Warren Murphy: The Sky is Falling

Look at Thomas Fdison, who, when he had failed in ninety-nine different ways to make a light bulb, said he had not failed. He had really discovered ninety-nine ways not to make a light bulb on his sunny road to success.

Look at General George Patton, who had never let ideas of failure bother him.

Look at Pismo Mellweather, who had produced the cassette tapes. Mellweather was a millionaire many times over, even though he'd been told as a child he would never amount to much. Teachers had even called him a swindler. He had spent time in jail for extortion and embezzlement. But now he had homes in several states because he had dared to face his own self-worth. The key to succeeding was not succumbing to the false notion that you had failed in some way.

Failure, the tape said, was a state of mind just like success. One only had to accept the fact that one was a winner and one would become a winner. Pismo Mellweather had sold three hundred thousand of these cassette programs with the astronomical markup, and had made himself a success for life.

Reemer Bolt had bought one of those programs and had listened to it so many times that at moments of despair he would even hear Pismo Mellweather's voice. And so while he now looked at a field of disaster, by nightfall he was able to see the car experiment not as a failure, but as just another way the miracle device should not be used.

"Reemer," he was told by an assistant, "we blew it."

"Little men blow things. Big men create success from what others call disasters."

"You can't manufacture anything with an electronic part in it," said the assistant. "You can't use the rays here in the world. The world is electronic. Good-bye. Good night. Do you have the employment section of the paper?"

"No," said Bolt, with the gleam of a true believer in his eyes. "We have discovered that we must manufacture nonelectronic products."

Many products were not electronic, the assistant pointed out, but none of them lent themselves to cheaper manufacture by exposure to the unfiltered rays of the sun.

Bolt's leadership kit solved that problem. Its message was that every problem had a solution if only a person unlocked his leadership power through a simple and tried method. One should think about a subject very hard, the tape advised, and then put it out of one's mind and go to sleep. In the morning, the answer would come.

In this hour of trial for Reemer Bolt, he did just that and the answer did come to him in the morning.

An assistant phoned him with a suggestion. Heated sand made glass. Glass was not electronic. Glass was still used. Why not make glass at the source? Undercut the price of even an Oriental laborer.

Thus was conceived the experiment that convinced a nuclear power that it was going to be attacked. The Sahara was chosen because it had the most sand. If the process worked, you only had to send your trucks out to the desert with a glass cutter and haul back the cheapest and perhaps the most perfect glass in the world.

"Why most perfect?" Reemer Bolt was asked.

"I don't know. It sounds good," he said. When the results came in he was so ecstatic he called a meeting of the board to announce an even greater breakthrough. Indeed, the initial survey showed that the glass was perhaps as clear as anything this side of a camera lens. And they had just made several hundred square miles of it. They could produce a million square miles of perfect glass every year. Forever.

"Forever," screamed Bolt in the boardroom of Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts, Inc. And then, in case anyone with a remaining eardrum had not heard him, he yelled again. "Forever."

"Reemer," said the chairman of the board, "what happened to that wonderful car-painting procedure?"

"A minor problem, sir. We are going to wait for that to come to its full fruition. Right now I am going to get us all our money back and then some. Once that is done we'll push ahead with the car-painting process."

Several of the members were puzzled. No one seemed to be agreeing.

"I will tell you why I asked," said the chairman of the board. "While the glass concept is good, by creating several hundred square miles of glass in Egypt you have just ruined the glass market for the next sixty-five years according to my calculations."

"Can we cut the price?"

"If they don't need as much as you have put on the market, you already have. No profit from cheap glass."

"I see," said Bolt. He felt something strange and warm running down his pants leg.

"Reemer, have you just wet your pants?" asked the chairman of the board.

"No," said Bolt with all the enthusiasm of a man who understood his leadership potential. "I have just discovered a way not to go to the bathroom."

It was a night of exhaustion. Delirious, delicious exhaustion, with every passionate nerve aroused and then contented.

That was before Kathy made love to Remo. That was in Hanoi, going from one government office to another. From one military base to another. That was in the dark alleys while a city went mad searching for the killer among them.

Several times the police would have gone right by if Kathy hadn't knocked over something. And then she saw them come against this wonderful, magnificent, perfect human being, and die. Sometimes their bones cracked. Sometimes death was as silent as the far edge of space. Other times, those special times when they came roaring down upon them, the bodies would go one way and the heads would go another.

It was before dawn when Remo said, "It's not here. They don't know where it is."

"That's too bad," said Kathy.

"Then why do you have that silly grin on your face?" asked Remo.

"No reason," purred Kathy. She nestled into his arm. It didn't feel very muscular. "Are you tired?"

"I'm puzzled. These people don't know where the fluorocarbon thing is. They never heard of it."

"That's their problem."

"What else do you remember about it?"

"Just that awful man in San Gauta."

"I dunno," said Remo. They were in a warehouse marked "People's Hospital." It had been labeled that way during the Vietnam war so that when the Americans bombed the warehouses they could be accused of bombing hospitals. The reporters never mentioned that it stored rifles, not wounded.

It still stored weapons, Remo and Kathy saw, but now they were for battles in Cambodia or on the China border.

So much for the peace everyone had predicted if America left.

"Are you ready to move?" asked Remo.

"No. Let's just stay here tonight. You and me." She kissed his ear.

"Are you tired?"

"Yes, very."

"I'll carry you," said Remo.

"I'll walk. How are we going to get out of here? We're white. It's a police state. Are we going to walk out through Indochina? That will take months."

"We'll go out through the airport."

"I know you can get us through any guard, but they'll shoot down any plane you get to. There are no alleys to hide in. It's flat. You might make it somehow, but I'll die," said Kathy. She was still wearing the suit and blouse she had arrived in. The shoulder was ripped, but she felt this only made her sexier. She knew her own deep satisfaction had to be sending out signals to this man, making him desirable as well. After all, hadn't he suddenly taken her here into this warehouse when the killing was over?

"Would you mind if I died?" asked Kathy. She wondered if she were acting like a little girl. She grinned coyly when she said this.

"Sure," said Remo. She was the only one who knew anything about this mysterious device that could end life on earth.

"Do you mean it?" She hated herself for asking that question. She'd never thought she would. She'd never thought she would feel like all the other girls in school had felt, giggly all over, fishing for any little compliment from the man she loved.