“I would like a beer,” Regnad Daghammarskjold said. “Do you have any?”
“I don’t know,” Dragnie replied.
“You might,” the pirate said. “Look around. Check your premises, Dragnie.”
“Let me tell you something about beer,” Sanfrancisco De Soto said, his eyes blazing. Thirty-five minutes later, when he had concluded his discourse on the history, morality, and metaphysics of beer, Dragnie signaled for Pierre to bring three bottles. She handed them around. Each of the visitors gave her a ten-dollar bill. There was no need for anyone to thank anyone for anything. “I won’t insult you by offering you food,” Glatt said. “You are all perfectly capable of obtaining your own sustenance.”
“I know it,” Regnad said.
The group settled in the living room and Hunk Rawbone opened the discussion. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, John,” he said. “But Goa has fallen.”
“I didn’t know it,” Glatt said. “Goa be damned!”
“That’s the last one,” Sanfrancisco added. “Now every nation on earth has become a People’s State of the People.”
“Every nation—save one,” Dragnie murmured. “The United States.”
“Shall I tell you what the product safety boys are saying?” Rawbone asked out loud. “They’re saying that the People’s States’re complaining that our manufactured goods’re dangerous. They’re talking about an embargo.”
“Then we must meet with Mr. Jenkins,” Dragnie said. “We should also alert the boys in the Pentagon, our nation’s most brilliant scientist boys, and our leading achiever-boys in industry, research, and engineering.”
“This is serious, isn’t it, John?” Regnad said with unflinching directness.
“Yes,” Glatt replied.”
The three visitors had gone, and Dragnie and Glatt were preparing for bed, when Glatt mentioned their earlier topic of conversation. Standing in their elegant bedroom, clad in the simplest of pajamas whose clean design, quiet sense of style, and always-tasteful pizzazz made a striking statement of individuality wherever he went, he said, “You were telling me about an extraordinary young man you met today.”
Dragnie suppressed a smile of amusement. “It’s of no importance,” she said, and only afterwards, while falling asleep, did she ask herself if that were really true.
Chapter 3
The Veracity of Truth
Dragnie stood up from her austere, stoical desk, as if announcing to the world with a single decisive gesture that she had completed the work she had sat at it in order to accomplish. She allowed herself a brief chuckle of amusement at her achievement, followed by a contemptuous chuckle of mockery at the amused contemptuousness with which she regarded her own chuckling mockery, which was so amusing.
Tagbord Rail’s Southwest Division was expanding to her satisfaction. The augmented schedule of the Chimichanga Line in Arizona, linking to the Tamale-Caliente Line in New Mexico, would take some of the pressure off the trunk lines of the Enchiladas Suizas Line in Texas. The entire region was doing well. The economy of the Southwest had shown steady growth in the past ten years, as if that area’s system of production and trade among men had been a human being, eating right and staying fit and as a consequence becoming larger.
In fact, the economy of the entire U.S. had undergone a similar expansion over the same period, although not before what came to be called The Great Takeover. Until then, the government, controlled by Mr. Thomas and a small cadre of corrupt and physically-unattractive bureaucrats, had sought to maximize its power and safeguard its incompetence and mediocrity with laws mandating “fairness.”
No one was allowed to produce anything new. No one was allowed to use anything old. No one was allowed to accept a new job or quit their current job. No one was allowed to be a genius. No one was allowed to have fun or have nice things or go anywhere or do anything or go out or see their friends or anything.
John Glatt’s response to this state of affairs was to persuade society’s achievers to withdraw from humanity and hide in a valley in Wyoming. As many as twenty important tycoons abandoned their companies. Some even destroyed their factories, refineries, and warehouses with dynamite and fire, miraculously without injury or loss of life to anyone of importance. What had transpired then was what always happens when a corporation’s founder retires or dies: the companies went out of business. All that remained of the country’s economy ground to a halt.
Then Glatt hijacked the radio waves and made a three-hour speech about his view of the world, and the government—as governments invariably do, after being denounced in long, philosophical lectures—surrendered. The boys in Washington pleaded with Glatt to restore order. Mr. Thomas, convening a formal committee including such cowardly lapdogs and obsequious pontificating high-ups as Jason Bellybutton, the supposed economist; Dr. Cyrus Pussyface, the prevaricating expert; Professor Jones, the world-renowned person; and Secretary of Union Greed Mumph Slimetrail, importuned Glatt to take the reins of the economy and rescue it from disaster. Glatt refused. The government attempted to coerce him into cooperating but that, too, failed. Finally, it abdicated, and Glatt led his courageous, principled team of businessmen and classical music composers and actresses out of Glatt’s Gorge and back into the world.
Their first actions were swift and decisive. They fired Mr. Thomas and replaced him with the impotent puppet Mr. Jenkins. They then nullified every undemocratically-imposed edict and authoritarian-enforced regulation of the past twenty years, and supplanted them with rules supporting individual achievement. They repealed the Everybody Be Nice Act and replaced it with the Leave Business Alone Directive. They cancelled the Nobody Gets to Have More Than Anybody Else Act and instituted the Finders Keepers Losers Weepers Ruling. They reversed the If You Don’t Have Enough to Share With The Rest of the Class Then You Can Leave Those Cupcakes With Me And Collect Them At The End of The Day edict and, in its place, promulgated the This Is My Fudgesickle Go Get Your Own Law.
The results were immediate and profound. Everywhere, in every industry, millionaires went back to work. Useless regulators and corrupt bureaucrats committed mass suicide, publicly begged for forgiveness, or found themselves simply shot on sight. Labor unions, openly acknowledging the superior wisdom and unfailing justice of the marketplace, voluntarily disbanded after first publishing, in newspapers throughout the land, full-page advertisements apologizing to management for any inconvenience they had caused for the past one hundred years. Reality, as properly defined, resumed.
But now, Dragnie mused to her own private self as she began to walk toward her office door, a new enemy of freedom loomed: the consolidation of the People’s States of the People, whose cancerous collectivist malignancy had now spread to every nation on earth—save one.
“Miss Tagbord? A delivery for you.”
Miss Smith, her loyal and obedient secretary, stood in the doorway, an expression of open admiration obscured, on the face of her head, by an immense bouquet of vivid, luxuriant magenta orchids in a handsome cut-glass vase created by one of the city’s top vase designers. Dragnie suppressed a small smile at the inadvertent double meaning of the secretary’s announcement. The notion that she would ever take part in “a delivery,” and from the sacred and inviolable sanctity of her body’s individuality, bring forth another human being whose helplessness and weakness would subject her—at least according to society’s superstitious tribal standards—to years of unremunerated toil and slavish subservience, was literally inconceivable to the mentality of her mind.
A standard business card sat in a small clip amid the heavy, flesh-like blooms. She plucked it out and, as Miss Smith placed the vase on her desk in an attractive orientation, Dragnie read the meticulously hand-written message: