Chapter 21

July 26

The first ten monkeys arrived Monday morning. Each was issued a desk on the trading floor, a security badge, a set of darts, a computer, a phone, a copy of the Wall Street Journal, a membership card for the company health plan, 12 ball point pens, four pads of paper, a stapler, a staple remover, and a flea collar. On its surface, this would seem to be a tremendous opportunity for any monkey, particularly one that's other career option was on the less-happy end of medical research. But, oddly, most of the chimps did not seem altogether pleased with their new vocation. By ten a.m., two of the remaining human analysts had been bitten, and a third had simply fallen to pieces amid the incessant shrieking of his new coworkers, which was in a distinctly different and more piercing pitch than the shrieking of his previous coworkers. 
 A handful of top Johnston Brothers executives--although no actual Johnstons--joined Gwafinn as he surveyed the scene. Gwafinn had not been so high on the idea of interacting with low-level analysts even back when they were human, and he certainly wasn't going to stand around making small talk with a bunch of monkeys. To avoid such awkward social situations, he'd had a Plexiglas-enclosed viewing station constructed by one of the exits to the research floor. It was similar to the penalty box you might find at a hockey rink, except not so densely packed with Canadians.
 "Do you suppose they're not happy with their contracts?" asked the Vice President of Business Development, a long-time Gwafinn ally.
 "Maybe they sense a bear market," said the Executive Vice President of Corporate Communications. "I hear where all the birds left Tokyo just days before their market melted down back in 1990."
 "Eerie," said the first vice president.
 "But why aren't they using the darts?" a marketing manager asked Gwafinn. "Shouldn't they be throwing the darts at their Wall Street Journals?"
 "Be patient," Gwafinn assured him. Gwafinn was known for his patience among his fellow executives, having once invested in a stock that lacked earnings momentum. "The monkeys are just establishing their territory. It looks like they're driving the human analysts out of equities towards the fixed income and corporate finance departments."
 "That is smart," noted one of the vice presidents.
 "Yep, equities is where the real money is here at Johnston Brothers," said the other.
They had smart monkeys after all.
 By eleven o'clock the monkeys had calmed a bit. The human analysts, now largely confined to less profitable departments, looked on with apprehension as their co-workers swung from the exposed pipes of the sprinkler system and soiled their Wall Street Journals. 
 "Should we check where the shit lands, or wait for them to use the darts?" asked the Vice President of Business Development.
Gwafinn considered the question. "I definitely read that they'd use darts," he said at last. "But perhaps we should monitor the shit in the meantime. It might be a sell signal."
 "I'll send in an intern to check," said the VP, pleased that progress was being made.
 
"I have a proposal for you," Kerns told the first student organization representative. "I think it will work well for all concerned."
The student leader, who was a senior in college, and thus savvy in the ways of the world, eyed Kerns with suspicion.
 "Your group has more space than it needs," Kerns continued, "and the college needs more space for its operations. Why don't you lease your student center back to us?"
 "You're trying to make us sell out," said the student. "We'll never sell out our ideals."
 "I wouldn't dream of asking you to sell out. For one thing, I want you to lease, not sell. And for another, I'm offering you funds that can be put to far more idealistic uses than a building. As things stand now, you're much too illiquid. You don't want to be illiquid do you?"
"No," the student admitted, he didn't like the sound of being illiquid one bit, whatever it meant. "But I still don't trust you," he added.
 "I understand. I'll just offer the cash to the other special interest groups." Kerns flashed a wad of hundred-dollar bills in front of the student's face.
 "Wait…"
Kerns might have a lot to learn about the day-to-day management of a college. But as an economist, he was well acquainted with the power of cash. 
 When word of the free money got around, virtually every student-center possessing group on campus decided that they'd like to do Bucklin a favor, too, and help out with its building shortage. By the end of the day, the college held rights to lease all but six of its own buildings back from the student groups for the year at some extremely attractive rates. For the first time in months, Kerns had been able to put the fact that he was badly outnumbered to his advantage. He had what is known as a "monopsony," a term Kerns had shared with class after class of Economics 101 students, most of whom assumed he was mispronouncing another, similar, word that they already knew very well, having started games of it many times, without ever actually seeing one through to its end. But a monopsony is something very different from a monopoly--and even more different from Monopoly, since you couldn't choose to be a thimble. In a monopsony, there are many interested sellers and only one buyer--in this case, Bucklin College--a fact that tends to leave buyers in extremely advantageous negotiating positions even if they're not bargaining with college kids who considered $49.95 a lot of money, which, of course, Kerns was. Within a day, he had regained access to millions of dollars of campus buildings for a very reasonable grand total of $4,530. That was less than a Bucklin student paid for two months of classes. "Quite a bit less," Kerns thought, "once I get through upping the little bastards' tuition."
 Officially, Kerns was just renting his buildings back from the groups, and risked having to go though the whole process again next year. But part two of Kerns' plan figured to be even more enjoyable than part one. "Janet," Kerns buzzed the office secretary, on the off chance she had bothered to drop by that day, "please get me the contact information for all the members of the Handicapped Students Coalition, plus any student who complained to Health Services in the past year about our buildings' air quality. We need to update them on the proper places to send their complaints." In a few weeks, Kerns would spread the rumor that as landlords, the student groups would be required to shell out for necessary building upgrades and health inspections. They'd beg him to take their student centers back forever. In the interests of the students, Kerns would be forced to comply.
 
July 27

"How are the monkeys doing?" I asked Gwafinn at our Tuesday Tuesday lunch.
 "Things seem to be progressing. Just yesterday all they were doing was shrieking and throwing feces at the interns. But now they're shrieking less and I expect they'll soon take an interest in the darts. We don't start our human recruits in on stock picking until they've finished a month-long training program. This is saving us money already."
 "Has the feces throwing dropped off as well?"
 "Not noticeably, no. But we've found some new interns who mind it less."
 "From an agricultural college?
 "No, English majors mostly. They're just happy to have work, even as unpaid interns. But remember, if you're talking to an intern, pretend that they have a chance at promotion." Gwafinn chuckled at his joke.
 "How will I know I'm talking to an intern?"
 "The head-to-toe shit stains are the main tip off. Oh, and they'll be the ones to believe you if you say we promote interns."
 "I heard that one of the chimps has been issuing sell recommendations."
 "Oh yes, that's Chimp #8," said Gwafinn. "He's got all the makings of a superstar. We've even started feeding him more, to get more sell recommendations out of him. Unfortunately, the other chimps still seem more interested in throwing their sell recommendations at interns."
 "Have you considered sending the interns into the monkey room covered with copies of the Journal?" I suggested, trying to keep in the spirit of the thing.
Gwafinn looked up with a start. "Good thinking, Bob. Damn, you've made your father proud."
 
"Tommy!" Dana shouted. "What are you doing with that cloth bag?" Tommy clearly was lurking in the bushes with that cloth bag, but Dana asked anyway, on the off chance that there might be some better explanation.
 "I'm just doing a favor for Sarah," Tommy said.
 "And is that favor attempting to kill people?"
 "Well, that's not exactly how she put it."
 "How exactly did she put it?"
 "Same, only without 'attempting'."
 "How could you? I thought you said you were on my side?"
 "I am on your side. But Sarah convinced me I shouldn't go against the group decision."
 "What group decision? They only have a majority because you've joined them."
 "That's what makes me feel so needed."
 "Listen, Tommy, you need to speak up for yourself here, and believe what I told you to believe."
 "But the group…"
 "If you take my side, then you wouldn't be going against the group, the group would be evenly divided," Dana said.
 "Evenly divided," Tommy said, dropping the cloth bag in despair. "Then who would I follow?"
 "Follow your heart. What do you think you should do? Think, Tommy. You must think for yourself."
And Tommy did think. He thought for all he was worth. Dana could see sweat gathering on his brow at a rate exceptional even for an island this close to the equator. Finally Tommy seized on an idea. He picked the cloth bag up off the ground and pulled it over his head.
 "No, Tommy, that's not the answer," Dana said, and grabbed the bag back from him. "Is it this difficult for you to think for yourself, to make a decision on your own?"
 "If you say so."
 "That's it. I'm going to help you make the right decision. You're coming with me--and we're leaving the bag here. You're going to have a beer at George and William's bar so you know the people you were going to try to kill. After you meet them, you'll know what to do. Oh, and should it come up, you might want to avoid mentioning any role you might have had in any prior bag attacks. It's something of a touchy subject in the village."
Dana walked Tommy down to the bar, introduced him to William, then excused herself to go find Sarah. She couldn't find her, but at least Dana's plan to put Tommy in check was successful. In fact, it was even more successful than she'd dared hope. By the time she returned for him half an hour later, Tommy had joined the natives' community.
 
"So Kerns thinks he can outmaneuver me, does he?" Associate Dean Thomas Prester Smith was pacing about his office like a caged animal, although as a mid-level administrator at a smallish college, it wasn't a particularly fearsome animal. "True, Kerns might have saved me from a savage rake beating by solving the building shortage. But that's hardly the point. He made me look bad by undermining my solution to the problem. How can I show my face on campus? How can I ever hope to land another job in academia?" Smith imagined that the rest of the college world was exchanging tales of his failure, never imagining that few had ever heard of him, and that those who had mostly just remembered the shuffling. Right now Smith was so mad that his shuffling suffered. "The man has no idea who he's up against," Smith fumed. "Or more accurately, he probably does have an idea that he's up against me, but he doesn't understand how dangerous that is."
 In point of fact, Smith had just one plan left. One final stab at rescuing his once promising career. But it wasn't just any plan. It was a big plan. A proactive plan. A history-making plan. A plan that would leave elite colleges and universities around the country clamoring for his services and that bastard Kerns exposed as an administrative dilettante. It was a plan so big that the Regents might just hand Smith the job he should have had in the first place, Dean of Bucklin College…if he could pull it off. With every circuit he paced around his office Smith glanced not out his window at Bucklin's campus, as was his custom, but rather at the world map he had posted on his office wall. "It could work," he muttered. "It could work." He'd find out soon enough. The plan was already in motion.
 After the fiasco with the Budgetary Exemption, Smith had been a bit slier with these machinations. True, some rather extensive travel was required, and that did necessitate official approval from Kerns. But Smith had been careful to bury his real intentions under a blizzard of irrelevant facts and barely-relevant half-truths in his travel application. Then, just to be safe, he'd gone back and replaced the half-truths with quarter-truths. Kerns had been suspicious, but eventually he did provide his official approval. At least Smith thought it was an official approval. Trouble was, Dean Kerns was just agreeing with everyone these days, without really giving official official approvals at all. Plans submitted in writing came back with requests for more details. Detailed submissions came back with requests for executive summaries. When pressed for an answer, Kerns would cite some economics theory and rattle on till you drifted off, then he'd sneak out of the room. If you managed to stay awake, he would pretend to drift off himself, then make you start over from the beginning when he woke. It was all extremely frustrating, and, Smith was man enough to admit, devilishly brilliant. Kerns was becoming more competent by the hour. And that was all the more reason for Smith to leave immediately. 
 As far as his travel proposal was concerned, Smith was heading to South America on a routine diversity recruiting assignment. Such trips were increasingly common, in that many foreign countries were overflowing with exactly the sorts of minority students that American colleges needed to survive. According to his official travel request, Smith would be forging alliances with high school guidance counselors and college-study-abroad program directors in Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Guyana, Paraguay and the too-often-overlooked secondary guay, Uruguay. Smith's real plan was considerably more focused. He was after not South American minority students in general, but one student in particular--one whose story originated even further to the south. 
Long ago, Smith had stumbled onto a fact that somehow had escaped the notice of his fellow college-recruiting directors. Nearly twenty years before, he'd learned, the forward-thinking leaders of a small nation called Spanish Guyana had sent a pregnant Spanish Guyanian citizen--Smith believed it had been a woman--to Antarctica, where, predictably enough, she had given birth. Spanish Guyana claimed the voyage was necessitated by overcrowded maternity wards in local hospitals. The real reason had been that Spanish Guyana, feeling a tad impotent on the world stage, wished to conquer a foreign land. Now it's certainly correct that conquering foreign lands is a tried-and-true path towards success. But this was the late twentieth century; all the really attractive lands already had long since been conquered. With few options, Spanish Guyana set its sights on one of the few undeveloped properties that remained: Antarctica. The traditional opening move in these situations is to send a few citizens to colonize the stretch of dirt you wish to control, and indeed that had been Spanish Guyana's original plan. In fact, a sizable order had been placed for long underwear. But before the plan had been put in motion, a clever Spanish Guyanian provincial governor had stuck on a better idea: if Spanish Guyana controlled the only Antarctican, he reasoned, then Spanish Guyana would control Antarctica, without all the hassles involved in colonization and long-underwear purchasing. They'd simply have to wait until their Antarctican was old enough to vote. The Antarctic baby plan was born. 
 The idea seemed solid enough on its surface. Only too late did Spanish Guyana find that it fell apart on one minor detail: Antarctica was not a democracy. It was a land governed by brute force--or it would have been, except the only ones there were penguins, which are not a particularly forceful bird. This troubling state of affairs rendered Spanish Guyana's Antarctic voting edge valueless. And as for the brute force route to conquest, an invasion of Antarctica would have invited reprisals by other countries, and Spanish Guyana--a country that's military had once accidentally surrendered to itself after seeing its reflection in a mirror--knew it was out of its depth. The country gave up on the whole Antarctic idea, and turned their attention back to stemming that pesky outbreak of plague.
 A few years later the point was moot. Scientists discovered that it really was quite cold in Antarctica more or less year round, so the continent likely would never develop into a profitable vacation spot or farming colony. Given this grim prognosis, the civilized nations of the world shook hands, agreed to share Antarctica equally in the spirit of brotherhood and harmony, and in the future only fight over places that had enough oil under them to make them worth everyone's trouble. 
 Spanish Guyana's place in Antarctic lore was soon forgotten--by everyone except Smith. For Smith, the central issue remained unresolved: what had happened to that Antarctic baby? Unless it had been raised by penguins, a possibility Smith was willing to consider, the child figured to have grown up back in Spanish Guyana. This child, the only individual from continent larger than Europe, probably only thought about his unique heritage when filling out forms that asked for place of birth, and maybe when looking for an anecdote to tell at parties. But whether he knew it or not, this child was the Holy Grail of campus diversity, and Smith had been waiting for the right moment to search for the grail ever since. Now the child was 18, and Smith needed a victory. It couldn't wait any longer. It was time for the Antarctic baby to enroll in college. 
 Smith unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. Smith might have been the only administrator on campus who actually believed a desk lock would keep someone out who really wanted to get into his files. He certainly was the only administrator on campus who thought someone might really want to get into his files. Smith gave a last, suspicious look around his office, unnecessarily, perhaps, since he'd already taken the time to lock his office door and check behind his curtains. Then he removed the drawer entirely. Behind it, taped securely to the inside of the desk frame was his secret file. In it was every article Smith had tracked down about the Antarctic baby. It didn't amount to much--not even a name. All Smith knew was that the child was a boy, the son of a government functionary high enough in the scheme of things to be entrusted with such an important assignment, yet low enough in the pecking order that he could be ordered to send his wife to a barren, icy wasteland to produce his first born. A middle manager. In short, Smith was looking for the child of a man very much like himself. That, thought Smith, would be his advantage.