Patron of the Arts

really know how much it is. You really only care when it isn’t there. Money is a burden, a responsibility, and just occasionally, a joy.

I bring up the matter of my wealth merely to provide a frame of reference. It is well known that I am one of the world’s five hundred wealthiest men. It is not so well known that I am one of the world’s most frustrated artists. The presstats often run features on me, tied in with some unorthodox venture, and one of their favorite cliches is “The Man With the Midas Touch.” This is an oversimplification that I find annoying. They seem to think that all it takes to make money is money. But many a millionaire has been reduced to trust income by making the wrong decisions too many times. Many a minor investor has risen by a series of right decisions at the right times. The sensation press likes to refer to these meteoric rises as a run of luck, a fortunate throw of the dice. Luck does play a part in any venture when not all the factors are known. My modestly endowed archeological team digging at the Martian ruins near Bradbury was “lucky” enough to discover the treasure that has come to be called the Royal Jewels of Ares, although no scientific proof exists that they are in any way royal, or even if a Martian royalty existed. It is this kind of luck that keeps me in the eye of the presstats, the darling of Uninews, and the target for more get-rich-quick schemes than you would believe.

Every man with even a one-star credit rating is a mark for swindlers, cheats, ambitious women, and the tax man. Every rich man learns to protect his treasure with information, suspicion, wit, force, research, guile, early warning systems, intelligence, and, often, ruthlessness. When you become what the press services have dubbed the super-rich you are the automatic magnet for countless secret dossiers, plans, lusts, schemes, hatreds, and envy. You are shot at just because you are rich. You are insulted, seduced, ignored, catered to, and charged extra—not because of you, but simply because you have money.

But, all in all, it is better to be rich than poor, and it is better to be super-rich than just rich, because it lets you do things few other people can do. For one thing, it gives you some degree of privacy. In a world bulging with eight billion people, and more on the way, real privacy is almost impossible except to the very rich and the incurably insane. Being rich, I have been able to indulge myself shamelessly in those two things I deem most important: art and women.

It was when I went to Mars that everything changed.

I didn’t need to go to Mars. Several chairmen of several boards begged me not to, when I mentioned it as a possibility. At least a dozen women saw it as a hopeless tragedy, not because of any great personal concern or love, but because it would thwart the timing of certain ventures they had in mind for me. My friends, who knew me, shrugged and wished me luck, but I don’t think any of them really expected me to actually go. Few men of my status had ever even considered it seriously. I had no pressing business on Mars, I just wanted to go. But being the locus of hundreds of lines of power and responsibility makes you a hostage to your own money, and to those who depended upon the stability of my “empire.” The only way I could go was to sneak away, and that wasn’t easy. I knew that even my own security guards might consider it a higher loyalty, since my life might be in danger, to prevent me from going by leaking the news. Certainly all my company presidents and most of my stockholders considered it unnecessary that I endanger myself. If I went, they went, and I don’t mean to Mars.

But the adventure of going beyond the Moon excited me. It always had, but somehow I had just never had the time before. Or made the time. When I was a small boy I saw for the first time a recording of the landing at Touchdown and I had never forgotten the feeling of excitement. Through the crackle and pop I heard that corny but stirring line, “Today Mars, tomorrow the stars!”

My preoccupation with the fourth planet had lead me to invest heavily in almost anything Martian, although my natural caution kept me away from some of the more fraudulent schemes, such as the Martian Estates, the Secret Knowledge Foundation, the Deimos affair, and the ludicrous “Canal Dust” panaceas. It was my Martian Explorations teams that discovered the ancient ruins at Burroughs and Wells, and explored the huge Nix Olympica cone. I must admit it was I who suggested to Mizaki and Villareal, and later to the Tannberg group, that they utilize the names that had so intrigued and delighted us all in our youth. Yet it was really not me, but my money that spoke. All I might expect is a paragraph in art history, like one of the Borgias, or a pope. I was merely the patron of such sensatron artists as Cilento, Caruthers, and Willoughby. It was my money that assisted the creation of Vardi’s gardens, Eklundy’s Martian Symphony # 1, and Darrin’s massive Rocky Mountain sculptures. It was not I who had created those works of art. I was no more than a laser operator hanging from a Mt. Elbert cliff or a cement finisher working under Vardi’s glare. I provided the brick and electrodes and fusion power. I knew that what any artist really needs is the time and material to do what he must do, the appreciation of someone willing to pay for it, and, most importantly, the freedom to be able to. And that was what I supplied.

Now I wanted the freedom to do something for myself, and going to the Red Planet was it.

The more I thought of going, the more I desired to do so. I was also somewhat impelled by being once again in the news, the result of a retrospective exhibition at the Landau Gallery of Michael Cilento’s works. The mystery of his disappearance was dramatic enough to insure another round of publicity and I was being enmeshed again. It was simply the time to go.

No passports were needed for Mars. The traffic was not all that heavy, and the Chinese, Russian, and American bases are far enough apart so that there was no real friction. All the trip took was reasonable health and an incredible amount of money. Sending Eklundy to stand on the lip of Nix Olympica and to sleep in the Grand Hall had cost over a million Swiss francs, but we received his symphony in return, plus the recent Icemountain Concerto, and others that would come. To let Powell walk the rugged John Carter Range had cost even more, but I had thought it well worth while.

I could not simply buy a ticket and go, however. Even after the trip had been reduced from seven months to one month, and had become much less of a dramatic affair, people such as myself would receive far too much publicity. I realize this is supposed to be a free world, freer and more democratic than any in history, but some people are freer than others. I was not one of them. There were those who would raise such a fuss that there would be vibrations down all those lines of power, all through that giant financial and industrial net. There would be fear, breakages, shiftings of power, and even, possibly, deaths. When Jean-Michel Voss thoughtlessly disappeared for a mere eight days, cuddled into a SensoryTrip with a girl of each race and a Memorex-Ten, the rumor that he was dead spread out from Beirut, across Syria and Turkey, and caused the collapse of the shaky Bajazet government, the sabotage of the Karabuk steel