When the younger man had gone, Amschel sighed and said, 'Our Jerry Auburn is considerably different than I remember his father.' He smiled slightly. 'Perhaps it is the generation gap, after all. I was Fredric Auburn's contemporary. Jerry seems a bit precipitous. I wince at his confrontation with the Graf's representative.' He turned his eyes from the retreating Jerry and brought them back to Lee. 'I imagine everyone is asking you what you think of the World Club.'
'Well, yes,' she told him carefully. 'My first reaction is that the Central Committee's plans seem to be somewhat premature, though I support them. Is the world ready for a universal government?'
'Ready or not,' he said with a touch of resignation in his voice, 'it is the only answer. Today, the world is on the precipice of disaster. What is the old Britishism? The chickens have come home to roost. The slowly developing problems of the past three centuries have now reached a head.'
Lee demurred. 'Oh, come now, the world is comparatively dormant at present. There are no real immediate crises. We haven't known a major war within the lives of anyone now living.'
He shook a thin finger at her. 'My dear, it is astonishing how quickly matters can develop when conditions are ripe. Consider the spring of 1914 when everything seemed stable. The Kaiser was securely on his throne, Franz Joseph of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on his, the Sultan ruled the powerful Ottoman Empire, and the Czar of all the Russias had recently celebrated the 300th anniversary of Romanoff rule. Five years later, there was no major monarchy in Europe save England, and capitalism itself had collapsed in Russia, the largest nation of the world. No, my dear, comparatively overnight, world institutions can radically alter, given the right, or perhaps I should say the wrong, conditions.'
She took a full lower lip between perfect white teeth. Then, 'And you think such conditions exist today?'
'Yes.' He looked about. 'Come, my dear, let us find a place to sit down. My friend Fong Hui tells me you are an interesting young woman. Frankly, I was sorry to see Pamela McGivern leave, but if it was necessary at least we seem to have found a competent replacement. Would you like me to fill your glass?'
'No,' she said. 'No, I have plenty.' She followed him to a fifteenth-century couch set against one of the large chamber's walls. When they were seated she said, 'And what do you foresee in the nature of this new World State? What kind of government will it be? I get the impression that there is considerable difference on this among Central Committee members.'
He conceded the validity of that. 'Yes, there is. Some of us wish to continue the type of democracy that now prevails in the United States of the Americas.'
She sipped again at her wine, frowning slightly. 'You advocate a two-party democracy with both of the parties controlled by a power elite?'
He smiled his little dry smile again. 'Yes. I am a product of my class and my age. My class owns the so-called Western world. 1 believe that they should govern it. Benevolently, of course, and maintaining all the liberties that man has achieved. Perhaps half of the Central Committee and even more of the candidate members concur.'
'And the ordinary citizens, including the proles: they are still to have the vote?'
'Yes, of course, my dear. Why not? It keeps them happy to think that they have the ultimate say. Every four years we put up two candidates and let them take their pick. What could be more democratic than that? You must realize that even at the height of the Empire, the Roman proletariat had the vote. They usually sold it to the highest bidder, of course, but they had it. The proles, my dear, we shall always have with us. They are the masses who labor at the undesirable jobs when labor is needed, or fight as common soldiers in times of war. They are the nonentities. The world has passed them by. A typical example is the peons of Latin America, now assimilated into the United States of the Americas. Uneducated, untrained, they were pushed from a burro society into one of electronic computers. They won't adjust, nor will their children. Like the Roman proletariat, they must simply be fed and otherwise taken care of by the state, as cheaply and efficiently as possible, and forgotten about.'
'But there are exceptions among them. There surely are many exceptions.'
'Of course, and they must be found and encouraged. Thomas Edison was born in poverty and had only about three years of grammar school. But he was a genius. Andrew Carnegie came to America as an immigrant and fought his way upward into the highest ranks of the powerful. Oh yes, there are many exceptions. The ancestor of Harrington Chase who founded the Chase fortune was an oilfield worker in Texas.'
Lee shook her head and put her empty glass down on a small table beside the couch. 'I had always thought the
World Club to be composed largely of economists whose research was supported by wealthy philanthropists.'
The international banker was obviously amused. 'Don't exaggerate the contributions of economists, my dear. They are highly overrated compared to us, the pragmatic. If there was ever a group to which the question, 'If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?' applies, it is the economists. Economics aren't as complicated as all that but the economists tny-thologize the subject. There are exceptions, but most of them go through life as second-raters— teaching, writing books that few read and even fewer understand, or selling their services to governments or the powerful. They make their way with gobbledy-gook terminology, but practically never do they get rich. Even a five- percent advantage on knowing what way the stock market was going to go would make them wealthy, but they simply don't know. Karl Marx himself, that analyzer of the capitalist system, lived and died in poverty. Did you ever hear of a Rockefeller, a Dupont, a Getty, or any other founder of the great American fortunes, who was an economist?'
Lee's smile was inverted. 'I am afraid that you are making a cynic of me, Mr. Amschel.'
The smile he returned was thin. 'I hope not, my dear. You are far too charming to succumb to cynicism. However, take as an example the monetary crisis of the last century. Every economist in the world was working on the problem of the collapse of international money. There was not enough gold or any other precious metal in the world to back the needed mediums of exchange. All nations, particularly your United States, simply began printing paper money, which had no value since it represented nothing. Inflation was rampant. Inflation, of course, is not a matter of prices going up, but of the value of money going down. The United States, with a two trillion dollar a year economy, faced disaster because it had issued perhaps four hundred billion dollars' worth of paper without backing. Did the economists solve the problem? No. It was solved by an obscure speculative writer.'
'I didn't know that!'
'Oh, yes. He proposed that the government, in taxing the two hundred top corporations of the United States, take ten percent of the taxes in the form of their common stock. This was amalgamated into what was called United States Basic
Common, a sort of gigantic mutual fund. Its shares, of course, paid dividends based on the combined dividends of the corporations. The stock was placed on every stock exchange of the world to seek its level. Each year, the government added its new common stock, taken in the form of taxes, to its U. S. Basic Common. Anyone who had dollars could turn them in for Basic Common. In short, the money of the United States, now called pseudo-dollars since there was no gold behind them, was now backed by the American economy.' The banker made a little snort. 'It wasn't long before all other developed nations followed the lead. The world now has valid currencies.'
Halfway across the room, Jerry Auburn was interrupted on his way to seeing Peter Windsor.
Harrington Chase, his inevitable glass of bourbon and branch water in hand, waved him down. The American tycoon was a stereotype of the cattleman or oil entrepreneur who had flourished in the old Southwest. He differed little if at all from his progenitors. A Henry Ford or a Joe Kennedy might have come from rough-and-ready, tough- and-tight-eyed schools, but in two generations their descendants were attending Ivy League universities and had become ladies and gentlemen who conducted themselves as aristocrats—America's new nobility. But not the Chases! Harrington Chase's fief was a ranch enveloping two large counties overlapping in Texas and Oklahoma, larger than the areas of several northeastern states. Big and ruddy of face, his bulk no longer called for his riding his famed Palominos, but he usually still affected riding boots. And a king-sized cigar, even when police were in the vicinity, was always in his mouth. He also, Jerry knew, invariably ordered steak and potatoes, in the most celebrated restaurants, with apple pie and ice cream for dessert.
With Chase, as usual at a Central Committee session, was his closest associate, John Warfield Moyer, for some twenty years Director of the IABI. A square-cut man in his late fifties, Moyer, with his bulldog face, shaggy brows, and cold, accusing eyes, looked every inch what he was: a high-ranking police officer. In his case, the highest ranking in the world.
Chase said, with an overriding joviality, 'Hold on, Jerry, old-timer.''
