Robert Heinlein - To Sail Beyond The Sunset

‘Maureen, you can't mean this.'

‘Brian, I'm at the end of my rope. Priscilla knocked me down not twenty minutes ago and Donald has been trying to break down the front door. If you won't come here by the very next rocketplane, I am calling the police and swearing out warrants, all those charges - enough to get them locked up at least long enough for me to dose this house and get out of town. No half measures, Brian. I want your answer, right now.'

Marian's face appeared beside his. ‘Mother, you can't do that to Gus! He didn't do anything. He told me so, on his honour!'

‘That isn't what they say, Marian. If you don't want them saying it on the witness stand, under oath, Brian will come here and get them.'

‘They're your children.'

‘They are Brian's children, too, and he has custody. Six years ago, when I left them with you, they were well-behaved children, polite, obedient, and no more given to naughty spells than any growing child. Today they are incorrigible, uncivilised, totally out of hand.' I sighed. ‘Speak up, Brian. What will you do?'

‘I can't come to KC today.‘

‘Very well, I'll call the police and have them arrested. Have them taken in and then swear out the warrant, the criminal charges.'

‘Now wait a minute!'

‘I can't, Brian. I'm holding them off temporarily with the patrol, the private police who watch this neighbourhood. But I can't keep them here tonight; she's bigger than I am and he's twice as big. Goodbye; I've got to call the cops.'

‘Now hold it! I don't know how soon I can get a ship.'

‘You can hire one; you're rich enough! How soon will you be here?'

‘Uh... three hours'

‘That's six-twenty, our time. At six-thirty I'm calling the cops:

Brian got there at six-thirty-five. But he had called me from the field in North Kansas City well before the deadline. I was waiting for him in my living-room with both children... and with Sergeant Rick of the Argus Patrol and Mrs Barnes, the Patrol's office manager, who doubled as matron. It had not been a pleasant wait; both rent-a-cops had been forced to demonstrate that they were tougher than teenage children and would brook no nonsense.

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 I - 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?

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 seance 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 pubhc.'

‘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 non liquid 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 for 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 eve 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 further 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?'