badly of me. I want you to pardon me for—for…“

Regan coughed. His lungs were giving out. He glanced toward the wall, opaque on this side, and pointed to the airlock, hoping somebody out there would see him and let him out. Whether or not the Martians had understood what he was trying to tell them, he couldn’t remain here any longer.

The Martians continued to give him the blank-faced stare.

The airlock irised open.

Regan stumbled out, choking, gasping. He reeled for a moment, caught hold of someone, steadied himself. The spasm passed. He filled his lungs with air.

A reporter loomed up before him. “Mr. Regan, if you’ll give us a statement—”

‘No—please—“

‘Factor! Factor!“

‘No comment!“ Regan yelled.

He got away from them, running like a demon-ridden soul down the streets of the moon he had built, until he reached the Fair’s administration building and took refuge there. He staggered into his office. Lyle Henderson was there, looking dazed.

‘Factor Regan! There’s a call from Denver for you. Global is calling, sir. They’ve heard the news, and—“

‘Tell them I’ll be in touch,“ Regan said. ”I don’t feel like talking to them now. Tell them that whatever they’ve heard is true. Jesus, Lyle, get me a drink. I’ve had a rough time of it.“

He gulped down the contents of the paper cup Henderson handed him. Bourbon? Rye? He didn’t know. He belted it away, closed his eyes, took a few deep breaths. The tension started to ebb.

‘Do you want anything else, Factor?“

‘No, Lyle. Just leave me alone. I don’t want to see anyone for a while. And stop calling me Factor. That’s all over with now.“

‘Yes, sir.“

Henderson left.

Regan was alone. He sat quietly. The Martians had understood, hadn’t they? Well, no matter. They’d probaby go on hating him forever, but he couldn’t help that. What was done was done.

He smiled. Right now they were busy writing the editorials about him, praising his nobility, bis self-renunciation. Turning his back on billions, stepping out of the world’s most lucrative job, going off to grub in the desert.

Do you feel very noble, Factor Regan? he asked himself.

Not really. Not noble at all. He was a kidnaper, a liar, a cheat. AH in a good cause, of course. Well, now he could atone. Not that it was all pure altruism, of course.

Let them think so, Regan told himself. Let them sing hymns to him. It was good publicity. They would never understand. Old Alexander the Great had understood, though. He had wept for lack of new worlds to conquer. Not Regan. The new world was there, up in the sky. Just starting out. He would go to it, not as a millionaire, just as an ordinary colonist. The slate was clean. He had gone as far as he could go on Earth: the control of one large corporation. But up there…

A whole world, waiting to be developed, waiting for the guiding hand, waiting…

Waiting for Claude Regan.

He poured himself another drink. Then, flicking on the closed-circuit television set in the office, he scanned the different levels of the Fair, saw the throngs roaming in wonder from pavilion to pavilion. The Fair was a great success, Regan thought. Most satisfying. A man with talent can handle the impossible with the greatest of ease.

Regan lifted his paper cup. “To the 1992 Columbian Exposition,” he said ringingly. He took a sip. But the toast seemed inappropriate, somehow. One didn’t toast past triumphs. One looked forward. He lifted his cup a second time.

‘To Mars!“ he cried. He laughed in boyish delight, and thought of the consternation his press conference had caused, and remembered the feeling of dedication he had experienced on his visit to Mars, the yearning to take that planet and mold it into something marvelous. Well, now he would have his chance. Starting from scratch, rising by skill and shrewdness alone. He finished his drink. ”Hey there, Mars “ he shouted at the wall of his office. ”Get ready for. something big! Get ready for Claude Regan! Regan is coming, Mars! Regan’s on his way!“

THE END