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Authors: Joe Haldeman
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this one will add to the list.
* In the real world it’s against the law to take something that somebody else is trying to sell. But since John Brunner already adapted Dos Passos’s technique in his powerful novels
Stand on Zanzibar
(Doubleday, 1968) and
The Sheep Look Up
(Harper & Row, 1972), I guess my crime is the receiving of stolen goods rather than kleptomania.
1. 13 October 1975
Shark Key is a few hundred feet of sand and scrub between two slightly larger islands in the Florida Keys: population, one.
Not even one person actually lives there—perhaps the name has not been attractive to real estate developers—but there is a locked garage, a dock and a mailbox fronting on US 1. The man who owns this bit of sand—dock, box, and carport—lives about a mile out in the Gulf of Mexico and has an assistant who picks up the mail every morning, and gets groceries and other things.
Howard Knopf Ramo is this sole “resident” of Shark Key, and he has many assistants besides the delivery boy. Two of them have doctorates in an interesting specialty, of which more later. One is a helicopter pilot, one ran a lathe under odd conditions, one is a youngish ex-Colonel (West Point, 1960), one was a contract killer for the Mafia, five are doing legitimate research into the nature of gravity, several dozen are dullish clerks and technicians, and one, not living with the rest off Shark Key, is a U.S. Senatorwho does not represent Florida but nevertheless does look out for the interests of Howard Knopf Ramo. The researchers and the delivery boy are the only ones in Ramo’s employ whose income he reports to the IRS, and he only reports one-tenth at that. All the other gentlemen and ladies also receive ten-times-generous salaries, but they are all legally dead, so the IRS has no right to their money, and it goes straight to anonymously numbered Swiss accounts without attrition by governmental gabelle.
Ramo paid out little more than one million dollars in salaries and bribes last year; he considered it a sound investment of less than one-fourth of one per cent of his total worth.
2. 7 May 1955
Our story began, well, many places with many people. But one pivotal person and place was 17-year-old Ronald Day, then going to high school in sleepy Winter Park, Florida.
Ronald wanted to join the Army, but he didn’t want to just
join
the Army. He had to be an officer, and he wanted to be an Academy man.
His father had served gallantly in WWII and in Korea until an AP mine in Ch’unch’on (Operation “Ripper”) forced him to retire. At that time he had had for two days a battlefield commission, and he was to find that the difference between NCO’s retirement and officer’s retirement would be the difference between a marginal life and a comfortable one, subsequent to the shattering of his leg. Neither father nor son blamed the Army for having sent the senior Day marching through a muddy mine field, 1955 being what it was, and neither thought the military life was anything but the berries. More berries for the officers, of course, and the most for West Pointers.
The only problem was that Ronald was, in the jargon of another trade, a “chronic underachiever.” He had many fascinating hobbies and skills and an IQ of 180, but he was barely passing in high school, and so had little hope for an appointment. Until Howard Knopf Ramo came into his life.
That spring afternoon, Ramo demonstrated to father and son that he had the best interests of the United States at heart, and that he had a great deal of money (nearly a hundred million dollars even then), and that he knew something rather embarassing about senior Day, and that in exchange for certain reasonable considerations he would get Ronald a place in West Point, class of 1960.
Not too unpredictably, Ronald’s intelligence blossomed in the straitjacket discipline at the Point. He majored in physics, that having been part of the deal, and took his commission and degree—with high
* In the real world it’s against the law to take something that somebody else is trying to sell. But since John Brunner already adapted Dos Passos’s technique in his powerful novels
Stand on Zanzibar
(Doubleday, 1968) and
The Sheep Look Up
(Harper & Row, 1972), I guess my crime is the receiving of stolen goods rather than kleptomania.
1. 13 October 1975
Shark Key is a few hundred feet of sand and scrub between two slightly larger islands in the Florida Keys: population, one.
Not even one person actually lives there—perhaps the name has not been attractive to real estate developers—but there is a locked garage, a dock and a mailbox fronting on US 1. The man who owns this bit of sand—dock, box, and carport—lives about a mile out in the Gulf of Mexico and has an assistant who picks up the mail every morning, and gets groceries and other things.
Howard Knopf Ramo is this sole “resident” of Shark Key, and he has many assistants besides the delivery boy. Two of them have doctorates in an interesting specialty, of which more later. One is a helicopter pilot, one ran a lathe under odd conditions, one is a youngish ex-Colonel (West Point, 1960), one was a contract killer for the Mafia, five are doing legitimate research into the nature of gravity, several dozen are dullish clerks and technicians, and one, not living with the rest off Shark Key, is a U.S. Senatorwho does not represent Florida but nevertheless does look out for the interests of Howard Knopf Ramo. The researchers and the delivery boy are the only ones in Ramo’s employ whose income he reports to the IRS, and he only reports one-tenth at that. All the other gentlemen and ladies also receive ten-times-generous salaries, but they are all legally dead, so the IRS has no right to their money, and it goes straight to anonymously numbered Swiss accounts without attrition by governmental gabelle.
Ramo paid out little more than one million dollars in salaries and bribes last year; he considered it a sound investment of less than one-fourth of one per cent of his total worth.
2. 7 May 1955
Our story began, well, many places with many people. But one pivotal person and place was 17-year-old Ronald Day, then going to high school in sleepy Winter Park, Florida.
Ronald wanted to join the Army, but he didn’t want to just
join
the Army. He had to be an officer, and he wanted to be an Academy man.
His father had served gallantly in WWII and in Korea until an AP mine in Ch’unch’on (Operation “Ripper”) forced him to retire. At that time he had had for two days a battlefield commission, and he was to find that the difference between NCO’s retirement and officer’s retirement would be the difference between a marginal life and a comfortable one, subsequent to the shattering of his leg. Neither father nor son blamed the Army for having sent the senior Day marching through a muddy mine field, 1955 being what it was, and neither thought the military life was anything but the berries. More berries for the officers, of course, and the most for West Pointers.
The only problem was that Ronald was, in the jargon of another trade, a “chronic underachiever.” He had many fascinating hobbies and skills and an IQ of 180, but he was barely passing in high school, and so had little hope for an appointment. Until Howard Knopf Ramo came into his life.
That spring afternoon, Ramo demonstrated to father and son that he had the best interests of the United States at heart, and that he had a great deal of money (nearly a hundred million dollars even then), and that he knew something rather embarassing about senior Day, and that in exchange for certain reasonable considerations he would get Ronald a place in West Point, class of 1960.
Not too unpredictably, Ronald’s intelligence blossomed in the straitjacket discipline at the Point. He majored in physics, that having been part of the deal, and took his commission and degree—with high
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