Page 65 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Homeostatopia

replicating and self-interested. It’s the way to go, Greg. What do you
think?”
One on one he was irresistible. If he and Al Magnus were to meet
it would be dazzling. “I think you’re a genius. And I’m going to get
on board—no, not to build mud bungalows. I want to finance your
Nodal Village solar array package start-up. Just how much do you
need to get it off the ground?”
He raised his eyebrows and widened his eyes, allowing the pupils
to adjust to the size of the monstrous albacore he had just reeled in.
“You’re serious, aren’t you?” I nodded emphatically. “Well, just to
show you how serious I am, here it is: seven hundred fifty thousand
dollars.”
I smiled. “Hal, when I said I won big back in Vegas I wasn’t
kidding. I can do that amount. But it’s got to be documented in a way
that the taxman won’t come after either of us. If you can arrange that
bit of magic, I’m your backer. If I went home with all that money, my
ex-wives would have a feeding frenzy. It’s time I did something
useful with the fruits of my labor—just don’t ask me for my system
at blackjack.”
It took a little more convincing to turn Harold A. Peña into a
believer in my semi-reformed gambler—but not much: outside
funding was the life’s-blood of his perpetual motion scheme, and he
didn’t really care from which vein of American wealth it
hemorrhaged. He called in his little band of committed followers and
announced the news. After much rejoicing and many high-fives I was
given a royal send-off, just in time to get back to my hotel as the sun
was setting. Too many drunks on desert roads after dark and I was
one of them.
I’d have had to be a terribly cockeyed optimist not to see disaster
looming. After transferring the money to a hastily-opened account
for a sloppily-produced non-profit institution run by Peña, I
adjourned to a cooler clime. Were the followers of these gurus, I
wondered, just as nutty as their leaders, grasping and swallowing
whole the ideas of those charismatic crackpots? Or their
complement, another subset of humanity unfortunately promoted by
evolution to seek magically simple solutions to complex problems?
But that didn’t exhaust the possibilities: leaders and followers could
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