The Centauri Conspiracy Page 4

Chapter Two

  An offer

  Multi-billionaire Harry Zeed OpDyke sits struggling with a persistent cough and studying a large ten-foot square wall full of three large computer screen displays. The last screen on the right displays his yearly statement of worth in billions. The numbers at the bottom of the last line says 327 before the first comma. Old with a pallid complexion, bald except for a small closely trimmed white hair-ring, and frail Harry OpDyke is not in good health. In fact, Harry OpDyke has been dying for years. Only half a dozen heart replacement operations have kept him alive beyond his normal years. The last operation for a third mechanical assist unit almost four years ago gave him no more than two to five years more.

  Surprised that Harry OpDyke had lived through his last mechanical assist operation the head surgeon told him with shaking head, “No more.”

  Quickly, Harry turns his old baldhead toward the opening door. His gaunt face is thin, wrinkled, lined, pallid, and blotched with brown age spots on each temple. Brown spots tell of advanced liver disease beside heart problems.

  A short narrow-bodied middle-aged man with thinning hair and thick glasses enters. Not even the best eye surgeons can correct a few unusual stigmatisms or let those that have these problems wear contact lenses. The clerk steps inside the OpDyke office, pauses a moment, holds open the door for someone, and waits until his employer nods his head before announcing the visitor. After receiving a nod, the secretary makes his announcement.

  "Mr. OpDyke. Mr. Bakman is here."

  "Thank you, Wray."

  After being announced, Bakman steps past a turning to leave secretary. He is dressed in the same green clothes arrested in more than eight months ago, but less badly wrinkled thanks to a windy hover ride. Walking forward to meet his probation officer straight and tall of carriage as if he wears freshly pressed and expensive clothing, but Duncan Gulihur Bakman knows that his wrinkled ones even brand new were never the most expensive tunic and jacket that money could buy.

  Walking across the spacious OpDyke office Bakman thinks that one could hold a meeting of forty people in it and not have to remove the desk. Carrying himself as if he is a most important person, a V.I.P., not a convicted felon going to meet his parole officer, Duncan Bakman strides rapidly across the office, glances around, and arcs past an artificial plant stand to head toward a lone empty chair in front of a massive black desk. Beside the empty chair Bakman stops and stands expecting an invitation to sit.

  Instead, the old man, his parole officer, says in a loud angry sarcastic voice, "Welcome felon. Duncan Gulihur Bakman, a well-known felon, and known to his friends as 'Duffy,' or 'Duff!' According to court records the man before me is a liar, a cheat, a thief, and a state informer. This Felon has embezzled, fleeced, filched, misappropriated, and purloined monies of others. Our police have arrested and incarcerated Mister Duffy Bakman. This felon before me did plead guilty; our courts have fined and sentenced him. This felon standing here is not free to travel and must live in this building. If he breaks any conditions of his probation before the next ten months is ended, his original five year sentence will be finished in a New Dallas prison cell."

  During this blast, Duffy Bakman's face darkens in anger and shame. His back goes ramrod straight again. Regardless of the consequences Bakman turns toward the door and strides back across the large spacious office. While walking away, Duncan Bakman hears a buzzer dimly sound in the outer room.

  Wray opens the door. Harry OpDyke’s secretary stands in the open doorway with a small silver tray in his right hand.

  "He's also a coward and runs away," Harry OpDyke yells loudly behind Duffy Bakman’s retreating back. Just before an angry Duncan Bakman makes the doorway, his parole officer Harry OpDyke speaks in a loud voice without his sarcastic tone. "Acting is over, Duffy. Tear up your million-dollar check on the way out, or pick it up, and come on back."

  A surprised and confused Duffy Bakman looks down at the check on the silver tray, twists his head to be able to read “D.G. Duffy Bakman . . . New Dallas World Bank . . . One Million Dollars.”

  His brown eyes studies the check for a moment to make sure it is real with a puzzled frown. Bakman’s fingers lift the check from the tray, inspects it front and back, decides it might be real, and carrying the check in his right hand returns to stand before Harry OpDyke’s desk again.

  "Sit," Harry OpDyke orders as his secretary Wray closes the door.

  With an angry flush still on his face Duffy Bakman sits and waits for the other shoe to drop. Puzzled over the check he sits wondering if he has fallen from the frying pan into the fire.

  "Had to see how you would act when pressed? I don't know how you managed to get yourself hired as cover-man for that bunch of thieves. They have run three other good men down the road to destruction. All three men ended up in prison instead of them. You were to be their fourth. Duffy, I enjoyed watching you give them theirs."

  Slowly the anger leaves Duffy Bakman's face, but shows no sign of being willing to cooperate or answer any questions.

  "I paid your fine so we could have this talk; you can keep the check for a year's work. No strings." Harry presses a button. Wray enters again with a folder that he hands to his boss, Mister Harry OpDyke, and leaves.

  "I’ve had every bypass, mechanical assist, and heart replacement operation known to medical science. They have replaced and repaired the valves in my last heart three times, and finally four years ago I had surgery for a last new mechanical assist. The doctors told me then I had from two to five years. I’m dying. For the last three and half years I've been selling off things, converting to cash, and looking for someone." Harry pauses to catch his breath and to gauge Duffy Bakman's reaction, but sees none so he continues.

  "On the screen the front number is 327 billion and change. After I give 200 billion to the government tomorrow to build a new Mars spaceship to haul colonists, I'll have a hundred and twenty-seven billion left on paper the government thinks. I’ve a little more hidden away. Everyone thinks that I've been selling my holdings to collect cash to start an OpDyke Foundation before I die. For years they expect my foundation to do some good work with the interest on my money and keep my name going forever. What do you think about a foundation?"

  "Not much."

  "Me neither."

  That unusual answer from a rich man shocked Duffy; his blank expression changed to a small puzzling frown. His eyes start for the first time to study the thin and frail old man and the wall's three computer screens listing wealth totals with renewed interest.

  Harry OpDyke looks through the folder and takes out a piece of paper. He bends to touch a panel again and a plan of the OpDyke Building plan flashes on the screen.

  "The highest causeway in our area is the Twenty-fifth level. I live on the 28th floor. The 27th has among other things a barbershop, restaurant, tailor, a gym, and medical services. You, all our other management people, and I use the 27th floor. No money, no charge, contractors all bill me. You will live on the 26th floor."

  Harry stops and looks at Duffy for a moment, studies him, and finally continues again. This time there is a trace of a small grin and glint of devilment in his old eyes.

  "Are you interested in five tax-free billion?"

  "Who do I kill? What do you want stolen?"

  Harry OpDyke's pasty face grins openly without humor. "It may come to that. I wanted you because of how you reacted when you found out that bunch of crooks did not want you to cleanup their corporation like they told you. When you realized what they wanted was for you to go to prison for them, you did not try to get out from under, push it off on someone else, or slip away. You took them all down with you and did not try to dodge any responsibility you might have had. No special deal or whining for legal forgiveness in return for testimony. You looked the law straight in the eye and told the truth. I liked that . . . or else attitude. That's why I paid your three million dollar fine and why you're here."

  Looking at Harry, Duffy Bakman wonders what he got into th
is time. He waits hoping it was better that his last gamble.

  "I'm seldom wrong about people. You're the one I've been searching for these last five years. I had about given up. If you agree to my proposal, I'm going to make you first a visionary, then a fool, and finally a crook hated world-wide with five tax-free billion in a secret Alps Mountain bank investment numbered account drawing three percent. The operation will take I hope no more than three or four years?"

  For a moment Harry OpDyke studies Duffy Bakman's reaction before adding, "Interested?"

  "It's better than what I had planned. I had hoped to find some kind of a job to pay the rent and be able to eat at least once a day. Five billion's a convincing argument."

  "That book on the small table beside your chair. Open it to page 233."

  Quick fingers lift and open an old fashioned maroon hard cover paper volume entitled The History of New England to page 233. In the center of the second paragraph Duffy sees a set of numbers inserted with double commas into a long sentence.

  "See those numbers in the middle of the page? That is the number to an account worth five billion dollars. Your name is on the front and back inside covers. Don't lose that book without memorizing those numbers."

  Duffy Bakman nods his understanding.

  "Now, down to cases . . . are you familiar with the Cargill Report?"

  "I think that's about space . . . space travel."

  A brief summary of the Cargill Report appears on the center screen when Harry OpDyke touches a small screen-panel in front of him again. "Doctor Jemin Glen Cargill told us that the only way a human being will ever get to a planet in another solar system will be with faster more powerful engines. Humans cannot get there without greater speed. Cargill says that we must use nuclear power to cross the void, avoid the danger of radiation, avoid the dangers of long weightlessness with artificial gravity, develop a system to raise enough food even in the void, reprocess all water, carry enough air, and that the trip could take as long as two or three generations, eighty or a hundred or more years. In conclusion, Doctor Cargill believes long distant space travel it is not now possible, lists in detail thirty-seven health and forty-nine supply problems to overcome, and concludes with a statement that after these problems are solved another even longer list awaits. Doctor Cargill believes it will take new inventions before it is possible."

  "Is he right?"

  "Everyone with a half a brain thinks so."

  "I don't understand."

  "Duffy Bakman, I want you to put together a group of ten well-known scientists, a ten million-dollar group, to produce a different answer."

  "If you already know that answer, why spend the money?"

  "Twenty-two years ago in a New Dallas Science Think Tank Report Meryl Lewis Runk thought the only way it ever would be possible was to freeze human eggs and sperm, send them into space where the cold of space would help keep them frozen and be an aid not a hindrance, and when the spacecraft gets close to a distant earth-type planet a sensor turns on heaters and there create embryos. Meryl Runk said we have to send along an artificial womb and mechanicals. Using this system, speed will not be as important and almost all the other problems vanish except those in planetary orbit. While the spaceship obits the distant planet, children can be born using the technique illegal cloning labs are using today. These children will mature from twelve to fifteen years in a safe environment before shuttling down to the planet below.”

  Harry pauses a moment to see how Duffy takes all of this and gives him a chance to ask a question. Could not see any change and did not hear a question so he starts again.

  “For a month or more people talked about the Runk Report. All screens were a buzz with it until Meryl Runk had a nervous breakdown from all the media and scientific groups pressuring him. After that, his idea was easily passed off as the work of a crazy man."

  "You want me to find Meryl Runk?"

  "Meryl died thirteen years ago in a hospital mental ward."

  "I don't understand."

  "Duffy, I want you to put together a group of scientists that will take Meryl's idea and modernize it. Develop the practicality of it. Make it look as if with today's knowledge it is finally workable."

  "What then?"

  "Release a free Bakman Report to agencies, governments, and the public."

  "They will talk again, argue, and do nothing."

  "Yes. They will talk and do nothing. When the people that own the talking heads on Informational networks decide against it, their talking heads will in time gradually make the people against it. Just look at what these brutally cruel owners of talking heads have done during the last fifty years to destroy worthwhile government programs, continue no longer needed or wasteful ones, and ruin reputations of decent and honorable leaders they have not liked. In our Republic these few control the voter mob—not good ideas."

  "After they get done arguing and rejecting the idea, Mister OpDyke, what have you gained?"

  "Mister Duncan Bakman will look like a thinker to the public after the Bakman Report—not a crook. Just when the public is busy discussing it, you will open a series of Old West Clubs. These will slowly make you a public joke. While they laugh, you will be working quietly to put the Bakman plan into action. Duffy, people never see any harm in a silly fool, especially one with a gift of gab."

  "What do you get out of this Mister OpDyke?"

  "Call me Harry."

  "What's in it for you . . . Harry?"

  "Immortality."

  "What?" A shocked Duffy Bakman blurts out. He had expected a dozen possible reasons, but not this one.

  "When it is done humans will stand on new planets in other solar systems. Humans will look on a different star as their sun. Your name and mine will be known through all the ages by everyone on this world and three others. Several cultures and religions I could name believe that you live as long as people talk about you or remember your name. In those cultures Socrates, Alexander, Pythagoras, Caesar, Newton, Washington, Thomas Edison, and Einstein to name just a few still live. If what we do is successful, governments will do it again the OpDyke-Bakman way, spread people to planets in other solar systems, and even more worlds after that. And then, our names will be known forever on even more worlds filled with human beings. Physically I cannot live forever, but I plan for my name to live forever . . . my question to you today is does Duffy Bakman want that too. Do you too want immortality?"

  Duncan Bakman just stared at Harry. His face went blank, lost color, and Duffy just gawked at the old man as if he had suddenly sprouted three violet-fleshed heads and broken out in hideous pink blotches and green warts. His mind was in a whirl. At first thinking the old man's loony, and in that confused mist OpDyke’s strange idea settles in to Harry may have something. Finally, to Duffy Bakman’s shock and surprise his mind and mouth agreed on an answer.

  Bakman blurted out, "Okay. I'll do it."

  "Done," a grinning Harry OpDyke tells him as the buzzer sounds again out in the outer office and Wray carries in a thick folder.

  Wray takes out a document, hands it to Mr. OpDyke who looks briefly at it, nods and hands it back. The secretary places two copies of that document on top of the folder with a new photo-light pen, so new Duffy had only heard two waiting lawyers in the New Dallas Jail corridor talking about them. Wray held it in front of Duffy Bakman.

  "Sign it!" orders Harry OpDyke.

  Writing his name on both copies where Wray points Duffy is surprised twice when an image of his face appears on the page to the left of his signature. It was the first he had seen of the new Light Imaging Pen created to end forgeries.

  Mr. Harry OpDyke tells a light-headed Duffy Bakman, "That makes us partners in Old West establishments. We will figure out what they will be later. Three hundred places scattered around this continent and another hundred scattered around the rest of the world."

  Staring at the document he had just signed Duffy was shocked that it read:

  One billion dollars will be in
vested in the Old West Clubs to be jointly operated by the partners Duncan Gulihur Bakman and Harry Zeed OpDyke.

  With only 128 dollars and eighteen cents, minus the cost of the trip here, on his plastic card in his pocket he, Duncan Bakman, signed it. Now, he was a full partner in a new billion dollar joint-venture. That too put his head in a new whirl.

  In his confusion, Duffy Bakman signs all of the other papers that Wray lays on top without looking at any, not attempting to read what he signs. On each signing his image’s appearance on the document to the left of his signature and surprises him. Only after Duncan Bakman signs all nine duplicate copies does he look up again.

  Only then did Harry OpDyke speak again. "I want you to think about this and settle in. Wray will show you to the elevator. I’m tired. We'll talk more tomorrow." His old frail hand motions Duffy away.

  Rising in a fog of confusion Duncan Gulihur “Duffy” Bakman clutches his million dollar check, a folder of his copies of signed documents, and five-billion dollar book to follow Wray toward the office door and out to the elevator. Seeing his condition Wray steps inside, pushes the elevator panel numbers directing it up to the 26th floor, and quickly steps out before the door closes.