Quent Cordair
A Prelude to Pleasure
First published by The Atlantean Press, 1991.
- Page 1 of 6
- Next Page
Garrett Brace was soaring seven miles above the earth, flying faster than sound. When the snowcapped Rockies came sharply into focus, he pulled the wheel back with one finger, pushed the throttle in with another and sent his plane climbing toward a wall of dark thunderclouds. The white machine sliced neatly through them and shot out into an empty blue sky, where below there was only a carpet of cottony clouds, stretching away to the distant horizon.
"Okay, Pete, she's yours," he said to the pilot beside him. "According to the weather reports, it should be smooth sailing from here to New York." But he sat for a moment longer, letting his hands rest on the controls until he felt the cool metal warm to the heat of his touch. He smiled: it was a fine plane, the best that money could buy.
Pete had been watching him. "Garrett, you should have been a pilot yourself—but back during World War I. I keep seeing you in goggles, scarf and leather jacket."
Garrett chuckled softly. He was a deep, quiet man with dark wavy hair; his eyes were always thinking, often laughing.
"Okay, Pete, she's yours," he said.
He relinquished the controls and was stepping through the door to the cabin when he hesitated, trying to place the woman who sat by the window reading a magazine. The cushions seemed made to fit the body beneath her loosefitting clothes; her smooth, exquisite face was remarkably void of a distinguishing characteristic.
"Oh...hello, Celeste," he said after a moment. "You look comfortable."
"I am, darling, thank you. Can I get you a drink?...or is there anything else I can do for you?"
"No...no, I have work to do," Garrett answered, his mouth holding the smile.
"Of course, dear. I'll be right here."
Garrett walked past her and sat down at his desk, where he remained motionless, trying not to think. There was a faint brown ring on the otherwise spotless surface. As he traced it with his finger, the smile faded. The stain was from his last cup of coffee. He rubbed it without effect. The ring itself was too minor a detail to bother him—he knew that—but the only thing he could associate it with was the ring in his pocket; he could feel the sharp edge of the stone against his leg. There was nothing about that ring which could possibly cause concern: he had spent five years making sure of it.
He sighed and pressed a switch on the desk, and his shoulders relaxed as the soft hum of the computer joined the quiet whine of the jet engines. He adjusted the monitors in front of him; his fingers, finding the keyboard, began tapping out an intricate rhythm. Screens full of graphs, charts, and columns of figures appeared, merged, changed and disappeared on command. Every detail was a vital statistic of a business concern somewhere on the earth below. Garrett Brace was in his element. He soon forgot Celeste Warren and the ring.
An hour later, he was studying a bill for repairs to drilling equipment on a Texas oil field, when he stopped: the price of o-rings had gone up again. He glared at the coffee stain. But maybe it wasn't the ring part that bothered him...could it be the coffee? He couldn't remember any recent economic or political changes in the coffee-exporting countries that might affect one of his shipping lines; no crop-threatening hurricane brewed; there had been no significant change in the supply or demand. But if it wasn't the coffee, and it wasn't the ring...it was the stain!
He struck two keys—the oil company disappeared—and with three keys more he summoned the file of a small New Jersey chemical company. He had reviewed it only the day before, finding nothing abnormal, but now he quickly narrowed his focus to the minutes of the last board meeting, and to the briefing by the head of the research department. He found what he was looking for. Without moving his eyes from the screen, he smashed a button on the desk.
"Kelly!..." There was no answer. "Kelly?..." He remembered it was Saturday—his secretary wasn't working. Throwing open the desk drawer, he scattered the contents, grabbed a notebook and leafed furiously through the pages. He stopped his finger on a number and punched it into the keyboard.
A little girl's voice answered shyly, "Hello?"
"Cindy? May I speak with your father, please?"
"Daddy's not home right now. He's at work, making something very special...but Mommy's here. Do you want to—"
"No thanks, honey." Garrett disconnected, cursed, and found the number for the research lab at J & G Chemical. No one answered there. He stayed on the line, waiting, using the time to examine the cold, raw fear that had risen into his chest and seeped down into his legs. Its seed had been the slight irritation at the coffee stain. He knew the progression well.
"Hello?" came a voice over the phone.
"Dr. Kilgor?"
"Mr. Brace! A pleasure to hear from you, sir. What can I do for you?"
You just did it—Garrett thought, breathing a sigh of relief. "Tell me about that wood-stain formula you're working on," he said.
"How did you know...? Oh yes, I suppose you would. Well, as I mentioned in my report, I think we can cut the cost of producing our stain in half by—"
"I read all of that. Give me the formulas and equations."
The scientist did and concluded: "I'll have it ready for testing in about an hour, Mr. Brace. Do you want me to call you back with the result?"
"That wouldn't be necessary, Dr. Kilgor. I could probably hear it from here."
"What?"
"Eighteen years ago your predecessor was trying the same thing and, fortunately, stepped out of the lab for a cup of coffee. Take a look at the west wall and the adjacent quarter of the south one. See the difference from the others?...Of course, rebuilding the walls was the least expense—I shudder at the thought of having to replace that equipment we installed last year—and besides, it might take me more than a day or two to replace you, Steve."
"Christ! I was about to...if you hadn't..." the voice dropped away and there was a moment of silence. "Thanks, Garrett."
"Just be sure to have the details on your new plastic worked out by the end of the month. I have a research firm in Concord working on a biotechnological application for it, and I'm upgrading the systems at three manufacturing plants to accommodate it as soon as it's ready. So do me a favor—stay in one piece long enough to finish it, okay?...By the way, how's the baby?"
"Growing so fast I can't keep clothes on him! I'm going to have to invent a material that will grow with him...but later—I've got work to do." There was a smile in the scientist's voice.
"Good to hear it, Dr. Kilgor. Have a good weekend."
"You too, Mr. Brace."
Garrett spent another hour studying companies and subsidiaries. He had owned several of them nearly twenty years, two had been acquired only four days ago, but none received more or less attention than the others: each had to be maintained, nurtured, and made to grow. When he touched the keyboard, his nerve endings leaped out to the corners of his empire, sensing every nut and bolt, of every beam and pipe, of every factory, warehouse, office and store. As the plane shifted its course, a band of warm sunlight fell across the owner's chest.
Turning to the financial and political news, he found nothing that required action. There was a tingling at the back of his neck; the lines of his body pulled taut as he leaned forward in the chair: it was time for his favorite work.
Five localities had been carefully selected for the day's hunt. He began with a small city in Kentucky, methodically scanning the headlines and articles of the local news services. A store opening, a corporate merger, a hole in a market, a new product—anything might trigger that little—he hadn't found a name for it, but the sensation was the opposite and complement of the one he had felt at the coffee stain—it was a little nudge, a whispered hint of possibility, a tiny prelude to pleasure. Usually, as he followed the lead, the trail would disappear as more data removed the end from further consideration. But sometimes...
He searched on, moving to the second city, then to the third. The daily hunts had been unsuccessful for three weeks now, and once again there was much worth noting, but nothing of immediate value, nothing that he could act on or that might—
There.
Tucked away in the "Entertainment" section of the Phoenix Sun Times, a two-paragraph article reported that a local toy store was launching a small fleet of trucks. The mobile playroom-stores would make scheduled visits to the surrounding neighborhoods and would travel to any home immediately upon a parent's request. Garrett smiled.
He jumped to the reference files and found the current financial report on Dream Toys of Phoenix. Their bottom line was low, very low, but starting to climb. Garrett pulled the sum of his knowledge into a white-hot focus and brought it to bear upon the available facts...which gradually revealed—potential. There was a tingling, numb pleasure in his wrists and palms. Monday morning, he would find the owner, make him an irresistible offer—and buy another company.
Garrett leaned back in the chair, and looked out at the cold blue sky and the endless stretch of clouds. He had made an immense fortune doing just what he was doing now, what he most loved to do. His eyes fell on the wing's sharp metal edge and followed it through the window to the clean, efficient lines of the cabin. The joy of another small victory was building within him and begging for the release of a champagne cork and the crowning ecstasy of making love to—he watched Celeste smoothly turn a page of the magazine. Garrett straightened in the chair—and went back to work.
He found the owner of Dream Toys of Phoenix: it was the Strive Company. Slamming his fist to the desk made the computer screens blink, and flash full of unintelligible characters. In the past months he had tried twice to buy Strive subsidiaries, but in reply to his inquiries he had received only a terse, handwritten note on the company's letterhead, which said:
"I don't sell unless it's first my idea to do so. What I have is good—and I know it." The words were Garrett's own, quoted from a rare interview. The note was signed only, "The Strive Company."
Garrett had ripped the note to shreds, knowing that it wasn't the message or the writer that infuriated him—he was angry with himself. It should have been his signature on that letterhead; he should have owned the Strive Company. He could have—but instead...
He reached slowly for the keyboard and deliberately typed, "B-L-A-I-N."
- Page 1 of 6
- Next Page
