And of course after I left GBSI Number 521 that year for my extended wanderjahr before declaring my major and minor passions, I fell in with a variety of older people who politely resisted the impulse to joke about my name.
Except when they didn’t.
But that’s just the Geek Way, anyplace you go.
Still, I wasn’t about to change Moritz to something else. Family pride, and all that. Would’ve killed my mother, who had worked hard with my Pop (and alone after his death) to make the family business a success. Moritz Cosplay was known worldwide for its staging of large-scale (ten thousand players and up) recreational scenarios, everything from US Civil War to Barsoom to Fruits Basket, and Mom—Helena Moritz—regarded our surname as a valuable trademark, to be proudly displayed at all times, for maximum publicity value.
Not that I was part of the firm any longer—not since five years ago, when I had told Mom, with much trepidation, that I was leaving for a different trade.
Mom was in her office, solido-conferencing with the head of some big hotel chain and negotiating for better rates for her clients, when I finally got up the courage to inform her of my decision. I waited till she flicked off the solido, and then said, “Mom, I’m switching jobs.”
She looked at me coolly with that gesture familiar from my childhood, as if she were peering over the rims of her reading glasses. But she hadn’t worn eyeglasses since 1963, when she had gotten laser-eye surgery to correct her far-sightedness. Then out the glasses went, faster than Clark Kent had gotten rid of his in Action Comics #2036. (But Lois Lang still didn’t recognize Clark as Superman, since Clark grew a moustache at the same time, which was really a very small shapeshifting organism, a cousin of Proty’s, who could attach and detach from the Kryptonian’s upper lip at will to help preserve Supe’s secret identity.)
Anyway, I had made my decision and announcement and wasn’t about to quail under a little parental glare.
“What’re you planning on doing?” Mom asked.
“I’ve just gotten my NC license. I’ve been studying in secret for the past six months.”
“You? A nick carter? Max, I respect your intelligence highly, but it’s just not the Sherlock-Holmes-Father-Brown-Lincoln-Powell variety. You had trouble finding clean socks in your sock drawer until you were ten.”
“I aced the exam.”
Mom looked slightly impressed, but still had an objection or two. “What about the physical angle? You’re hardly a slan in the strength department. What if you get mixed up with some roughnecks?”
“Roughnecks? Shazam, Mom! What century are you living in? There hasn’t been any real prevalence of ‘roughnecks’ in the general population since before I was born. At GBSI Five-twenty-one, one of the patternmasters spent half a day trying to explain what a ‘bully’ was. The incidence of sociopathic violence and aggressive behaviour has been dropping at a rate of 1.5 percent ever since President Hearst’s first term—and that was nearly three-quarters-of-a-century ago.”
“Still, the world isn’t perfect yet. There’s bad people out there who wouldn’t hesitate—”
“Mom, I also got my concealed weapons licence.”
Mom had a technical interest in weapons, after hosting so many SCA tournaments and live-action RPG events. “Really? What did you train on?”
“Nothing fancy. Just a standard blaster.”
I didn’t tell Mom that I had picked a blaster because on wide-angle setting the geyser of charged particles from the mini-cyclotron in the gun’s handle totally compensated for my lack of aiming abilities. But I suspected she knew anyhow.
Mom got up from her chair and gave me a big hug. “Well, all right, Max, if this is really what you’ve got your heart set on. Just go out there and uphold the Moritz name.”
So that’s how, on August 16, 1970 (Hugo Gernsback’s eighty-sixth birthday, by coincidence; I recall watching the national celebration via public spy-ray), I moved out of the family home and hung up my shingle in a cheap office on McCay Street in Centropolis.
Now, five years later, after a somewhat slow start, I had a flourishing little business, mostly in the area of thwarting industrial espionage.
All Mom’s fears about me getting into danger had failed to come true.
Until the morning Polly Jean Hornbine walked through the door.
Business was slow that day. I had just unexpectedly solved a case for ERB Industries faster than I had anticipated. (The employee dropping spoilers on the ansible-net about ERBI’s new line of Tarzan toys had been a drone in the shipping department.) So I had no new work immediately lined up.
I was sitting in my office, reading the latest copy of Global Heritage magazine. I had always been interested in history, but didn’t have much Copious Spare Time these days to indulge in any deep reading. So the light-and-glossy coverage of GH provided a fast-food substitute.
I skipped past the guest editorial, a topical poem written by Global Data Manager Gene McCarthy himself. Where he found the time to churn out all these poems while shepherding the daily affairs of billions of people around the planet, I had no idea. Everyone else, myself included, bright and ambitious as one might be, looked like a lazy underachiever next to our GDM.
Beyond the editorial, the first article was a seventy-fifth anniversary retrospective on President Hearst’s first term of office, 1901–1905. Even though the material was mostly familiar, it made for a lively, almost unbelievable story: the story of a personal transformation so intense that it had completely remade, first, one man’s life, and then the collective life of the whole world.
Few people recalled that William Randolph Hearst had been a money-grubbing, war-mongering, unscrupulous newspaper publisher in the year 1898. A less likely person to become a pacifist politician and reformer would be hard to imagine. But there was a key in the rusty heart of the man, a key that would soon be turned.
And that key was Hearst’s son.
In 1879, at age twenty-six, Hearst had been vacationing in England. There, through mutual friends, he met a poor but beautiful woman named Edith Nesbit, aged twenty-one. The American and the Englishwoman fell in love and married. The couple returned to America. The next year saw the birth of their son, George Randolph Hearst.
In 1898, spurred on by his father’s jingoist rhetoric, the teenaged boy enlisted in the Army and went off to Cuba to fight in the very conflict his father was so ardently promoting, the Spanish-American War.
And there young George Randolph Hearst died, most miserably, on the point of a bayonet and subsequent peritonitis.
The death of their son first shattered, then galvanized William and Edith. Recanting all his past beliefs, Hearst vowed on his son’s grave to use all his skills and resources to bring an end to armed conflict on the planet. A titanic task. But he would be aided immensely by Edith. Her hitherto undisclosed writing talents and keen political sensibilities were brought to their joint cause.
In early 1899, Hearst and Edith formed the US branch of the Fabian Society, based on the parent UK organization that Edith had ties to. Backed by his media empire, Hearst ran a feverish, spendthrift campaign for the Presidency of the United States under that banner, and indeed defeated both McKinley and Bryan.
And that’s when Hearst started changing the world—
My robot annunciator interrupted my downtime reading then. “Chum Moritz, you have a client in the reception room.”
I swung my feet off my desk, and checked my appearance in a mirror hanging on the back of the door to reception.