To Sail Beyond the Sunset (50 page)

Brian had taken the precaution of fetching four guards with him, two men, two women, one pair from Dallas, one pair from Kansas City. That did not make it legal but he got away with it because no one—I least of all!—cared to argue technicalities.

I saw the door close behind them, went upstairs and cried myself to sleep.

Failure! Utter and abject failure! I don’t see what else I could have done. But I will always carry a heavy burden of guilt over it.

What should I have done?

The Adventures of Prudence Penny

It took the opening of the Cleveland-Cincinnati rolling road to nail down in George Strong’s mind that my prophecies really were accurate. I was always most careful not even to hint the source of my foreknowledge because I had a strong hunch that the truth would be harder for George to take than leaving it all a mystery. So I joked about it: my cracked crystal ball—a small time machine I keep in the basement next to my Ouija Board—my séance guiding spirit, Chief Forked Tongue—tea leaves, but it has to be Black Dragon tea, Lipton’s Orange Pekoe doesn’t have the right vibrations.

George smiled at each bit of nonsense—George was a gentle soul—and eventually quit asking me how I did it and simply treated the message in each envelope as a reliable forecast—as indeed it was.

But he was still chewing the bit at the time the Cleveland-Cincinnati road opened. We attended the opening together, sat in the grandstand, watched the governor of Ohio cut the ribbon. We were seated where we could talk privately if we kept our voices down; the speeches over the loudspeakers covered our words.

“George, how much real estate does Harriman and Strong own on each side of the roadway?”

“Eh? Quite a bit. Although some speculator got in ahead of us and took options on the best commercial sites. However, Harriman Industries has a substantial investment in D/M power screens—but you know that; you were there when we voted it, and you voted for it.”

“So I did. Although my motion to invest three times that amount was first voted down.”

George shook his head. “Too risky. Maureen, money is made by risking money…but not by wildly plunging. I have trouble enough keeping Delos from plunging; you mustn’t set him a bad example.”

“But I was right, George. Want to see the figures on a We-Woulda-Made if my motion had carried?”

“Maureen, one can always do a We-Woulda-Made on a wild guess that happens to hit. That doesn’t justify guessing. It ignores the other wild guesses that did not hit.”

“But that’s my point, George—I don’t guess; I know. You hold the envelopes; you open them. Have I ever been wrong? Even once?”

He shook his head and sighed. “It goes against the grain.”

“So it does and your lack of faith in me is costing both Harriman and Strong and Harriman Industries money, lots of money. Never mind. You say some speculator optioned the best land?”

“Yes. Probably somebody in a position to see the maps before the decisions were public.”

“No, George, not a speculator—a soothsayer. Me. I could see that you weren’t moving fast enough so I optioned as much as I could, using all the liquid capital I could lay hands on, plus all the cash I could raise by borrowing against nonliquid assets.”

George looked hurt. I added hastily, “I’m turning my options over to you, George. At cost, and you can decide how much to cut me in after the special position we have begins to pay back.”

“No, Maureen, that’s not fair. You believed in yourself; you got there first; the profits are yours.”

“George, you didn’t listen. I don’t have the capital to exploit these options; I put every cent I could raise into the options themselves—if I had been able to lay hands on another million, I would have optioned still more land farther out and for longer terms. I just hope you will listen to me next time. It distresses me to tell you that it is going to rain soup, then have you show up with a teaspoon rather than a bucket. Do you want me to warn you about the next special position? Or shall I go straight to Mr. Harriman and try to persuade him that I am an authentic soothsayer?”

He sighed. “I’d rather you told me. If you will.”

I said most quietly, “Do you have a place where we can shack up tonight?”

He answered just as quietly, “Of course. Always, dear lady.”

That night I gave him more details. “The next road to be converted will be the Jersey Turnpike, an eighty-mile-per-hour road as compared with this fiddling thirty-mile-per-hour job we saw opened today. But the Harriman Highway—”

“‘Harriman’?”

“The D. D. Harriman Prairie Highway from Kansas City to Denver will be a hundred-mile-per-hour road that will grow a strip city thirty miles wide from Old Muddy to the Rocky Mountains. It will boost Kansas from a population of two million to a population of twenty million in ten years…with endless special positions for anyone who knows it is going to happen.”

“Maureen, you frighten me.”

“I frighten myself, George. It’s rarely comfortable to know what is going to happen.” I decided to take the plunge. “The rolling roads will continue to be built at a frantic pace, as fast as sunpower screens can be manufactured to drive them—down the East Coast, along Route Sixty-six, on El Camino Real from San Diego to Sacramento and beyond—and a good thing, too, as the sunpower screens on the roofs of the road cities will take up the slack and fend off a depression when the Paradise power plant is shut down and placed in orbit.”

George kept quiet so long I thought he had fallen asleep. At last he said, “Did I hear you correctly? The big atomic power pile in Paradise, Arizona, will be placed in orbit? How? And why?”

“By means of spaceships based on today’s glide rockets. But operating with an escape fuel developed at Paradise. But, George, George, it must not happen! The Paradise plant must be shut down, yes; it is terribly dangerous, it is built wrong—like a steam engine without a relief valve.” (In my head I could hear Sergeant Theodore’s dear voice saying it: “They were too eager to build…and it was built wrong—like a steam engine without a relief valve.”) “It must be shut down but it must not be placed in orbit. Safe ways will be found to build atomic power plants; we don’t need the Paradise plant. In the meantime the sunpower screens can fill the gap.”

“If it’s dangerous—and I know some people have worried about it—if it is placed in orbit, it won’t be dangerous.”

“Yes, George, that’s why they will put it in orbit. Once in orbit, it would not be dangerous to the town of Paradise, or the state of Arizona…but what about the people in orbit with it? They will be killed.”

Another long wait—“It seems to me that it might be possible to design a plant to operate by remote control, like a freighter rocket. I must ask Ferguson.”

“I hope you are right. Because you will see, when you return to Kansas City and open my envelope number six and also number seven, that I prophesy that the Paradise power plant will be placed in orbit, and that it will blow up and kill everybody on board, and destroy the rocketship that services it. George, it must not be allowed to happen. You and Mr. Harriman must stop it. I promise you, dear, that if this can be stopped—if my prophecy can be proved wrong—I will break my crystal ball and never prophesy again.”

“I can’t make any promises, Maureen. Sure, both Delos and I are directors of the Power Syndicate…but we hold a minor position both in stock and on the board. The Power Syndicate represents practically all the venture capital in the United States; the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was suspended to permit it to be formed in order to build the Paradise plant. Mmm…a man named Daniel Dixon controls a working majority, usually. A strong man. I don’t like him much.”

“I’ve heard of him, haven’t met him. George, can he be seduced?”

“Maureen!”

“George, if I can keep fifty-odd innocent people from being killed in an industrial accident, I’ll do considerably more than offer this old body as a bribe. Is he susceptible to women? If I am not the woman he is susceptible to, perhaps I can find her.”

Dixon didn’t cotton to me at all (nor I to him, but that was unimportant) and he did not seem to have any cracks in his armor. After the Power Syndicate voted to shut down the Paradise plant “in the public interest” I was successful only in getting George and Mr. Harriman to vote against reactivating that giant bomb in orbit—theirs were the only dissenting votes—The death scenario rolled on and I could not stop it: Power satellite and spaceship
Charon
blew up together, all hands killed—and I stared at the ceiling for nights on end, reflecting on the bad side of knowing too much about the future.

But I did not stop working. Back in 1952, shortly after I had given George my earliest predictions, I had gone to Canada to see Justin: 1) to set up a front to handle business for my “Prudence Penny” column, and 2) to offer Justin the same detailed predictions I was giving to George.

Justin had not been pleased with me. “Maureen, do I understand that you have been holding all these years additional information you got from Sergeant Bronson—or Captain Long, whatever—the Howard from the future—and did not turn it over to the Foundation?”

“Yes.”

Justin had shown an expression of controlled exasperation. “I must confess to surprise. Well, better late than never. Do you have it in writing, or will you dictate it?”

“I’m not turning it over to you, Justin. I will continue to pass on to you, from time to time, data that I have conserved, item by item as you need to know it.”

“Maureen, I really must insist. This is Foundation business. You got these data from a future chairman of the Foundation—so he claimed and so I believe—so I am their proper custodian. I am speaking not as your old friend Justin, but as Justin Weatheral in my official capacity as chief executive officer of the Foundation and conserver of its assets for the benefit of all of us.”

“No, Justin.”

“I must insist.”

“Insist away, old dear—it’s good exercise.”

“That’s hardly the right attitude, Maureen. You don’t own that data. It belongs to all of us. You owe it to the Foundation.”

“Justin, don’t be so tediously male! Data from Sergeant Theodore saved the Foundation’s bacon on Black Tuesday, in 1929. Stipulated?”

“Stipulated. That’s why—”

“Let me have my say. And that same data also saved your arse and made you rich—and made the Foundation rich. Why? How? Who? Old busy bottom Maureen, that’s who! Because I’m an amoral wench who fell in love with this enlisted man and kicked his feet out from under him—and got him to talking. That had nothing to do with the Foundation, just me and my loose ways. If I hadn’t cut you in on it, you would never have met Theodore. Admit it! True? False? Answer me.”

“Well, when you put it that way—”

“I do put it that way and let’s have no more nonsense about what I owe the Foundation. Not until you’ve counted up what the Foundation owes me. I still promise to pass on data as needed. Right now, the Foundation should get heavily into Douglas-Martin Sunpower Screens, and if you don’t know about them, see your files of the
Economist
or the
Wall Street Journal
or the
Toronto Star
. After that, the hottest new investment as soon as it opens up will be rolling roads and real estate near them.”

“Rolling roads?”

“Damn it, Justin, I know Theodore mentioned them in that rump meeting of the board on Saturday the twenty-ninth of June, 1918, as I took notes and typed them out and gave you a copy, as well as the original to Judge Sperling. Look it up.” So clear back in 1952 I showed Justin where the principal roadtowns would be, as told to me by Theodore. “Watch for them, get in early. Enormous profits to the early birds. But get rid of all railroad stock.”

At that time I decided not to bother Justin with my “Prudence Penny” venture—not when he was feeling bruised on his maleness bump. Instead, I had taken it up with Eleanor. Entrusting a secret to Eleanor was safer than telling it to Jesus.

“Prudence Penny, The Housewife Investor” started out as a weekly column in country newspapers of the sort we had had in Thebes, the
Lyle County Leader
. I always offered the first six weeks free. If a trial period stirred any interest, a publisher could continue it for a very small fee—those small-town weeklies can’t pay more than peanuts; there was no sense in trying to make money on it at first.

In fact my purpose was not to make money. Or only indirectly.

I set the format in 1953 with the first column and never varied it:

Prudence Penny
THE HOUSEWIFE INVESTOR

TODAY’S DEFINITION: (Each column I gave at least one definition. Money people have their own language. If you don’t know their special words, you can’t play in their poker game. Some of the words I defined for my readers were: Common stock, preferred stock, bonds, municipal bonds, debentures, margin, selling short, puts and calls, living trust, joint tenancy, tenants in common, float, load, points, deficiency judgment, call money, prime rate, gold standard, fiat money, easement, fee simple, eminent domain, public domain, copyright, patent, etc., etc.

(Trivial? To you, perhaps. If so, you did not need “Prudence Penny.” But to most people these elementary terms might as well be ancient Greek. So I offered one definition each column, in one-syllable Anglo-Saxon words that could be misunderstood only by a professor of English.)

Next I offered a discussion of something in the news of the day that might affect investing. Since everything, from weather to elections to killer bees, affects investing, this was easy. If I could include a little juicy gossip, I did. But not anything hurtful, or cruel, and I was most careful not to offer anything actionable.

My next item each week was TODAY’S RECOMMENDED INVESTMENT. This was a sure thing, based directly or indirectly on Theodore’s predictions. The same recommendation might be repeated many times, alternated with others from the same source.

I always closed with Prudence Penny’s Portfolio:

Ladies, we started this portfolio with one thousand dollars ($1,000.00) in January 1953. If you invested the same amount and at the same time, investing and changing investments just as we did, your portfolio is now worth $4,823.17.