'I think it was March or August or something like that, sir.'
'Get me the whole file, please,' he said. Nineteen seventy-five. His year—his real year. Would he have a month? A week? Or—?
'Sign this card, mister,' the girl was saying patiently. 'There's a reading machine, you just go sit there and I'll bring you the spool.'
He scribbled his name and went to the machine, the only one vacant in a row of a dozen. The time on his watch was 11:05. He had fifty minutes.
The girl dawdled over cards at her desk and chatted with a good-looking young page with a stack of books while sweat began to pop from Bern's brow. At last she disappeared into the stacks behind her desk.
Born waited. And waited. And waited. Eleven-ten. Eleven-fifteen.
Eleven-twenty.
An H-bomb would be out of his league.
His ulcer stabbed him as the girl appeared again, daintily carrying a spool of 35-millimeter film between thumb and forefinger, smiling brightly at Born. 'Here we are,' she said, and inserted the spool in the machine and snapped a switch. Nothing happened.
'Oh, darn,' she said. 'The light's out. I told the electrician.'
Born wanted to scream and then to explain, which would have been just as foolish.
'There's a free reader,' she pointed down the line. W. J. Bern's knees tottered as they walked to it. He looked at his watch—11:27. Twenty-eight minutes to go. The ground-glass screen lit up with a shadow of the familiar format; January 1st, 1975. 'You just turn the crank,' she said, and showed him. The shadows spun past on the screen at dizzying speed, and she went back to her desk.
Born cranked the film up to April 1975, the month he had left 91
minutes ago, and to the sixteenth day of April, the very day he had left.
The shadow on the ground glass was the same paper he had seen that morning: synthetics surge to new vienna peak.
Trembling he cranked into a vision of the future; the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975.
Three-inch type screamed: securities crash in global crisis: banks close; clients storm brokerages!
Suddenly he was calm, knowing the future and safe from its blows. He rose from the reader and strode firmly into the marble halls. Everything was all right now. Twenty-six minutes was time enough to get back to the machine. He'd have a jump of several hours on the market; his own money would be safe as houses; he could get his personal clients off the hook.
He got a cab with miraculous ease and rolled straight to the loft building in the West Seventies without hindrance. At 11:50 by his watch he was closing the door of the phone booth in the dusty, musty-smelling lab.
At 11:54 he noticed an abrupt change in the sunlight that filtered through the dirt-streaked windows and stepped calmly out. It was April 16th, 1975, again. Loring was sound asleep beside a gas hotplate on which coffee simmered. W. J. Born turned off the gas and went downstairs softly. Loring was a screwy, insolent, insecure young man, but by his genius he had enabled W. J. Born to harvest his fortune at the golden moment of perfection.
Back in his office he called his floor broker and said firmly: 'Cronin, get this straight. I want you to sell every share of stock and every bond in my personal account immediately, at the market, and to require certified checks in payment.'
Cronin asked forthrightly: 'Chief, have you gone crazy?'
'I have not. Don't waste a moment, and report regularly to me. Get your boys to work. Drop everything else.'
Born had a light, bland lunch sent in and refused to see anybody or take any calls except from the floor broker. Cronin kept reporting that the dumping was going right along, that Mr. Born must be crazy; that the unheard-of demand for certified checks was causing alarm, and finally, at the close, that Mr. Born's wishes were being carried out. Born told him to get the checks to him immediately.
They arrived in an hour, drawn on a dozen New York banks. W. J. Born called in a dozen senior messengers, and dealt out the checks, one bank to a messenger. He told them to withdraw the cash, rent safe-deposit boxes of the necessary sizes in those banks where he did not already have boxes, and deposit the cash.
He then phoned the banks to confirm the weird arrangement. He was on first-name terms with at least one vice president in each bank, which helped enormously.
W. J. Born leaned back, a happy man. Let the smash come. He turned on his flashboard for the first time that day. The New York closing was sharply off. Chicago was worse. San Francisco was shaky —as he watched, the flashing figures on the composite price index at San Francisco began to drop. In five minutes it was a screaming nosedive into the pit. The closing bell stopped it short of catastrophe.
W. J. Born went out to dinner after phoning his wife that he would not be home. He returned to the office and watched a board in one of the outer rooms that carried Tokyo Exchange through the night hours, and congratulated himself as the figures told a tale of panic and rain. The dominoes were toppling, toppling, toppling.
He went to his club for the night and woke early, eating alone in an almost-deserted breakfast room. The ticker in the lobby sputtered a good morning as he drew on his gloves against the chilly April dawn. He stopped to watch. The ticker began spewing a tale of disaster on the great bourses of Europe, and Mr. Born walked to his office. Brokers a-plenty were arriving early, muttering in little crowds in the lobby and elevators.
'What do you make of it, Born?' one of them asked.
'What goes up must come down,' he said. 'I'm safely out.'
'So I hear,' the man told him, with a look that Born decided was envious.
Vienna, Milan, Paris, and London were telling their sorry story on the boards in the customers' rooms. There were a few clients silting up the place already, and the night staff had been busy taking orders by phone for the opening. They all were to sell at the market.
W. J. Born grinned at one of the night men and cracked a rare joke:
'Want to buy a brokerage house, Willard?'
Willard glanced at the board and said: 'No thanks, Mr. Born. But it was nice of you to keep me in mind.'
Most of the staff drifted in early; the sense of crisis was heavy in the air.
Born instructed his staff to do what they could for his personal clients first, and holed up in his office.
The opening bell was the signal for hell to break loose. The tickers never had the ghost of a chance of keeping up with the crash, unquestionably the biggest and steepest in the history of finance. Born got some pleasure out of the fact that his boys' promptness had cut the losses of his personal clients a little. A very important banker called in midmorning to ask Born into a billion-dollar pool that would shore up the market by a show of confidence. Born said no, knowing that no show of confidence would keep Moon Mining and Smelting from opening at 27 on September llth, 1977. The banker hung up abruptly.
Miss Illig asked: 'Do you want to see Mr. Loring? He's here.'
'Send him in.'
Loring was deathly pale, with a copy of the Journal rolled up in his fist.
'I need some money,' he said.
W. J. Born shook his head. 'You see what's going on,' he said. 'Money's tight. I've enjoyed our association, Loring, but I think it's time to end it.
You've had a quarter of a million dollars clear; I make no claims on your process—'
'It's gone,' Loring said hoarsely. 'I haven't paid for the damn equipment—not ten cents on the dollar yet. I've been playing the market. I lost a hundred and fifty thousand on soy futures this morning.
They'll dismantle my stuff and haul it away. I've got to have some money.'
'No!' W. J. Born barked. 'Absolutely not!'
'They'll come with a truck for the generators this afternoon. I stalled them. My stocks kept going up. And now—all I wanted was enough in reserve to keep working. I've got to have money.'
'No,' said Born. 'After all, it's not my fault.'
Loring's ugly face was close to his. 'Isn't it?' he snarled. And he spread out the paper on the desk.
Born read the headline—again—of the Stock Exchange Journal for April 17th, 1975: securities crash in global crisis: banks close; clients storm brokerages! But this time he was not too rushed to read on: 'A world-wide slump in securities has wiped out billions of paper dollars since it started shortly before closing yesterday at the New York Stock Exchange. No end to the catastrophic flood of sell orders is yet in sight.
