2

“Hey, Bennie! Bennie—LOOK!”

Eddie was psyched. Eddie was so excited he was trembling. He wasn’t in arrears—far from it—He wasn’t joyous. He wasn’t effervescent. His days of gaming debt and youthful effervescence were over long ago; they’d never come again.

But psyched he was, assuredly: You could see it in those big, wide, bulging, reddened eyes, the florid face, the shuffling bodily rush.

These days Eddie didn’t get as all-out purple-faced excited as he’d done back in his youth. Oh, maybe once in a while on the private jet to London, say, with a gin and tonic in his hand, and his fly unzipped, and some aspiring Hollywood starlet kneeling down in front of him (Don’t tell Mrs. Parker, though): Maybe then he’d get his face to flush and his eyes to bulge the way they had in former times when he and Ben were back in school.

But now? No, now he was a calmer sort of fellow in his middle years—practically sedate, you’d have to say. Lots of money does that for a man. Age does it just as well, I guess, though money calms a person way more efficiently and in much less time: The really rich are really pretty calm, you see. Forty million in investments, plus the real estate and corporate stock and all, and it gives the antsiest of fellows reassurance, instills more confidence than the diffidence he’d shown in former days. So whether it was wealth alone or the simple mellowing crust of maturation, or maybe an amalgam of the two—In any case, Eddie was a way, way calmer sort of fellow in his mid-life years than he’d been back in his youth.

Well, usually he was. Generally he was—But you sure couldn’t call him perfectly calm today!

No, today—today he was—well, for him, at least, the guy was pretty flat-out frantic, as he brushed right past Ben’s goalie-of-a-secretary Cindy in the antechamber and straight into the enormous office of the Company founder and CEO, bolted wholesale into the room, where Ben sat at his desk incredulously glancing up, and hit Ed with the inevitable question:

“Jesus, Eddie! What the hell is…?”

Ben posed this uncompleted inquiry because it was evident that something pretty damn significant was … well … up. After all, this was hardly the ideal time for getting interrupted: Ben had that meeting with the Braverman people a little after noon—which Eddie quite obviously knew—And it was getting toward eleven now. And, you know, it takes some time for preparation. And if a potential big-bucks buyer isn’t totally prepared on a mega-million-dollar deal like this, why the sellers can just about eat him alive, checkbook, moneybags and all; and so….

But Braverman Corp meeting be damned, there was Eddie, all crimson in the face, and he was obviously psyched about something. Psyched—feverishly psyched! And on the rare occasions when this generally placid guy got psyched these later days—let alone feverishly—you couldn’t hope to brush him off; hell no. You simply had to bite your tongue and listen to him vent. And so Ben set the research papers neatly on his desk, glanced at the zillion-dollar Patek Philippe on his wrist, shook his head, took his half-frame reading glasses off and set them deftly on the papers, met Eddie’s gaze with a minimum of genuine interest, and queried:

“Well, Eddie? OK, go ahead, shoot, I’ll bite. Spit it out and make it quick. I’ve got that meeting with the Braverman team at twelve-fifteen, so….”

So Eddie finally coughed at least a prefatory statement out, as Ben had asked his pal to do. It had taken Ed quite a little while to catch his breath and get his trembling hands to slow their rhythm of vibrato—Whew!

“Forget the goddamn Braverman bullshit, Benny Boy,” Eddie blurted out in double time. “It’s peanuts, pal; it’s nickel-dime, penny-ante crap. This one is BIG; this one is the mother lode. I just came across the friggin’ thing sittin’ on my desk this morning—MAN!—and … and—look, we gotta jump on it. Now—Right now. Today—before anybody else muscles in. Look—Just look it over for a minute and you’ll see what I mean. Here, check it out right now, Ben; read the first two pages; just shuffle through a second, pal, and then….”

Eddie went to set the folder on Ben’s desk, but Ben waved a hand to hold him off.

“Not now, Eddie. Please. I’ve got this whole stack of numbers to go through, and it’s just about eleven already, and….”

“Yes now, right now. Hey, have I ever steered you wrong when I was sure about an offering? Have I?”

Had he? All right, so maybe he had. Sure he had. That pharmaceutical fiasco six months back—Man! They’d lost a pile of cash on that one—twenty million, maybe more. But Eddie hadn’t been as all-out hyped about the lethal diet drug as he seemed to be about this proposal, whatever the hell it was. And the last time he was sure, the last time he was red-in-the-face trembling like this, they’d closed that ultra-profitable coup on Claxon Corp. Publishing and made a massive mint; and so….

“OK, look,” Ben offered, nodding. “You got two minutes and not a second more. Run it by me quick—two minutes maximum—and then I’ve got to get back to these figures. Really. If you can lay it out clean and simple in a couple of minutes flat, go ahead, otherwise….”

“Sure, Ben, sure. Two minutes is all I’m asking here; I know you’re pressed. Just listen to the concept, and if you like what I tell you—which you will, I guarantee—I’ll go ahead and make the call and get our tootsies in the door, OK?”

“OK already, fine—So what’s your fabulous brainstorm this time, Eddie? Plastics?”

“No, not plastics, for Chrissakes, Bennie. Plastics—shit! Hey, this thing is gonna be bigger than any plastics you ever saw—Hell, it’ll be bigger even than Facebook, I swear—We dropped the pop-up bigtime by not jumping in on Facebook early on, remember? So this time let’s not screw up, OK?”

Bennie shrugged and shook his head. Facebook—DAMN! The memory of missing out on Facebook when they’d had the chance gave Ben an agonizing twinge.

“OK,” continued Ed. “so here’s the thing:”

The thing, eh? Ben glanced down at his watch again and pursed his lips. OK, two minutes—maximum—for the ‘thing’ and then….

Ben reclined his swivel chair, picking up the glasses he had just set down and slipping the metal temple-piece between his lips. There was about five percent of his attention available to Eddie just then—a twentieth at the max—and the other nineteen twentieths percolating over Braverman’s figures and the quickest way to get the greedy bastards down to a palatable price, leaving AthCorp a decent profit. Ben knew commercial values, the present and potential worth of any marketable company up for bidding anywhere in the universe, practically to the cent or pound or yen; his mind scoped out the capitalist marketplace the way an eagle scans terrain for prey—Not that he looked the part of a financier, however, for Ben was still a photogenic type of guy for a fellow in his middle-fifties: more like the beach set than the desk set, frankly, with his copious head of hair, still fractionally gray; still lean and scaphoid at the belly; still bright-of-eye and wrinkleless-of-face. Ben was a pretty nifty fifty-five with the chronologic meter running; of that there could be little doubt.

Now Eddie, on the other hand—Associate Chairman Eddie, Head of Market Research for the Atherton Group, who was an exact contemporary of Ben’s—Eddie looked as though he could have been Ben’s older brother or uncle, or … not quite old enough in appearance to be a youthful-looking dad, but not that far a stretch.

But getting back to Ben again and to the action of the hour, the Braverman deal had got his eyes to redden up a bit from lack of sleep, and those pouches underneath his lower lids these past few days: Today, this morning, Ben looked a trifle wearier than the norm, a little less his youthful self. Tired, antsy; and therefore five percent of his attention span was about the upper limit of what he could spare for Eddie’s new pet project—whatever the hell it might turn out to be. And about that new pet project Eddie blurted out—and blurted really fast, so as to cram the words together making Ben miss a considerable number of them in the flurried verbal spate:

“OK, OK, two minutes then, Bennie; I’ll keep it brief. Hey, you’re gonna love this kid’s idea, Ben, I’m a hundred percent positive you will. Here, what I’m gonna do: I’m gonna put the letter and prospectus on your desk; you’ll wanna read it later after I explain. But what it is in a nutshell—Hey, Benny, are you listening? I need your full attention here, OK? Stop chewing on those goddam glasses and listen up.”

“Yeah, sure; I hear you, Ed; go ahead, but, like I said, you’ve got to make it quick.”

“OK, then, here’s the thing, Ben; here’s the skinny as quick as I can lay it out. You know there’s a couple of sites on the Net that match up photos to find a person’s double—Did you know about them?”

“Not specifically, no; but I might have guessed as much.” Internet investments had never really been Ben’s thing—which was why they’d dropped the ball on Facebook, he supposed—So now, this being an internet investment, his attention level tumbled down a good bit more and started on a rapid downhill plunge.

“Well, listen, Ben.” Eddie raised both tone and volume of his voice to try and perk Ben’s ears a bit: “So—How ‘bout this? What about a site that could match folks up and match them forward and backward in time?”

“Meaning what, Eddie? I don’t quite follow what you’re getting at. Explain and make it super-quick.”

“Meaning this, Benny boy: The kid—this brilliant goddam kid; the guy’s a fucking genius—He came up with a program that takes apart the photo you send in and gets down to the bone structure and the fat and muscles underneath the skin—got it?—Then it takes the facial make-up back to the past and forward to the future—Not just what you look like now, but what you would’ve looked like ten or twenty years ago and what you’re gonna look like ten or twenty years in the future. That’s what he matches you up with—who you are, or who you were, or who you’re gonna be—You get the picture now?”

“I get the picture.” Ben shook his head and glanced down one final time with manifest impatience at his watch. “But I don’t believe it’s possible to do that kind of analytic foolery with any accuracy. What about environment and stuff?—Don’t those factors enter in?”

“Yeah, sure. He factors in environment, Ben—that’s the beauty of the thing. The more pictures you send in, the more accurate the projections become. So, say he’s got your photo from now and five or six years before—OK? He sticks that info in and the program figures the environmental input along with the heredity. According to the kid’s prospectus….”

“The kid’s prospectus may be total bullshit, Eddie. It probably is bullshit. But, I must admit, the concept does sound remotely interesting anyhow in a far-out kind of way. How much does he want?”

“Capital? Our stake? Peanuts—Twelve million is all he’s asking for right now.”

“Twelve!—Twelve? What the hell does he think he can accomplish with a measly twelve?”

“Hey, I don’t know, but that’s what he’s asking. Read the prospectus; it’s all in there. Then if you’re interested, let me know on Monday. And I’ll give the kid a call.