The holo, in its second stage, hog-tied Karl with his hands behind him
and his hands and feet together and him writhing helpless. Then Emily came
back with a fourth apple and jammed it in Karl's mouth. Yeah, he was the
trussed pig with the apple in his mouth, and Emily's triumph was complete.
But this did not put Karl's spirits down at all. Rather it elevated
them, and now he acquired a special affection for this Emily Vortex.
Karl made fortunes in the stock market and on the various money
exchanges.
"There are a lot of empty places in the money shuffle and they're just
crying out to be filled up," Karl said. Then he explained how he did it all:
"Inerrant prediction is the key," he said. "But faulty prediction is
worse than none at all. You must know where you are, have a stable axis, for
accurate prediction. The gyroscope is the best of all prediction
himself a gyroscope, then he has all the predictions by their gyrating
instruments since it is the only one with a stable axis. But if a person is
tails."
This is the explanation of how he made fortunes in the money markets?
Well, Karl did have what can only be called a high rate of rotation in all his
activities, and in that sense he was a gyroscope. He was even called Lord
Gyroscope by some of his fellow inmates in the progressive institution. This
was from a take-off done on him in one of the gridiron entertainments at the
institution.
"Are we going to have a crisis in energy sources around here?" Emily
Vortex asked Karl Riproar one day. "I come from an older family than you do in
this hyperactivity business and I know where to draw energy from. But is there
enough for both of us? Are you hogging it? If there will only be enough for
one of us, then I know which one it will be. Myself."
"I hog it a little bit, Emily," Karl said, "but there will be enough for
us both until it is time for us to leave here. And for the time after than, I
have plans. See my plans." And he showed her his prospectus of things to come
in this area.
"Not bad for starters," Emily Vortex said. "Give them to me. I'll work
theii~ over and see if something really good can't be made out of them."
2.
When he came to his fifteenth birthday and was officially of age, Karl
Riproar did a number of quick things.
He funded and founded the "Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex Simultaneous
Arts Institution and Perpetual Memorial". He ordered construction to begin on
it that very day.
He declared himself to be "Ultra-Departmental Director" of the city,
using a little-known emergency provision by which he put the previous
ultra-departmental director under citizen's arrest and replaced him.
He founded the "Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex Sky's the Limit
Speculation and Enjoyrnent Enterprises" which survives even to this day.
He married Emily Vortex.
Let us not have an inaccuracy creep into this account. He didn't marry
her that day. It was the following day that they got married. Emily was one
day younger than Karl and did not come of age till the following day. But
their marrying was part of the number of quick things that they effected as
soon as they could.
Karl legally changed his name to 'Lord Torpedo Lord Gyroscope'. But on a
practical basis he would still go by the name of Karl Riproar.
He founded the "Imperial Compressed Music Company".
He bought the land for the "Pleasant Meadows Home Development Project".
He had construction on the homes begin at once, and also on his own manor
house and gardens which would occupy the central portion of that area.
He gathered in funds from a number of annuities that he had set up to
mature when he was fifteen years old. He shuffled those funds. He increased
them amazingly. The money for their increase had to come from somewhere.
Really it was a toll levied on all the money markets of the country. But it
was one of those tricks that are done only once.
Anything else?
No, those were the main projects of Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex. They
were set up then, and all working pieces were working. They could play endless
and trick variations with these projects, but the basics were there from this
first establishment.
So Karl Riproar waxed in years and size and strength and mentality and
activity and angular velocity and momentum.
To describe the simultaneous developments and achievements and pleasures
of Karl Riproar and Emily Vortex would require a talent for simultaneity equal
to their own. So we will describe the course of Karl mostly. Their courses ran
roughly parallel, but we understand Karl's better. Besides, we're scared of
Emily. She's weird.
Karl Riproar, the boy and man who was so much in a hurry that he had to
do as many as a dozen things at once, he now entered a timeless realm and
regime in which there was no pressure at all but in which more things happened
in more momentous and more massive fashion than ever before.
"This is like Heaven," Karl said one day.
"Not quite," said the usually more accurate Emily. "I calculate that the
number of contacts in Heaven is two and a half times what we're experiencing, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]