Warburton looked momentarily confused. Then he shrugged it off.
"I spoke to some of your colleagues at the university, and it seems you're not that interested in money. You already have your full professorship. So it's a problem, since everybody I ask about finding the top man in the country concerning the physics of time immediately tells me it's Matthew Wright. No second place."
"Then you do have a problem," Matt said.
"I am prepared to offer you your own private lab with a research budget of ten million dollars yearly. No more faculty committees to satisfy, no pressure to publish, no agenda, no hindrance at all to exploring in any direction you choose. After you've addressed the job we're hiring you for, of course."
"I already have most of that," Matt said. "And the project would be...?"
"As I said on the phone, I can't tell you that until you've signed a secrecy agreement. This would be in effect whether or not you took the job. We are prepared to pay you one hundred thousand dollars simply to go with me this afternoon and examine certain artifacts that have come into the possession of the company I work for. Then you take the job or you don't take it; the hundred grand is yours either way."
Matt was going to take the job. He had known he would take it from the moment he hooked his jacket, before Warburton's helicopter even landed. But there was no sense jumping the gun, nor in giving up his negotiating advantage.
"We're not talking about the Company, are we? As in the Central Intelligence—"
"No, I can tell you that much. It's a private company."
"And what did you say the salary would be?" He laughed at the expression on Warburton's face. "Who told you I don't need money, anyway? Everybody needs money. That's why they call it money."
"I believe it was Professor Wellburn."
"Of course. Old Wellybelly has hated me since I got the Hawking Chair. I'd like a salary of... two million dollars a year."
Warburton, who had been authorized to offer another ten million, tried to look as if the demand was a bitter pill to swallow. After a suitable time frowning, he nodded.
"Done. I have a man aboard who will pack up your gear and drive your—" "Don't bother with the gear," Matt said. "If I kept it I'd only be tempted to try fishing again."
FROM "LITTLE FUZZY, A CHILD OF THE ICE AGE"
Temba had first come into season two years before that long dry summer, many thousands of years ago.
Though mammoths and elephants are very much like us in many ways, they are different in other ways.
Mammoth and elephant females become sexually mature about the same time that human females do. But human females are fertile once a month, and elephants and mammoths are only fertile once a year. With elephants that is usually in December or January. We are not completely sure when mammoths came into "season," or as scientists call it, estrus, but we think it was in the summer.
The two summers before that, Temba had watched as the male Columbian mammoths joined the herd and started looking for mates.
Another way humans are different from elephants and mammoths is that during mating season male elephants and mammoths go through something called musth. No other animals that we know of do this. During musth a male elephant gets very cranky, like human females sometimes do when they are having their menstrual period. He will tear up trees and go charging about angrily and attack anything that comes near him. You do not want to get in the way of a bull elephant during musth!
Poor Temba.
She smelled the bull elephants and she wanted to mate with them. But she was at the bottom of the pecking order, and so every time a bull in musth approached her she was shoved rudely aside by one of her older cousins or aunts. She could only watch through two summers as the mature bulls passed her by.
But this summer it would be different.
7
HOWARD Christian stood in the Eagle's Eye at the 140th-floor level of the Los Angeles Resurrection Tower and looked out over the city and saw that it was good.
Christian had conceived the tower as a memorial to the atrocities of September 11, 2001. He had architects design a tower 150 stories high. It was four-sided and square, like the destroyed World Trade Center, but there the resemblance ended. Christian had always felt the original buildings were too boxy. The architects had solved this by making the walls swoop out of the ground in what mathematicians called an asymptotic curve, one that approached a limiting vertical line but would never reach it.
Those who predicted opposition from politicians and city planners had underestimated the determination of Howard Christian, and the Power of money. With a combination of backroom horse trading, numerous quids pro quo, bullying, public relation blitzes, and a lot of old-fashioned bribery, minds were changed, including the important minds that held the power of a yea or nay over the project.
What finally sold it was the stainless steel eagle that perched on the tower's top. Taller than the Statue of Liberty, the eagle's baleful gaze turned continuously, covering all quadrants of the compass hourly, a fearsome bird of prey ever vigilant to find and punish America's enemies. At night, two multimillion-candlepower searchlights beamed from the golden eyes. The tower had weathered the most recent 6.2 quake with only a few cracked windows.
Unfortunately, the tower had never been more than 70 percent full. Even this many years after 9/11, there were many people who would not enter a skyscraper at all. The images of catastrophe were too vivid.
So the Resurrection Tower was a money-loser for Howard Christian. It ate up almost a quarter of a billion dollars of his cash each year. Howard didn't mind. At that rate, to misquote Charles Foster Kane, he'd be broke in... 140 years.
Howard Christian was different from most multibillionaires in many respects, and a big one was this: he bought things. Most members of that very small club that never had meetings and mostly couldn't stand one another were content to husband their vast holdings of stock, and if they bought something, it was probably another corporation. What they did, mostly, was to move money around. Money in motion generates more money, as surely as one of Newton's laws.
Christian didn't much care for money movement, for banking, for the stock market. He had bought companies in his time, naturally he had his bankers, and he owned a great deal of stock, but none of that was his main interest.
He liked real estate, he liked building things on his property, just like the Monopoly games he had played as a child. He liked research and development, spent upwards of three billion dollars a year on projects most accountants would estimate as unlikely to return much profit. More often than not, they were wrong. His own fortune came from blue-sky research, and he never forgot it. He had, in fact, made two huge fortunes, though the second triumph wouldn't have been possible without the infusion of vast amounts of money from the first fortune.
Infusion. He liked that. The source of his first fortune was discoveries and patents he held in the field of nanotechnology, specifically in the design and assembly of the kind of molecular transistors currently to be found in the CPUs of almost every computer on the planet, and in outer space, too. He had done the research for these devices in a tiny laboratory, funded with only a few hundred thousand in grant money.
But now that all that was done, now that he had revolutionized technology twice, and on a scale no one had equaled since Edison, Howard Christian devoted most of his time to his twin passions: show business and collecting.
He had the means to be a second Hearst, pillaging the world's museums for great art, but he had tried it and found it unsatisfying. He enjoyed some of the old masters of the Renaissance, but most of their work was not for sale or came onto the market so infrequently you could grow old waiting to have a crack at a particular Rembrandt or Titian. He was puzzled by the impressionists, and baffled by everything since then. What was he supposed to do? Hang an ugly mess by Pollock in his office and then stand and stare at it, wondering why anybody spent six dollars on crap like that, much less a million, and feeling like a fool? Pretend he really liked some stupid scrawl by Picasso? He owned quite an extensive collection of original Norman Rockwells, a single Monet that he found pleasant to look at, hanging behind his desk, and that was the extent of his fine art collection.