Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - The Sirens of Titan

The intellectual mountain had labored to produce a philosophical mouse - and Fern was the first to admit that it was a mouse, and a mangy mouse at that. As Fern expressed the philosophy conversationally, in its simplest terms:

"You go up to a man, and you say, 'How are things going, Joe?' And he says, 'Oh, fine, fine - couldn't be better.' And you look into his eyes, and you see things really couldn't be much worse. When you get right down to it, everybody's having a perfectly lousy time of it, and I mean everybody. And the hell of it is, nothing seems to help much."

This philosophy did not sadden him. It did not make him brood.

It made him heartlessly watchful.

It helped in business, too - for it let Fern assume automatically that the other fellow was far weaker and. far more bored than he seemed.

Sometimes, too, people with strong stomachs, found Fern's murmured asides funny.

His situation, working for Noel Constant and then Malachi, conspired nicely to make almost anything he might say bitterly funny - for he was superior to Constant pére and fils in every respect but one, and the respect excepted was the only one that really mattered. The Constants - ignorant, vulgar, and brash - had copious quantities of dumb luck.

Or had had up to now.

Malachi Constant had still to get it through his head that his luck was gone - every bit of it. He had still to get it through his head, despite the hideous news Fern had given him on the telephone.

"Gee," said Constant ingenuously, "the more I look at this furniture, the more I like it. This stuff should sell like hotcakes." There was something pathetic and repellent about Malachi Constant's talking business. It had been the same with his father. Old Noel Constant had never known anything about business, and neither had his son - and what little charm the Constants had evaporated the instant they pretended that their successes depended on their knowing their elbows from third base.

There was something obscene about a billionaire's being optimistic and aggressive and cunning.

"If you ask me," said Constant, "that was a pretty sound investment - a company that makes furniture like this."

"United Hotcake preferred," said Fern. United Hotcake preferred was a favorite joke of his. Whenever people came to him, begging for investment advice that would double their money in six weeks, he advised them gravely to invest in this fictitious stock. Some people actually tried to follow his advice.

"Sitting on an American Levitation couch is harder than standing up in a birchbark canoe," said Fern dryly. "Throw yourself into one of these so-called chairs, and it will bounce you off the wall like a stone Out of a slingshot. Sit on the edge of your desk, and it will waltz you around the room like a Wright brother at Kitty Hawk."

Constant touched his desk ever so lightly. It shuddered nervously.

"Well - they still haven't got all of the bugs out of it, that's all," said Constant.

"Truer words were never spoken," said Fern.

Constant now made a plea that he had never had to make before. "A guy is entitled to a mistake now and then," he said.

"Now and then?" said Fern, raising his eyebrows. "For three months you have made nothing but wrong decisions, and you've done what I would have said was impossible. You've succeeded in more than wiping out the results of almost forty years of inspired guessing."

Ransom K. Fern took a pencil from the air and broke it in two. "Magnum Opus is no more. You and I are the last two people in the building. Everyone else has been paid off and sent home."

He bowed and moved toward the door. "The switchboard has been arranged so that all incoming calls will come directly to your desk here. And when you leave, Mr. Constant, sir, remember to turn out the lights and lock the front door."

A history of Magnum Opus, Inc., is perhaps in order at this point.

Magnum Opus began as an idea in the head of a Yankee traveling salesman of copper-bottomed cookware. That Yankee was Noel Constant, a native of New Bedford, Massachusetts. He was the father of Malachi.

The father of Noel, in turn, was Sylvanus Constant, a loom fixer in the New Bedford Mills of the Nattaweena Division of the Grand Republic Woolen Company. He was an anarchist, though he never got into any trouble about it, except with his wife.

The family could trace its line back through an illegitimacy to Benjamin Constant, who was a tribune under Napoleon from 1799 to 1801, and a lover of Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne de Stael-Holstein, wife of the then Swedish ambassador to France.

One night in Los Angeles, at any rate, Noel Constant got it into his head to become a speculator. He was thirty-nine at the time, single, physically and morally unattractive, and a business failure. The idea of becoming a speculator came to him as he sat all alone on a narrow bed in Room 223 of the Wilburhampton Hotel.

The most valuable corporate structure ever to be owned by one man could not have had humbler headquarters in the beginning. Room 223 of the Wilburhampton was eleven feet long and eight feet wide, and had neither telephone nor desk.

What it did have was a bed, a three-drawer dresser, old newspapers lining the drawers, and, in the bottom drawer, a Gideon Bible. The newspaper page that lined the middle drawer was a page of stock-market quotations from fourteen years before.

There is a riddle about a man who is locked in a room with nothing but a bed and a calendar, and the question is: How does he survive?

The answer is: He eats dates from the calendar and drinks water from the springs of the bed.

This comes very close to describing the genesis of Magnum Opus. The materials with which Noel Constant built his fortune were hardly more nourishing in themselves than calendar dates and bedsprings.

Magnum Opus was built with a pen, a check book, some check-sized Government envelopes, a Gideon Bible, and a bank balance of eight thousand, two hundred and twelve dollars.

The bank balance was Noel Constant's share in the estate of his anarchist father. The estate had consisted principally of Government bonds.

And Noel Constant had an investment program. It was simplicity itself. The Bible would be his investment counselor.

There are those who have concluded, after studying Noel Constant's investment pattern, that he was either a genius or had a superb system of industrial spies.

He invariably picked the stock market's most brilliant performers days or hours before their performances began. In twelve months, rarely leaving Room 223 in the Wilburhampton Hotel, he increased his fortune to a million and a quarter.

Noel Constant did it without genius and without spies.

His system was so idiotically simple that some people can't understand it, no matter how often it is explained. The people who can't understand it are people who have to believe, for their own peace of mind, that tremendous wealth can be produced only by tremendous cleverness.

This was Noel Constant's system:

He took the Gideon Bible that was in his room, and he started with the first sentence in Genesis,

The first sentence in Genesis, as some people may know, is: "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." Noel Constant wrote the sentence in capital letters, put periods between the letters, divided the letters into pairs, rendering the sentence as follows: "I.N., T.H., E.B., E.G., I.N., N.I., N.G., G.O., D.C., R.E., A.T., E.D., T.H., E.H., E.A., V.E., N.A., N.D., T.H., E.E., A.R., T.H."

And then he looked for corporations with those initials, and bought shares in them. His rule at the beginning was that he would own shares in only one corporation at a time, would invest his whole nest-egg in it, and would sell the instant the value of his shares had doubled.