Beyond This Horizon (12 page)

None of which prepared Hamilton for the reception of a stat relating to J. Darlington Smith.

“Greetings,” it began, etc. etc. The gist of it was that the interlocutor appointed by the Institution as temporary guardian for Smith desired that Hamilton grant the favor of an hour of his no-doubt valuable time to Smith. No explanation.

In his bemused frame of mind his first impulse was to ignore it. Then he recalled that such an act would not have fitted his former, pre-intrigue, conduct. He would have seen the barbarian, from sheer curiosity.

Now was as good a time as any. He called the Institution, got hold of the interlocutor, and arranged for Smith to come to his apartment at once. As an afterthought he called Monroe-Alpha, he having remembered his friend’s romantic interest in Smith. He explained what was about to take place. “I thought you might like to meet your primitive hero.”

“My hero? What do you mean?”

“I thought you were telling me what a bucolic paradise he came from?”

“Oh, that! Slight mistake in dates. Smith is from 1926. It seems that gadgeting was beginning to spoil the culture, even then.”

“Then you wouldn’t be interested in seeing him?”

“Oh, I think I would. It was a transition period. He may have seen something of the old culture with his own eyes. I’ll be over, but I may be a little late.”

“Fine. Long life.” He cleared without waiting for a reply.

Smith showed up promptly, alone. He was dressed, rather badly, in modern clothes, but was unarmed. “I’m John Darlington Smith,” he began.

Hamilton hesitated for a moment at the sight of the brassard, then decided to treat him as an equal. Discrimination, he felt, under the circumstances would be sheer unkindness. “I am honored that you visit me, sir.”

“Not at all. Awfully good of you, and so forth.”

“I had expected that there would be someone with you.”

“Oh, you mean my nursemaid.” He grinned boyishly. He was, Hamilton decided, perhaps ten years younger than Hamilton himself—discounting the years he had spent in stasis. “I’m beginning to manage the lingo all right, well enough to get around.”

“I suppose so,” Hamilton agreed. “Both lingos are basically Anglic.”

“It’s not so difficult. I wish lingo were the only trouble I have.”

Hamilton was a little at a loss as to how to handle him. It was utterly inurbane to display interest in a stranger’s personal affairs, dangerous, if the stranger were an armed citizen. But this lad seemed to invite friendly interest. “What is troubling you, sir?”

“Well, lots of things, hard to define. Everything is—different.”

“Didn’t you expect things to be different?”

“I didn’t expect anything. I didn’t expect to come to…to
now
.”

“Eh? I understand that—never mind. Do you mean that you did not know that you were entering the ‘stasis’?”

“I did and I didn’t.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… Listen, do you think you could stand a long story? I’ve told this story about forty-eleven times, and I know it doesn’t do any good to try to shorten it. They just don’t understand.”

“Go ahead.”

“Well, I’d better go back a little. I graduated from Eastern U in the spring of ’26 and—”

“You what?”

“Oh, dear! You see in those days the schools—”

“Sorry. Just tell it your own way. Anything I can’t pick up I’ll ask you about later.”

“Maybe that would be better. I had a pretty good job offered to me, selling bonds—one of the best houses on the Street. I was pretty well known—All-American back two seasons.” Hamilton restrained himself, and made about four mental notes.

“That’s an athletic honor,” Smith explained hastily. “You’ll understand. I don’t want you to think I was a football bum, though. To be sure the fraternity helped me a little, but I worked for every cent I got. Worked summers, too. And I studied. My major was Efficiency Engineering. I had a pretty thorough education in business, finance, economics, salesmanship. It’s true that I got my job because Grantland Rice picked me—I mean football helped a lot to make me well-known—but I was prepared to be an asset to any firm that hired me. You see that, don’t you?”

“Oh, most certainly!”

“It’s important, because it has a bearing on what happened afterwards. I wasn’t working on my second million but I was getting along. Things were slick enough. The night it happened I was celebrating a little—with reason. I had unloaded an allotment of South American Republics—”

“Eh?”

“Bonds. It seemed like a good time to throw a party. It was a Saturday night, so everybody started out with the dinner-dance at the country club. It was the usual thing. I looked over the flappers for a while, didn’t see one I wanted to dance with, and wandered into the locker room, looking for a drink. The attendant used to sell it to people he could trust.”

“Which reminds me,” said Hamilton, and returned a moment later with glasses and refreshment.

“Thanks. His gin was pure bathtub, but usually reliable. Maybe it wasn’t, that night. Or maybe I should have eaten dinner. Anyhow, I found myself listening to an argument that was going on in one end of the room. One of these parlor bolsheviks was holding forth—maybe you still have the type? Attack anything, just so long as it was respectable and decent.”

Hamilton smiled.

“You do, eh? He was one of ’em. Read nothing but the American Mercury and Jurgen and then knew it all. I’m not narrow-minded. I read those things, too, but I didn’t have to believe ’em. I read the Literary Digest, too, and the Times, something they would never do. To get on, he was panning the Administration and predicting that the whole country was about to go to the bow-wows…go to pieces. He didn’t like the Gold Standard, he didn’t like Wall Street, he thought we ought to write off the War Debts.

“I could see that some of our better members were getting pretty sick of it, so I jumped in. ‘They hired the money, didn’t they,’ I told him.

“He grinned at me—sneered I should say. ‘I suppose you voted for
him
.’

“‘I certainly did,’ I answered, which was not strictly true; I hadn’t gotten around to registering, such things coming in the middle of the football season. But I wasn’t going to let him get away with sneering at Mr. Coolidge. ‘I suppose you voted for Davis.’

“‘Not likely,’ he says. ‘I voted for Norman Thomas.’

“Well, that burned me up. ‘See here,’ I said, ‘the proper place for people like you is in Red Russia. You’re probably an atheist, to boot. You have the advantage of living in the greater period in the history of the greatest country in history. We’ve got an Administration in Washington that understands business. We’re back to normalcy and we’re going to stay that way. We don’t need you rocking the boat. We are levelled off on a plateau of permanent prosperity. Take it from me—Don’t Sell America Short!’

“I got quite a burst of applause.

“‘You seem pretty sure of that,’ he says, weakly.

“‘I ought to be,’ I told him. ‘I’m in the Street.’

“‘Then there is no point in me arguing,’ he said, and just walked out.

“Somebody poured me another drink, and we got to talking. He was a pleasant, portly chap, looking like a banker or a broker. I didn’t recognize him, but I believe in establishing contacts. ‘Let me introduce myself,’ he said. ‘My name is Thaddeus Johnson.’

“I told him mine.

“‘Well, Mr. Smith,’ he said, ‘you seem to have confidence in the future of our country.’

“I told him I certainly did.

“‘Confident enough to bet on it?’

“‘At any odds you want to name, money, marbles, or chalk.’

“‘Then I have a proposition that might interest you.’

“I pricked up my ears. ‘What is it?’ I said.

“‘Could you take a little joyride with me?’ he said. ‘Between the saxophones and those Charleston-crazy kids, a man can’t hear himself think.’ I didn’t mind—those things don’t break up until 3 P.M.; I knew I could stand a spell of fresh air. He had a long, low wicked-looking Hispano-Suiza. Class.

“I must have dozed off. I woke up when we stopped at his place. He took me in and fixed me a drink and told me about the stasis—only he called it a ‘level-entropy field.’ And he showed it to me. He did a lot of stunts with it, put a cat in it, left it in while we killed a drink. It was all right.

“‘But that isn’t the half of it,’ he said. ‘Watch.’ He took the cat and
threw
it, right through where the field would be if it was turned on. When the cat was right spang in the center of the area, he threw the switch. We waited again, a little longer this time. Then he released the switch.
The cat came sailing out, just the way it was heading when we saw it last
. It landed, spitting and swearing.

“‘That was just to convince you,’ he said, ‘that inside that field, time doesn’t exist—no increase of entropy. The cat never knew the field was turned on.’

“Then he changed his tack. ‘Jack,’ he says, ‘what will the country be like in twenty-five years?’

“I thought about it. ‘The same—only more so,’ I decided.

“‘Think A.T.&T. will still be a good investment?’

“‘Certainly!’

“‘Jack,’ he says softly, ‘would you enter that field for ten shares of A.T.&T.?’

“‘For how long?’

“‘Twenty-five years, Jack.’

“Naturally, it takes a little time to decide a thing like that. Ten of A.T.&T. didn’t tempt me; he added ten of U.S.Steel. And he laid ’em out on the table. I was as sure as I’m standing here that the stock would be worth a lot more in a quarter of a century, and a kid fresh out of college doesn’t get blue chips to play with very easily. But a quarter of a century! It was like dying.

“When he added ten of National City, I said, ‘Look Mr. Johnson, let me try it for five minutes. If it didn’t kill the cat, I ought to be able to hold my breath that long.’

“He had been filling out the assignments in my name, just to tempt me. He said, ‘Surely, Jack.’ I stepped to the proper spot on the floor while I still had my courage up. I saw him reach for the switch.

“That’s all I know.”

Hamilton Felix sat up suddenly. “Huh? How’s that?”

“That’s all I know,” repeated Smith. “I started to tell him to go ahead, when I realized he wasn’t there any more. The room was filled with strangers, it was a different room. I was here. I was
now
.”

“That,” said Hamilton, “deserves another drink.”

They drank it in silence.

“My real trouble is this,” said Smith. “I don’t understand this world at all. I’m a business man, I’d like to go into business here. (Mind you, I’ve got nothing against this world, this period. It seems okay, but I don’t understand it.) I can’t go into business. Damn it, nothing
works
the same. All they taught me in school, all I learned on the Street, seems utterly foreign to the way they do business now.”

“I should think that business would be much the same in any age—fabrication, buying, selling.”

“Yes and no. I’m a finance man—and, damn it, finance is cockeyed nowadays!”

“I admit that the details are a little involved,” Hamilton answered, “but the basic principles are evident enough. Say—I’ve a friend coming over who is the chief mathematician for the department of finance. He’ll straighten you out.”

Smith shook his head decisively. “I’ve been experted to death. They don’t speak my lingo.”

“Well,” said Hamilton, “I might tackle the problem myself.”

“Would you? Please?”

Hamilton thought about it. It was one thing to kid sober-sided Clifford about his “money-machine”; another matter entirely to explain the workings of finance economics to…to the hypothetical Man from Arcturus. “Suppose we start this way,” he said. “It’s basically a matter of costs and prices. A business man manufactures something. That costs him money—materials, wages, housing, and so forth. In order to stay in business he has to get his costs back in prices. Understand me?”

“That’s obvious.”

“Fine. He has put into circulation an amount of money exactly equal to his costs.”

“Say that again.”

“Eh? It’s a simple identity. The money he has had to spend, put into circulation, is his costs.”

“Oh…but how about his profit?”

“His profit is part of his cost. You don’t expect him to work for nothing.”

“But profits aren’t costs. They’re…they’re
profits
.”

Hamilton felt a little baffled. “Have it your own way. Costs—what you rail ‘costs’—plus profit must equal price. Costs and profits are available as purchasing power to buy the product at a price exactly equal to them. That’s how purchasing power comes into existence.”

“But…but he doesn’t buy from himself.”

“He’s a consumer, too. He uses his profits to pay for his own and other producers’ products.”

“But he
owns
his own products.”

“Now you’ve got
me
mixed up. Forget about him buying his own products. Suppose he buys what he needs for himself from other business men. It comes out the same in the long run. Let’s get on. Production puts into circulation the amount of money—
exactly
—needed to buy the product. But some of that money put into circulation is saved and invested in new production. There it is a cost charge against the new production, leaving a net shortage in necessary purchasing power. The government makes up that shortage by issuing new money.”

“That’s the point that bothers me,” said Smith. “It’s all right for the government to issue money, but it ought to be
backed
by something—gold, or government bonds.”

“Why, in the Name of the Egg, should a symbol represent anything but the thing it is supposed to accomplish?”

“But you talk as if money was simply an abstract symbol.”

“What else is it?”

Smith did not answer at once. They had reached an impasse of different concepts, totally different orientations. When he did speak it was to another point. “But the government simply
gives away
all this new money. That’s rank charity. It’s demoralizing. A man should work for what he gets. But forgetting that aspect for a moment, you can’t run a government that way. A government is just like a business. It can’t be all outgo and no income.”