“But why,” said Heller, “why all these different corporations and brokerage houses and bank accounts?”

“Now, I am responsible for you. Right?”

“Right,” said Heller.

“If any one of those corporations goes broke, it folds all by itself and it doesn’t do a thing to any other part of the entire consortium. You get it? You can go bankrupt to your heart’s content! You can also sell them for tax losses, buy other corporations with them. You can also hide and vanish profits. Everything.”

“But,” said Heller doubtfully, “I don’t see that so many—”

“Well, I will admit I haven’t told you the real reason.” He leaned over to Heller’s ear. “You told me you had an enemy. Mr. Bury of Swindle and Crouch. He is the most vicious, unprincipled lawyer on Wall Street. With this setup, he will never be able to touch you.”

“Why not?” said Heller.

Izzy leaned much closer and whispered much more quietly, hard to hear above the chatter of the crowd. “Because in every record, neither you nor your name will ever appear in any of this. And anything you are publicly connected with will not feed back into any of this. They are all private companies, all for profit, all controlled by actual stock shares. It is impenetrable!”

He stood back. “There is just one thing more I need your approval on. I didn’t put it on this chart. An art student did it for me at breakfast.”

Tucked in the bottom of the roll was another roll. It opened to a picture about two feet by three. It was a round, black globe. It had a little piece of rope or something sticking out of the top of it. Sparks were flying from the tip.

“What is it?” said Heller.

“It is my proposal for the evolving logo of Multinational! Actually, it is the old symbol of anarchy, a bomb! See the lit fuse?”

“A chemical powder bomb,” said Heller.

“Now, we turn the poster over and we simply see a dark sphere with a wisp of cloud at the top. And that’s what we will put out as the logo but you and I will know what it really is. Now do you approve?”

“Well, yes,” said Heller.

“The chart and the logo?”

“Well, yes,” said Heller.

“I know it is crude and hastily done. I haven’t even filled in many of the names. I think it is very tolerant of you to approve it.”

“What is this?” a newcomer asked Heller. “A work of art?”

“Yes,” said Heller. “A work of art!”

“Well now, let’s roll it up,” said Izzy.

“No,” said several of the crowd at once. One said, “A lot of people haven’t been able to see it. We’ll spread it out on the steps here and people can go up on the parapet there or climb the statue and get a real look.”

Overruled, Heller and Izzy drew back and let them have their way.

“Did you get re-enrolled?” said Heller.

“Oh, yes,” said Izzy. “That’s why I was a little late. While I was doing all this, I got a brand-new idea for a doctorate thesis. And I saw them about it. It’s ‘The Use of Corporations in Undermining Totally the Existing World Order.’”

“And they agree to let you re-enroll and write it?”

“You see, the mistake I was making was getting off into political science and they kept telling me so. My doctorate is in business administration. But this new idea is perfect. It doesn’t contain the word government, it does contain the word corporations. And world order can be interpreted to mean capitalistic finance. So unless some horrible, malignant fate overtakes me from some other quarter, I can get my doctor’s degree at the end of this October.”

“Then you paid your bill,” said Heller.

“Oh, yes. You can have your two hundred advance back.”

“But how… ?”

“Right after I left you yesterday, I went to the Bank of America. I showed them the two hundred which proves I had a job and borrowed five thousand dollars without collateral. I paid off the government loan and have far more left than I really need. I won’t have to sleep in the park — I’m always afraid of being mugged. I can stay in a dorm a couple of nights until we get our offices. And, if you don’t mind, I’ll sleep there when we do.”

I was speechless. How could this ragtag, mucked-up mess of a timid little man walk into a bank and borrow five thousand just by showing them a couple of hundred-dollar bills?

“Now wait a minute,” said Heller, obviously having afterthoughts. “It will take a long, long time to set up all those corporations in Hong Kong and Tahiti and wherever. What do you have in mind as a time schedule?”

“Oh, that is my fault,” said Izzy. “I have been under such a nervous strain lately. I didn’t want to tell you because I was afraid you would balk.”

“So, how long? Two months? A year?”

“Oh, heavens, no! I was shooting for next Tuesday! I thought you would want it Friday but there’s a weekend…”

“Next Tuesday,” said Heller. Then he seemed to rally. “You’re going to need money for all this. So here is ten thousand to start with. Will that be enough?”

“Oh, heavens, yes. Too much, actually. I’ll put it in a locker at the bus station to keep it safe. And then put it in the first bank account. And then, when everything is set, you can put your capital in the various bank accounts and it will get transferred around and start to get to work. Is it too much to ask to meet you here on these steps 4:00 P.M. Tuesday?”

And then I thought I had it. This Izzy was a sly, clever crook. He was going to take all of Heller’s money, deny him any control and leave him broke. I cancelled any idea of interfering with Izzy Epstein! He didn’t even give Heller a receipt!

Izzy got his chart back from the congratulatory crowd. Several even helped him carry it as he went away.

I laughed. Maybe that was the last Heller would ever see of him!

I was quite heartened by the number of potential allies I was picking up in case everything else went wrong with my plans for Heller. Vantagio, Miss Simmons, this Izzy Epstein. I began to keep a list. When Raht and Terb called in, possibly I could greatly embellish my planning.

Heller spent the afternoon doing some more checking on class locations, obviously still trying to figure out how to be in two or three places at once and get tutored at the same time. And then he went around to the other side of what was labelled “Journalism” and found the college bookstore on Broadway.

All day he had been running into people and sticking his nose into professors’ offices and making up a list. He had been using the back side of a computer printout with the staples removed and now had this yard-long sheet with titles and texts and manuals and authors scribbled all over it. He handed it to the girl behind the counter. She was obviously some graduate student doing part-time work to handle the current rush. Pretty, too.

“All this?” she said, adjusting her horn-rimmed glasses. “I can’t read some of this writing. I wish they would teach kids to read and write these days.”

Heller peered over at what she was pointing at. Yikes! He had annotated the list over on the edge with Voltarian shorthand!

My pen was really poised. Oh, I’ve seen Code breaks in my time. Maybe a whore and a tailor wouldn’t know they were dealing with an extraterrestrial but he was in a college area and those people are smart.

“It’s shorthand,” said Heller. “The main titles and authors are in English.”

They were, too. In very neat block print.

“What’s this here?” said the girl, lifting her glasses above her eyes to see better. She was pointing at The Fundamentals of Geometry by Euclid. “We don’t have any books by that author. Is it a new paperback?”

Heller told her she’d have to help him as he didn’t know either. She went to her catalogues and looked up under “Authors.” She couldn’t find it. So she looked in a massive catalogue of alphabetical book titles. Then, cheered on by Heller, she looked up the author in the book titles. “Hey, here it is!” she said. “Euclidian Geometry as Interpreted and Rewritten by Professor Twist from an Adaption by I. M. Tangled.” She went and found a copy. “You wrote here that his name was ‘Euclid’ when it was ‘Euclidian.’ You should learn how to spell.”