"Robert Heinlein - The Man Who Sold the Moon" - читать интересную книгу автора (Heinlein Robert A)

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON


CHAPTER ONE


“YOU’VE GOT TO BE A BELIEVER!”

George Strong snorted at his partner’s declaration. “Delos, why don’t you give up? You’ve been singing this tune for years. Maybe someday men will get to the Moon, though I doubt it. In any case, you and I will never live to see it. The loss of the power satellite washes the matter up for our generation.”
D. D. Harriman grunted. “We won’t see it if we sit on our fat behinds and don’t do anything to make it happen. But we can make it happen.”
“Question number one: how? Question number two: why?”
“‘Why?’ The man asks ‘why.’ George, isn’t there anything in your soul but discounts, and dividends? Didn’t you ever sit with a girl on a soft summer night and stare up at the Moon and wonder what was there?”
“Yeah, I did once. I caught a cold.”
Harriman asked the Almighty why he had been delivered into the hands of the Philistines. He then turned back to his partner. “I could tell you why, the real ‘why,’ but you wouldn’t understand me. You want to know why in terms of cash, don’t you? You want to know how Harriman & Strong and Harriman Enterprises can show a profit, don’t you?”
“Yes,” admitted Strong, “and don’t give me any guff about tourist trade and fabulous lunar jewels. I’ve had it.”
“You ask me to show figures on a brand-new type of enterprise, knowing I can’t. It’s like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to estimate how much money Curtiss-Wright Corporation would someday make out of building airplanes. I’ll put it another way, You didn’t want us to go into plastic houses, did you? If you had had your way we would still be back in Kansas City, subdividing cow pastures and showing rentals.”
Strong shrugged.
"How much has New World Homes made to date?”
Strong looked absent-minded while exercising the talent he brought to the partnership. “Uh . . . $172,946,004.62, after taxes, to the end of the last fiscal year. The running estimate to date is—”
“Never mind. What was our share in the take?”
“Well, uh, the partnership, exclusive of the piece you took personally and then sold to me later, has benefited from New World Homes during the same period by $1 3,010,437.20, ahead of personal taxes. Delos, this double taxation has got to stop. Penalizing thrift is a sure way to run this country straight into—”
“Forget it, forget it! How much have we made out of Skyblast Freight and Antipodes Transways?”
Strong told him.
“And yet I had to threaten you with bodily harm to get you to put up a dime to buy control of the injector patent. You said rockets were a passing fad.”
“We were lucky,” objected Strong. “You had no way of knowing that there would be a big uranium strike in Australia. Without it, the Skyways group would have left us in the red. For that matter New World Homes would have failed, too, if the roadtowns hadn’t come along and given us a market out from under local building codes.”
“Nuts on both points. Fast transportation will pay; it always has. As for New World, when ten million families need new houses and we can sell ‘em cheap, they’ll buy. They won’t let building codes stop them, not permanently. We gambled on a certainty. Think back, George: what ventures have we lost money on and what ones have paid off? Everyone of my crack-brain ideas has made money, hasn’t it? And the only times we’ve lost our ante was on conservative, blue-chip investments.”
“But we’ve made money on some conservative deals, too,” protested Strong.
“Not enough to pay for your yacht. Be fair about it, George; the Andes Development Company, the integrating pantograph patent, every one of my wildcat schemes I’ve had to drag you into—and every one of them paid.”
“I’ve had to sweat blood to make them pay,” Strong grumbled.
“That’s why we are partners. I get a wildcat by the tail; you harness him and put him to work. Now we go to the Moon—and you’ll make it pay.”
“Speak for yourself. I’m not going to the Moon.”
“I am.”
“Hummph! Delos, granting that we have gotten rich by speculating on your hunches, it’s a steel-clad fact that if you keep on gambling you lose your shirt. There’s an old saw about the pitcher that went once too often to the well.”
“Damn it, George—I’m going to the Moon! If you won’t back me up, let’s liquidate and I’ll do it alone.”
Strong drummed on his desk top. “Now, Delos, nobody said anything about not backing you up.”
“Fish or cut bait. Now is the opportunity and my mind’s made up. I’m going to be the Man in the Moon.”
“Well . . . let’s get going. We’ll be late to the meeting.”
As they left their joint office, Strong, always penny conscious, was careful to switch off the light. Harriman had seen him do so a thousand times; this time he commented. “George, how about a light switch that turns off automatically when you leave a room?”
“Hmm—but suppose someone were left in the room?”
“Well. . . hitch it to stay on only when someone was in the room—key the switch to the human body’s heat radiation, maybe.”
“Too expensive and too complicated.”
“Needn’t be. I’ll turn the idea over to Ferguson to fiddle with. It should be no larger than the present light switch and cheap enough so that the power saved in a year will pay for it.”
“How would it work?” asked Strong.
“How should I know? I’m no engineer; that’s for Ferguson and the other educated laddies.”
Strong objected, “It’s no good commercially. Switching off a light when you leave a room is a matter of temperament. I’ve got it; you haven’t. If a man hasn’t got it, you can’t interest him in such a switch.”
“You can if power continues to be rationed. There is a power shortage now; and there will be a bigger one.”
“Just temporary. This meeting will straighten it out.”
“George, there is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency. The switch will sell.”
Strong took out a notebook and stylus. “I’ll call Ferguson in about it tomorrow.”
Harriman forgot the matter, never to think of it again. They had reached the roof; he waved to a taxi, then turned to Strong. “How much could we realize if we unloaded our holdings in Roadways and in Belt Transport Corporation—yes, and in New World Homes?”