of people waiting for the doors to open in the morning. It was an orderly enough queue, like the line at a theater’s ticket window, or at the Yankee Stadium, or something happy and ordinary like that. Only, in this queue, the faces were not the same. These—the old woman, clearly weeping, a handkerchief pressed against her lips, the little boy behind her, clutching at her skirt, the young man towering above him, looking out at the world from snarling eyes; the old, the tired, the angry, and the resigned were all there in that extraordinary news picture.
Only the happy were missing. Not one face was gay, uplifted, expectant, or content.
Vee shook her head sharply to get the old picture out of the way of the smeary mimeographed writing. Once again she took her attention and pinned it to the instructions facing her.
“Don’t bother with all that,” Ann said. “It drowns you in technicalities. I’ll phone Larry Meany—he’s the lawyer I always use on affidavits. He’ll do the whole thing—you just sign some papers.”
Vera looked unbelieving.
“You mean it’s that simple? People’s lives—”
“It’s like everything else, Vee.” Ann shrugged. “Him who hath—”
Jasper Crown stared patiently at the man opposite him.
The man opposite him was an enemy, Jasper was thinking, though probably an unconscious one. The man opposite him, talking too eagerly, explaining too minutely, had been for some months now Jasper’s most active supporter and ally, had already been instrumental in raising a quarter million toward the new project. Instrumental. Not decisive. Nobody could wind up the thing with a prospective investor except Jasper himself; others could, at most, pave the way, prepare his entrance. Then the rest was up to him, Jasper, who had thought up what would in effect be the first global network.
Now, Jasper knew that the man opposite, this plump, slightly bald Timothy Grosvenor, was potentially, at least, an enemy. He would have to be destroyed. Jasper sat listening to him, staring at him patiently. Destroyed…
Destroyed merely in relation to the new project. The project was bigger than any other consideration. There was need, immediate and constantly growing need, for a radio network that wasn’t paralyzed by a lot of polite rules about handling the news. The next years, the next months even, would decide forever that radio and not day-old newspapers would tell the world its major news. The Austrian crisis had been the newest proof that radio was entering a new era. The press of the nation was tired, old, outmoded. The people gave it no heed, paid it no attention—witness the 1936 elections. The new, young, potent means of communication was not the linotype machine, not the printed picture, but the air wave, the radio dial, the human, urging voice.
But radio, thus far, had been afraid of its own potentiality. The men at the top were such cautious men, always talking about being unbiased, about not editorializing, boasting of giving equal time to both sides of anything—even the side that would destroy free communication the moment it came to power. All the men who now controlled the forty or fifty million radios in the U.S.—controlled them by the simple expedient of running the broadcasting stations that fed them words, music, gags, news—that whole group of men were cautious, timidly maintaining the farce of impersonality.
His network would be different in every way the law would allow—JCN, the Jasper Crown Network. Every announcer would say, “Jasper Crown reporters have just learned…” or “Jasper Crown’s correspondents in the Far East, in London, in Berlin”—for Jasper Crown representatives would dot the news capitals of the world within a year. Money? Cost? Budget?
That kind of measuring and weighing was the unimaginative, fearful wariness of little men. It came from insecurity, the impulse to hedge, to take the small risk instead of the great one. Not for him, the small,
Only the happy were missing. Not one face was gay, uplifted, expectant, or content.
Vee shook her head sharply to get the old picture out of the way of the smeary mimeographed writing. Once again she took her attention and pinned it to the instructions facing her.
“Don’t bother with all that,” Ann said. “It drowns you in technicalities. I’ll phone Larry Meany—he’s the lawyer I always use on affidavits. He’ll do the whole thing—you just sign some papers.”
Vera looked unbelieving.
“You mean it’s that simple? People’s lives—”
“It’s like everything else, Vee.” Ann shrugged. “Him who hath—”
Jasper Crown stared patiently at the man opposite him.
The man opposite him was an enemy, Jasper was thinking, though probably an unconscious one. The man opposite him, talking too eagerly, explaining too minutely, had been for some months now Jasper’s most active supporter and ally, had already been instrumental in raising a quarter million toward the new project. Instrumental. Not decisive. Nobody could wind up the thing with a prospective investor except Jasper himself; others could, at most, pave the way, prepare his entrance. Then the rest was up to him, Jasper, who had thought up what would in effect be the first global network.
Now, Jasper knew that the man opposite, this plump, slightly bald Timothy Grosvenor, was potentially, at least, an enemy. He would have to be destroyed. Jasper sat listening to him, staring at him patiently. Destroyed…
Destroyed merely in relation to the new project. The project was bigger than any other consideration. There was need, immediate and constantly growing need, for a radio network that wasn’t paralyzed by a lot of polite rules about handling the news. The next years, the next months even, would decide forever that radio and not day-old newspapers would tell the world its major news. The Austrian crisis had been the newest proof that radio was entering a new era. The press of the nation was tired, old, outmoded. The people gave it no heed, paid it no attention—witness the 1936 elections. The new, young, potent means of communication was not the linotype machine, not the printed picture, but the air wave, the radio dial, the human, urging voice.
But radio, thus far, had been afraid of its own potentiality. The men at the top were such cautious men, always talking about being unbiased, about not editorializing, boasting of giving equal time to both sides of anything—even the side that would destroy free communication the moment it came to power. All the men who now controlled the forty or fifty million radios in the U.S.—controlled them by the simple expedient of running the broadcasting stations that fed them words, music, gags, news—that whole group of men were cautious, timidly maintaining the farce of impersonality.
His network would be different in every way the law would allow—JCN, the Jasper Crown Network. Every announcer would say, “Jasper Crown reporters have just learned…” or “Jasper Crown’s correspondents in the Far East, in London, in Berlin”—for Jasper Crown representatives would dot the news capitals of the world within a year. Money? Cost? Budget?
That kind of measuring and weighing was the unimaginative, fearful wariness of little men. It came from insecurity, the impulse to hedge, to take the small risk instead of the great one. Not for him, the small,
Similar Books
