THE NODULE

By the spring of 1973 the telephone had reversed itself. For three years I had placed the calls, planted the studies, underwritten the workshops, and mailed the faith out in plain envelopes; now the faith called me, collect, at all hours, wanting more of itself. Dredge consortia were forming around Kennecott money and Inco money and U.S. Steel money. Tenneco's ocean people were drawing up a claim to a strip of Pacific floor the size of Pennsylvania. Brokerages that could not have found the Clarion fracture zone with both hands had nodule paper to sell, and the paper sold.¹ I had built a stage set, and I stood in the wings that spring and watched real money walk onto it and start measuring for drapes.

I want the mechanics on the record, because they are the best lesson in my whole inventory and I paid nothing for them. We had needed the world to believe that a sane corporation would spend three hundred millions scooping potato-sized lumps of nickel and copper off the bottom of three miles of ocean. The trouble with the belief was never the nodules, which are real, and lie out there in their trillions like a spilled cargo; the trouble was the arithmetic, which says that the potato is cheap and the fetching is ruinous. So we had buried the arithmetic under tonnage, and the tonnage was the part a man could believe at lunch. And it turned out that a belief manufactured as camouflage will pass, in open country, for a belief arrived at honestly; it has the same plumage; it eats the same seed. The mania needed me for about eighteen months, and after that it flew on its own, and by 1973 I could have retired from the lying entirely and the lie would not have noticed.

In March a man from one of the New York houses took me to lunch at a club on Park Avenue to pitch me, in strict confidence, my own venture. He had a folder. He walked me through tonnages I had planted, grade figures I had invented in San Diego, and a projected cost curve some analyst of his had improved in the direction of Eden, and he did it in the hushed voice of a man doing you a favor that could get him talked about. "The Hughes organization doesn't build a ship like that on a hunch," he said, over the sole. "Our view is they know something the industry doesn't."

"I'd say that's certain," I said, and let him fill my glass. The houses that stayed out, I noticed that spring, were the sharp Jewish ones downtown, who had looked at the fetching cost the way a tailor looks at a customer, once, all the way down; the believers ran to Presbyterians, inherited seats, and lunch clubs with good silver, which ought to have told the Presbyterians something.² I record the observation without apology at this late date; my whole life has been spent among the sort of people a sensible man studies before he studies the merchandise.

I could have said, at that lunch, one sentence. I have run it in my head for thirty years, eleven words: nobody has assayed anything, the figures came out of a hotel room. I did not say it in March, and I did not say it in May at La Jolla, at a workshop I was underwriting through two removes, when an oceanographer I will call Ostrander, a decent, rumpled, furious man, stood up during the coffee and did the fetching arithmetic on a napkin, out loud, in front of forty believers. He had the lift costs per ton within ten percent of our own classified estimates, which I happened to know, having planted the public numbers he was correcting. For about forty seconds the room had the truth in it, free of charge, in ballpoint. Then a consortium man with beautiful teeth stood up and said the napkin assumed yesterday's technology, and a man from a bank said the Hughes organization had not become the Hughes organization by miscounting, and the room, which wanted the abyss paved with nickel, went with the teeth. Ostrander looked around for one ally and found forty portfolios, and sat down, and I, who could have risen and handed him the operation entire, asked the girl for more coffee and admired the view of the Pacific, under which, three miles down and fifteen hundred miles out, my actual client lay keeping her own counsel. Afterward in the lobby he buttonholed me, of all the men in that room, and asked whether the Hughes organization might be persuaded to open its cost data to independent review, and I said gravely that I would take it up the ladder, and he thanked me for my seriousness, and I accepted the thanks, and that transaction is on the ledger with the rest.

Meanwhile I was buying. I want this entry made carefully, because the Editor will be along behind me with the ledgers he is so fond of, and I would rather confess in my own prose than in his. I knew to the dollar what the ore was worth, which is to say I knew the whole industry was a curtain; and I bought anyway, with both hands, through a Zurich nominee and a Bahamian company with a name like a law firm, because a mania does not ask that the goods be real, only that the next man believe harder than the last, and I have never in my life had better information about the next man.³ I sold nothing short, that being conspicuous; I simply rode the faith up with the congregation, taking my texts from my own forged hymnal, and the pleasure of it was as clean as any I ever had with my clothes on. Let the reader who has never bet with the answer key in his pocket cast what he likes.

There was one refinement I kept even from Guthrie, and it belongs on the charge sheet with the rest. At the club that June a trustee of a charitable foundation of my acquaintance leaned in over the fish and asked me, man to man, for the straight goods: was there anything in this seabed business, or was it another tulip. The foundation's endowment was the sleepy kind, bonds and blue chips and a headache of spendable income, and the trustee wanted, he said, a little sea room. I gave him the word "nodules" and a look I have practiced since Fort Monmouth, the look of a man declining to say what he knows, and let his own greed write the rest of the memorandum, and the foundation went into ocean-minerals paper that summer on my unwritten say-so, to a depth I did not ask about, that being the whole hygiene of the method.⁴ Did it trouble me, steering a charity into theater? It troubled me the way weather troubles a man indoors, which is to say I heard it on the glass.

My other kettle was boiling in Washington that same season, the re-election business, which I have set down on a loose page elsewhere and will not warm over here; the reader need only know that between the committees and the columnists, newspapers were dangerous to me that year from a direction that had nothing to do with mining, and a man being careful in one direction is careful in all of them.⁵ I gave no interviews in 1973. It was put about, not by me but not against my wishes, that the Ocean Mining Division regarded publicity as unscientific. The one reporter who pressed, a boy from a financial weekly, was offered instead a tour of the Long Beach program office, core samples and wall charts and a man in a hard hat lent for the afternoon, and came away with a feature so friendly I had it framed, and the frame hangs in the room where I am writing this, between two of the doctorates, all three earned the same way.

At home the venture sat at my own dinner table like a lodger. Hal was at the business school by then, learning to inherit; Louise was twenty-three and studying ceramics at a college I paid for by the pound; and Bunny presided over the roast on Sundays with the serenity of a woman whose husband's work had at last become mentionable. She mentioned it seldom, which I should have noticed. On one of those Sundays, passing the horseradish, she said, in the voice she uses for asking whether the gutters have been seen to: "But darling, who buys a rock it costs more to fetch than it sells for?"

There it was, at my own table, under the horseradish: the exact hole in the economics, the sentence Ostrander had needed a napkin for, the eleven words the whole apparatus was engineered to keep out of print, served to me by a woman who to my certain knowledge read nothing but the garden column and her sorority's newsletter. I said something about proprietary technology and the long view. "Of course," Bunny said comfortably, and asked Louise about the kiln. Louise said the kiln was temperamental, and Hal said temperament was what you called equipment with no union, and the table moved along in the ordinary way of families, one of its chairs occupied by a man carrying the resting place of a Soviet ballistic-missile submarine and the true worth of an industry, and passing the horseradish. I put it down, as I had put down twenty-five years of such moments, to Northwestern, where they teach economics as a sorority elective, and I did not think about it again for two years, and when I did think about it again the thinking did me no good, as the Editor will no doubt arrange to show.

It was a rich, warm, dishonest autumn, and I remember it fondly and without defense. The ship was through her trials on the East Coast and coming around the Horn, too fat for the Canal, trailing wire-service photographs. The paper rose. The foundation's trustee sent me a case of claret at Christmas. And in January the telephone went in the study at Woodside, at the respectable hour that meant Guthrie, who did not trust the instrument after nine.

"Integration and sea trials, Mr. Klipspringer," he said. I could hear the flimsy in his hand; he read from documents even when he knew them by heart, believing memory to be a form of paraphrase. "Off Catalina, then the deep-water work. The mining-relations plan wants updating for the trials period."

"Send it up," I said. "I'll have language by Friday."

"And there is the manifest," Guthrie said, with what I can only call receipted satisfaction. "You're on it. Mining relations, afloat. A mining man ought to have seen his ship."

I said of course, delighted, nothing would be more natural, and put the receiver down, and stood a while in the study listening to the January rain on the windows and to my stomach, which had read the manifest faster than I had.