A Thing of Beauty

Norman Spinrad

“I once showed some native hunters, who were as keen sighted as hawks, magazine pictures in which any of our children would have instantly recognized human figures. But my hunters turned the pictures round and round until one of them, tracing the outlines with his finger, finally exclaimed: ‘These are white men.’ It was hailed by all as a great discovery”

(C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul).

We can make no greater mistake than to believe what we see is seen by everyone else.

“There’s a gentleman by the name of Mr. Shiburo Ito to see you,” my intercom said. “He is interested in the purchase of an historic artifact of some significance.”

While I waited for him to enter my private office, I had computer central display his specs on the screen discreetly built into the back of my desk. My Mr. Ito was none other than Ito of Ito Freight Boosters of Osaka; there was no need to purchase a readout from Dun & Bradstreet’s private banks. 1f Shiburo Ito of Ito, Boosters wrote a check for anything short of the national debt, it could be relied upon not to bounce.

The slight, balding man who glided into my office wore a red silk kimono with a richly brocaded black obi, Mendocino needlepoint by the look of it. No doubt back in the miasmic smog of Osaka, he bonged the peons with the latest skins from Savile Row. Everything about him was just so; he purchased confidently on that razor edge between class and ostentation that only the Japanese can handle with such grace, and then only when they have millions of hard yen to back them up. Mr. Ito would be no sucker. He would want whatever he wanted for precise reasons all his own, and would not be budgeable from the center of his desires. The typical heavyweight Japanese businessman, a prime example of the breed that’s pushed us out of the center of the international arena.

Mr. Ito bowed almost imperceptibly as he handed me his card. I countered by merely bobbing my head in his direction and remaining seated. These face and posture games may seem ridiculous, but you can’t do business with the Japanese without playing them.

As he took a seat before me, Ito drew a black cylinder from the sleeve of his kimono and ceremoniously place it on the desk before me.

“I have been given to understand that you are a connoisseur of Filmore posters of the early-to-mid-1960s period, Mr. Harris,” he said. “The repute of your collection has penetrated even to the environs of Osaka and Kyoto, where I make my habitation. Please permit me to make this minor addition. The thought that a contribution of mint may repose in such illustrious surroundings will afford me much pleasure and place me forever in your debt.”

My hands trembled as I unwrapped the poster. With his financial resources, Ito’s polite little gift could be almost anything but disappointing. My daddy loved to brag about the old expense account days when American businessmen ran things, but you had to admit that the fringe benefits of business Japanese style had plenty to recommend them.

But when I got the gift open, it took a real effort not to lose points by whistling out loud. For what I was holding was nothing less than a mint example of the very first Grateful Dead poster in subtle black and gray, a super-rare item, not available for any amount of sheer purchasing power. I dared not inquire as to how Mr. Ito had acquired it. We simply shared a long, silent moment contemplating the poster, its beauty and historicity transcending whatever questionable events might have transpired to bring us together in its presence.

How could I not like Mr. Ito now? Who can say that the Japanese occupy their present international position by economic might alone?

“I hope I may be afforded the opportunity to please your sensibilities as you have pleased mine, Mr. Ito,” I finally said. That was the way to phrase it; you didn’t thank them for a gift like this, and you brought them around to business as obliquely as possible.

Ito suddenly became obviously embarrassed, even furtive. “Forgive me my boldness, Mr. Harris, but I have hopes that you may be able to assist me in resolving a domestic matter of some delicacy.”

“A domestic matter?”

“Just so. I realize that this is an embarrassing intrusion, but you are obviously a man of refinement and infinite discretion, so if you will forgive my forwardness…”

His composure seemed to totally evaporate, as if he was going to ask me to pimp for some disgusting perversion he had. I had the feeling that the power had suddenly taken a quantum jump in my direction, that a large financial opportunity was about to present itself.

“Please feel free, Mr. Ito …”

Ito smiled nervously. “My wife comes from a family of extreme artistic attainment,” he said. “In fact, both her parents have attained the exalted status of National Cultural Treasurers, a distinction of which they never tire of reminding me. While I have achieved a large measure of financial success in the freight-booster enterprise, they regard me as nikulturi, a mere merchant, severely lacking in aesthetic refinement as compared to their own illustrious selves. You understand the situation, Mr. Harris?”

I nodded as sympathetically as I could. These Japs certainly have a genius for making life difficult for themselves! Here was a major Japanese industrialist shrinking into low posture at the very thought of his sponging in-laws, whom he could probably buy and sell out of petty cash. At the same time, he was obviously out to cream the sons of bitches in some crazy way that would only make sense to a Japanese. Seems to me the Japanese are better at running the world than they are at running their lives.

“Mr. Harris, I wish to acquire a major American artifact for the gardens of my Kyoto estate. Frankly, it must be of sufficient magnitude so as to remind the parents of my wife of my success in the material realm every time they should chance to gaze upon it, and I shall display it in a manner which will assure that they gaze upon it often. But of course, it must be of sufficient beauty and historicity so as to prove to them that my taste is no less elevated than their own. Thus shall I gain respect in their eyes and reestablish tranquility in my household. I have been given to understand that you are a valued counselor in such matters, and I am eager to inspect whatever such objects you may deem appropriate.”

So that was it! He wanted to buy something big enough to bong the minds of his artsy-fartsy relatives, but he really didn’t trust his own taste; he wanted me to show him something he would want to see. And he was swimming like a goldfish in a sea of yen! I could hardly believe my good luck. How much could I take him for?

“Ah … what size artifact did you have in mind, Mr. Ito?” I asked as casually as I could.

“I wish to acquire a major piece of American monumental architecture so that I may convert the gardens of my estate into a shrine to its beauty and historicity. Therefore, a piece of classical proportions is required. Of course, it must be worthy of enshrinement, otherwise an embarrassing loss of esteem will surely ensue.”

“Of course.”

This was not going to be just another Howard Johnson or gas station sale; even something like an old Hilton or the Cooperstown Baseball Hall of Fame I unloaded last year was thinking too small. In his own way, Ito was telling me that price was no object, the sky was the limit. This was the dream of a lifetime! A sucker with a bottomless bank account placing himself trustingly in my tender hands!

“Should it please you, Mr. Ito,” I said, “we can inspect several possibilities here in New York immediately. My jumper is on the roof.”

“Most gracious of you to interrupt your most busy schedule on my behalf, Mr. Harris. I would be delighted.”

I lifted the jumper off the roof, floated her to a thousand feet, then took a Mach 1.5 jump south over the decayed concrete jungles at the tip of Manhattan. The curve brought us back to float about a mile north of Bedloe’s Island. I took her down to three hundred and brought her in toward the Statue of Liberty at a slow drift, losing altitude imperceptibly as we crept up on the Headless Lady, so that by the time we were just off shore, we were right down on the deck. It was a nice touch to make the goods look more impressive—manipulating the perspectives so that the huge, green, headless statue, with its patina of firebomb soot, seemed to rise up out of the bay like a ruined colossus as we floated toward it.

Mr. Ito betrayed no sign of emotion. He stared straight ahead out the bubble without so much as a word or a flicker of gesture.

“As you are no doubt aware, this is the famous Statue of Liberty,” I said. “Like most such artifacts, it is available to any buyer who will display it with proper dignity. Of course, I would have no trouble convincing the Bureau of National Antiquities that your intentions are exemplary in this regard.”

I set the autopilot to circle the island at fifty yards offshore so that Ito could get a fully rounded view, and see how well the statue would look from any angle, how eminently suitable it was for enshrinement. But he still sat there with less expression on his face than the average C-grade servitor.

“You can see that nothing has been touched since the Insurrectionists blew the statue’s head off,” I said, trying to drum up his interest with a pitch. “Thus, the statue has picked up yet another level of historical significance to enhance its already formidable venerability. Originally a gift from France, it has historical significance as an emblem of kinship between the American and French revolutions. Situated as it is in the mouth of New York harbor, it became a symbol of America itself to generations of immigrants. And the damage the Insurrectionists did only serves as a reminder of how lucky we were to come through that mess as lightly as we did. Also, it adds a certain melancholy atmosphere, don’t you think? Emotion, intrinsic beauty, and historicity combined in one elegant piece of monumental statuary. And the asking price is a good deal less than you might suppose.”

Mr. Ito seemed embarrassed when he finally spoke. “I trust you will forgive my saying so, Mr. Harris, since the emotion is engendered by the highest regard for ,the noble past of your great nation, but I find this particular artifact somewhat depressing.”

“How so, Mr. Ito?”

The jumper completed a circle of the Statue of Liberty and began another as Mr. Ito lowered his eyes and stared at the oily waters of the bay as he answered.

“The symbolism of this broken statue is quite saddening, representing as it does a decline from your nation’s past greatness. For me to enshrine such an artifact in Kyoto would be an ignoble act, an insult to the memory of your nation’s greatness. It would be a statement of overweening pride.”

Can you beat that? He was offended because he felt that displaying the statue in Japan would be insulting the United States, and therefore I was implying he was nikulturi by offering it to him. When all that the damned thing was to any American was one more piece of old junk left over from the glorious days that the Japanese, who were nuts for such rubbish, might be persuaded to pay through the nose for the dubious privilege of carting away. These Japs could drive you crazy—who else could you offend by suggesting they do something that they thought would offend you but you thought was just fine in the first place?

“I hope I haven’t offended you, Mr. Ito,” I blurted out. I could have bitten my tongue off the moment I said it, because it was exactly the wrong thing to say. I had offended him, and it was only a further offense to put him in a position where politeness demanded that he deny it.

“I’m sure that could not have been further from your intention, Mr. Harris,” Ito said with convincing sincerity. “A pang of sadness at the perishability of greatness, nothing more. In fact as such, the experience might be said to be healthful to the soul. But making such an artifact a permanent part of one’s surroundings would be more than I could bear.”

Were these his true feelings or just smooth Japanese politeness? Who could tell what these people really felt? Sometimes I think they don’t even know what they feel themselves. But at any rate, I had to show him something that would change his mood, and fast. Hm-m-m …

“Tell me, Mr. Ito, are you fond of baseball?”

His eyes lit up like satellite beacons and the heavy mood evaporated in the warm, almost childish, glow of his sudden smile. “Ali, yes!” he said. “I retain a box at Osaka Stadium, though I must confess I secretly retain a partiality for the Giants. How strange it is that this profound game has so declined in the country of its origin.”

“Perhaps. But that very fact has placed something on the market which I’m sure you’ll find most congenial. Shall we go?”

“By all means,” Mr. Ito said. “I find our present environs somewhat overbearing.”

I floated the jumper to five hundred feet and programmed a Mach 2.5 jump curve to the north that quickly put the great hunk of moldering, dirty copper far behind. It’s amazing how much sickening emotion the Japanese are able to attach to almost any piece of old junk. Our old junk at that, as if Japan didn’t have enough useless old clutter of its own. But I certainly shouldn’t complain about it; it makes me a pretty good living. Everyone knows the old saying about a fool and his money.

The jumper’s trajectory put us at float over the confluence of the Harlem and East rivers at a thousand feet. Without dropping any lower, I whipped the jumper northeast over the Bronx at three hundred miles per hour. This area had been covered by tenements before the Insurrection, and had been thoroughly razed by firebombs, high explosives, and napalm. No one had ever found an economic reason for clearing away the miles of rubble, and now the scarred earth and ruined buildings were covered with tall grass, poison sumac, tangled scrub growth, and scattered thickets of trees which might merge to form a forest in another generation or two. Because of the crazy, jagged, overgrown topography, this land was utterly useless, and no one lived here except some bathetic remnants of old hippie tribes that kept to themselves and weren’t worth hunting down. Their occasional huts and patchwork tents , were the only signs of human habitation in the area. This was really depressing territory, and I wanted to get Mr. Ito over it high and fast.

Fortunately, we didn’t have far to, go, and in a couple of. minutes, I had the jumper floating at five hundred feet over our objective, the only really intact structure in the area. Mr. Ito’s stone face lit up with such boyish pleasure that I knew I had it made; I had figured right when I figured he couldn’t resist something like this.

“So!” he cried in delight. “Yankee Stadium!”

The ancient ballpark had come through the Insurrection with nothing worse than some atmospheric blacking and cratering of its concrete exterior walls.

Everything around it had been pretty well demolished except for a short section of old elevated subway line, which still stood beside it, a soft rusty-red skeleton covered with vines and moss. The surrounding ruins were thoroughly overgrown, huge piles of rubble, truncated buildings, rusted-out tanks, forming tangled manmade jungled foothills around the high point of the stadium, which itself had creepers and vines growing all over it, partially blending it into the wild, overgrown landscape around it.

The Bureau of National Antiquities had circled the stadium with a high, electrified, barbed-wire fence to keep out the hippies who roamed the badlands. A lone guard armed with a Japanese made dicer patrolled the fence in endless circles at fifteen feet on a one-man skimmer. I brought the jumper down to fifty feet and orbited the stadium five times, giving the enthralled Ito a good, long, contemplative look at how lovely it would look as the centerpiece of his gardens instead of hidden away in these crummy ruins. The guard waved to us each time our paths crossed—it must be a lonely, boring job out here with nothing but old junk and crazy wandering hippies for company.

“May we go inside?” Ito said in absolutely reverent tones. Man, was he hooked! He glowed like a little kid about to inherit a candy store.

“Certainly, Mr. Ito,” I said, taking the jumper out of its circling pattern and floating it gently up over the lip of the old ballpark, putting it on hover at roof-level over what had once been short center field. Very slowly, I brought the jumper down toward the tangle of tall grass, shrubbery, and occasional stunted trees that covered what had once been the playing field.

It was like descending into some immense, ruined, roofless cathedral. As we dropped, the cavernous triple decked grandstands—rotten wooden seats rich with moss and fungi, great overhanging rafters concealing flocks of chattering birds in their deep glowering shadows—rose to encircle the jumper in a weird, lost grandeur.

By the time we touched down, Ito seemed to be floating in his seat with rapture. “So beautiful!” he sighed. “Such a sense of history and venerability. Ali, Mr. Harris, what noble deeds were done in this Yankee Stadium in bygone days! May we set foot on this historic playing field?”

“Of course, Mr. Ito.” It was beautiful. I didn’t have to say a word; he was doing a better job of selling the moldy, useless heap of junk to himself than I ever could.

We got out of the jumper and tramped around through the tangled vegetation while scruffy pigeons wheeled overhead and the immensity of the empty stadium gave the place an illusion of mystical significance, as if it were some Greek ruin or Stonehenge, instead of just a ruined old baseball park. The grandstands seemed choked with ghosts; the echoes of great events that never were, filled the deeply shadowed cavernous spaces.

Mr. Ito, it turned out, knew more about Yankee Stadium than I did, or ever wanted to. He led me around at a measured, reverent pace, boring my ass off with a kind of historical grand tour.

“Here Al Gionfriddo made his famous World Series catch of a potential home run by the great DiMaggio,” he said, as we reached the high, crumbling black wall that ran around the bleachers. Faded numerals said “405.” We followed this curving, overgrown wall around to the 467 sign in left center field. Here there were three stone markers jutting up out of the old playing field like so many tombstones, and five copper plaques on the wall behind them, so green with decay as to be illegible. They really must’ve taken this stuff seriously in the old days, as seriously as the Japanese take it now.

“Memorials to the great heroes of the New York Yankees,” Ito said. “The legendary Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle … Over this very spot, Mickey Mantle drove a ball into the bleachers, a feat which had been regarded as impossible for nearly half a century. Ah…”

And so on. Ito tramped all through the underbrush of the playing field and seemed to have a piece of trivia of vast historical significance to himself for almost every square foot of Yankee Stadium. At this spot, Babe Ruth had achieved his sixtieth home run; here Roger Marls had finally surpassed that feat, over there Mantle had almost driven a ball over the high roof of the venerable stadium. It was staggering how much of this trivia he knew, and how much importance it all had in his eyes. The tour seemed to go on forever. I would’ve gone crazy with boredom if it wasn’t so wonderfully obvious how thoroughly sold he was on the place. While Ito conducted his love affair with Yankee Stadium, I passed the time by counting yen in my head. I figured I could probably get ten million out of him, which meant that my commission would be a cool million. Thinking about that much money about to drop into my hands was enough to keep me smiling for the two hours that Ito babbled on about home runs, no-hitters, and tripleplays.

It was late afternoon by the time he had finally saturated himself and allowed me to lead him back to the jumper. I felt it was time to talk business, while he was still under the spell of the stadium, and his resistance was at low ebb.

“It pleasures me greatly to observe the depths of your feeling for this beautiful and venerable stadium, Mr. Ito,” I said. “I stand ready to facilitate the speedy transfer of title at your convenience.”

Ito started as if suddenly roused from some pleasant dream. He cast his eyes downward, and bowed almost imperceptibly.

“Alas,” he said sadly, “while it would pleasure me beyond all reason to enshrine the -noble Yankee Stadium upon my grounds, such a self-indulgence would only exacerbate my domestic difficulties. The parents of my wife ignorantly consider the noble sport of baseball an imported American barbarity. My wife unfortunately shares in this opinion and frequently berates me for my enthusiasm for the game. Should I purchase the Yankee Stadium, I would become a laughing stock in my own household, and my life would become quite unbearable.”

Can you beat that? The arrogant little son of a bitch wasted two hours of my time dragging around this stupid heap of junk babbling all that garbage and driving me half crazy, and he knew he wasn’t going to buy it all the time! I felt like knocking his low posture teeth down his unworthy throat. But I thought of all those yen I still had a fighting chance at and made the proper response: a rueful little smile of sympathy, a shared sigh of wistful regret, a murmured, “Alas.”

“However,” Ito added brightly, “the memory of this visit is something I shall treasure always. I am deeply in your debt for granting me this experience, Mr. Harris. For this alone, the trip from Kyoto has been made more than worthwhile.”

Now that really made my day.

I was in real trouble, I was very close to blowing the biggest deal I’ve ever had a shot at. I’d shown Ito the two best items in my territory, and if he didn’t find what he wanted in the Northeast, there were plenty of first-rank pieces still left in the rest of the country—top stuff like the St. Louis Gateway Arch, the Disneyland Matterhorn, the Salt Lake City Mormon Tabernacle—and plenty of other brokers to collect that big fat commission.

I figured I had only one more good try before Ito started thinking of looking elsewhere: the United Nations building complex. The U.N. had fallen into a complicated legal limbo. The United Nations had retained title to the buildings when they moved their. headquarters out of New York, but when the U.N. folded, New York State, New York City, and the Federal Government had all laid claim to them, along with the U.N.‘s foreign creditors. The Bureau of National Antiquities didn’t have clear title, but they did administer the estate for the Federal Government. If I could palm the damned thing off on Ito, the Bureau of National Junk would be only too happy to take his check and let everyone else try to pry the money out of them. And once he moved it to Kyoto, the Japanese Government would not be about to let anyone repossess something that one of their heavyweight citizens had shelled out hard yen for.

So I jumped her at Mach 1.7 to a hover at three hundred feet over the greasy waters of the East River due east of the U.N. complex at 42nd Street. At this time of day and from this angle, the U.N. buildings presented what I hoped was a romantic Japanese-style vista. The Secretariat was a giant glass tombstone dramatically silhouetted by the late afternoon sun as it loomed massively before us out of the perpetual gray haze hanging over Manhattan; beside it, the low sweeping curve of the General Assembly gave the grouping a balanced calligraphic outline. The total effect seemed similar to that of one of those ancient Japanese Torii gates rising out of the, foggy sunset, only done on a far grander scale.

The Insurrection had left the U.N. untouched—the rebels had had some crazy attachment for it—and from the river, you couldn’t see much of the grubby open air market that had been allowed to spring up in the Plaza, or the honky-tonk bars along First Avenue. Fortunately, the Bureau of National Antiquities made a big point of keeping the buildings themselves in good shape, figuring that the Federal Government’s claim would be weakened if anyone could yell that the Bureau was letting them fall apart.

I floated her slowly in off the river, keeping at the threehundred-foot level, and started my pitch. “Before you, Mr. Ito, are the United Nations buildings, melancholy symbol of one of the noblest dreams of man, now unfortunately empty and abandoned, a monument to the tragedy of the U.N.‘s unfortunate demise.”

Flashes of sunlight, reflected off the river, then onto the hundreds of windows that formed the face of the Secretariat, scintillated intermittently across ‘the glass monolith as I set the jumper to circling the building. When we came around to the western face, the great glass facade was a curtain of orange fire.

“The Secretariat could be set in your gardens so as to catch both the sunrise and sunset, Mr. Ito,” I pointed out. “It’s considered one of the finest examples of Twentieth-Century Utilitarian in the world, and you’ll note that it’s in excellent repair.”

Ito said nothing. His eyes did not so much as flicker. Even the muscles of his face seemed unnaturally wooden. The jumper passed behind the Secretariat again, which eclipsed both the sun and its giant reflection; below us was the sweeping gray concrete roof of the General Assembly.

“And of course, the historic significance of the U.N. buildings is beyond measure, if somewhat tragic—”

Abruptly, Mr. Ito interrupted, in a cold, clipped voice. “Please forgive my crudity in interjecting a political opinion into this situation, Mr. Harris, but I believe such frankness will save you much wasted time and effort and myself considerable discomfort.”

All at once, he was Shiburo Ito of Ito Freight Boosters of Osaka, a mover and shaper of the economy of the most powerful nation on Earth, and he was letting me know it. “I fully respect your sentimental esteem for the late United Nations, but it is a sentiment I do not share. I remind you that the United Nations was born as an alliance of the nations which humiliated Japan in a most unfortunate war, and expired as a shrill and contentious assembly of pauperized beggar-states united only in the dishonorable determination to extract international alms from more progressive, advanced, self-sustaining, and virtuous states, chief among them Japan. I must therefore regretfully point out that the sight of these buildings fills me with nothing but disgust, though they may have a certain intrinsic beauty as abstract objects.”

His face had become a shiny mask and he seemed a million miles away. He had come as close to outright anger as I had ever heard one of these heavyweight Japs get; he must be really steaming inside. Damn it, how was I supposed to know that the U.N. had all those awful political meanings for him? As far as I’ve ever heard, the U.N. hasn’t meant anything to anyone for years, except an idealistic, sappy idea that got taken over by Third Wonders and went broke. Just my rotten luck to run into one of the few people in the world who were still fighting that one!

“You are no doubt fatigued, Mr. Harris,” Ito said coldly. “I shall trouble you no longer. It would be best to return to your office now. Should you have further objects to show me, we can arrange another appointment at some mutually convenient time.”

What could I say to that? I had offended him deeply, and besides I couldn’t think of anything else to show him. I took the jumper to five hundred and headed downtown over the river at a slow hundred miles per hour, hoping against hope that I’d somehow think of something to salvage this blown million-yen deal with before we reached my office and I lost this giant goldfish forever.

As we headed downtown, Ito stared impassively out the bubble at the bleak ranks of high-rise apartment buildings that lined the Manhattan shore below us, not deigning to speak or take further notice of my miserable existence. The deep orange light streaming in through the bubble turned his round face into a rising sun, straight off the Japanese flag. It seemed appropriate. The crazy bastard was just like his country: a politically touchy, politely arrogant economic overlord, with infinitely refined aesthetic sensibilities inexplicably combined with a pack-rat lust for the silliest of our old junk. One minute Ito seemed so superior in every way, and the next he was a stupid, childish sucker. I’ve been doing business with the Japanese for years, and I still don’t really understand them. The best I can do is guess around the edges of whatever their inner reality actually is, and hope I hit what works. And this time out, with a million yen or more dangling in front of me, I had guessed wrong three times and now I was dragging my tail home with a dissatisfied customer whose very posture seemed designed to let me know that I was a crass, second-rate boob, and that he was one of the lords of creation!

“Mr. Harris! Mr. Harris! Over there! That magnificent structure!” Ito was suddenly almost shouting; his eyes were bright with excitement; and he was actually smiling.

He was pointing due south along the East River. The Manhattan bank was choked with the ugliest public housing projects imaginable, and the Brooklyn shore was worse: one of those huge, sprawling, so called industrial parks, low windowless buildings, geodesic warehouses, wharves, a few _ freight-booster launching pads. Only one structure stood out, there was only one thing Ito could’ve meant: the structure linking the housing project on the Manhattan side with the industrial park on the Brooklyn shore.

Mr. Ito was pointing at the Brooklyn Bridge.

“The … ah… bridge, Mr. Ito?” I managed to say with a straight face. As far as I knew, the Brooklyn Bridge had only one claim to historicity: it was the butt of a series of jokes so ancient that they weren’t funny anymore. The Brooklyn Bridge was what oldcomic con men traditionally sold to sucker tourists, greenhorns or hicks they used to call them, along with phony uranium stocks and gold-painted bricks.

So I couldn’t resist the line: “You want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr. Ito?” It was so beautiful; he had put me through such hassles, and had finally gotten so damned high and mighty with me, and now I was in effect calling him an idiot to his face and he didn’t know it.

In fact, he nodded eagerly in answer like a straight man out of some old joke and said, “I do believe so. Is it for sale?”

I slowed the jumper to forty, brought her down to a hundred feet, and swallowed my giggles as we approached the crumbling old monstrosity. Two massive and squat stone towers supported the rusty cables from which the bed of the bridge was suspended. The jumper had made the bridge useless years ago; no one had bothered to maintain it and no one had bothered to tear it down. Where the big blocks of dark gray stone met the water, they were encrusted with putrid looking green slime. Above the waterline, the towers were whitened with about a century’s worth of guano.

It was hard to believe that Ito was serious. The bridge was a filthy, decayed, reeking old monstrosity. In short, it was just what Ito deserved to be sold.

“Why, yes, Mr. Ito,” I said, “I think I might be able to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.”

I put the jumper on hover about a hundred feet from one of the filthy old stone towers. Where the stones weren’t caked with seagull guano, they were covered with about an inch of black soot. The roadbed was cracked and pitted and thickly paved with garbage, old shells, and more guano; the bridge must’ve been a seagull rookery for decades. I was mighty glad that the jumper was airtight; the stink must’ve been terrific.

“Excellent!” Mr. Ito exclaimed. “Quite lovely, is it not? I am determined to be the man to purchase the Brooklyn Bridge, Mr. Harris.”

“I can think of no one more worthy of that honor than your esteemed self, Mr. Ito,” I said with total sincerity.

About four months after the last section of the Brooklyn Bridge was boosted to Kyoto, I received two packages from Mr. Shiburo Ito. One was a mailing envelope containing a minicassette and a holo slide; the other was a heavy package about the size of a shoebox wrapped in blue rice paper.

Feeling a lot more mellow toward the memory of Ito these days, with a million of his yen in my bank account, I dropped the mini into my playback and was hardly surprised to hear his voice.

“Salutations, Mr. Harris, and once again my profoundest thanks for expediting the transfer of the Brooklyn Bridge to my estate. It has now been permanently enshrined and affords us all much aesthetic enjoyment and has enhanced the tranquility of my household immeasurably. I am enclosing a bolo of the shrine for your pleasure. I have also sent you a small token of my appreciation which I hope you will take in the spirit in which it is given. Sayonara.”

My curiosity aroused, I got right up and put the holo slide in my wall viewer. Before me was a heavily wooded mountain which rose into twin peaks of austere, dark-gray rock. A tall waterfall plunged gracefully down the long gorge between the two pinnacles to a shallow lake at the foot of the mountain, where it smashed onto a table of flat rock, generating perpetual billows of soft mist which turned the landscape into something straight out of a Chinese painting. Spanning the gorge between the two peaks like a spiderweb directly over the great falls, its stone towers anchored to islands of rock on the very lip of the precipice, was the Brooklyn Bridge, its ponderous bulk rendered slim and graceful by the massive scale of the landscape. The stone had been cleaned and glistened with moisture, the cables and roadbed were overgrown with lush green ivy. The holo had been Taken just as the sun was setting between the towers of the bridge, outlining it in rich orange fire, turning the rising mists coppery, and sparkling in brilliant sheets off the falling water.

It was very beautiful.

It was quite a while before I tore myself away from the scene, remembering Mr. Ito’s other package.

Beneath the blue paper wrapping was a single gold painted brick. I gaped. I laughed. I looked again.

The object looked superficially like an old brick covered with gold paint. But it wasn’t. It was a solid brick of soft, pure gold, a replica of the original item, in perfect detail.

I knew that Mr. Ito was trying to tell me something, but I still can’t quite make out what.

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