France started to liquidate her credits and Western Germany also. Britain held out for a while, but facing a financial crisis of her own, and fearing the devaluation of gold, she also started to demand payment in bullion. And so from all quarters of the world there poured in a demand for American gold and the rumor went about (it was quite false) that there was not enough gold in Fort Knox or other lesser known U.S. depositories to meet the need.
There was but one exception to the general clamor. In the middle of the crisis The New York Times produced this cheery headline:
FINLAND OFFERS LOAN TO U.S.
In all this turmoil denial was useless. Those very media of mass communication which can plant a rumor in millions of minds simultaneously found that in trying to deny that rumor they were met with general disbelief. What was to be expected? people asked each other. Certainly the government would deny that it was shipping one thousand tons of American gold to the Duchy of Grand Fenwick. What government would openly admit to doing such a thing and hope to win the next election? It wasn’t just ordinary gold either. It was American gold, and it evolved that the American people prided themselves very much on the American gold in Fort Knox, which gave them a sense of comfort—as Mountjoy expected the dollar bills in the dungeon of the castle of Grand Fenwick would give his people a sense of comfort too. The mass of Americans might never see the gold or touch it, but the fact that it was there was reassuring and the thought that it soon might not be there—that Fort Knox might become an empty box—was deeply disturbing. People got a sense that they and their ancestors had worked for centuries and now had lost everything. They felt that in a world where belief in God was weakening there had always been the dollar. And now the dollar was going because it was, after all, just a piece of paper.
The Cabinet of the United States, often in session on many matters, has rarely been called upon to consider the nature of money—something which was left to the Treasury Department and the members of the banking and securities commissions. But a full-dress Cabinet meeting was now called to consider the very real crisis which faced the country, unwittingly touched off by Grand Fenwick’s disputed attempts to avoid wealth. In the course of that meeting the Secretary of the Treasury, Eben Roberts, son of a coal miner from the Pennsylvania pits, gave the President and the members of his Cabinet a discourse on the mystique of money which closely paralleled that given by the Count of Mountjoy to the Privy Council of Grand Fenwick.
“In essence,” Roberts said, “money is an act of faith. It is not gold, silver, diamonds, or gourds (once used in the Republic of Haiti). It is nothing more than belief. What we are suffering from is a crisis of faith—a mounting of public doubt, national and international, to such a degree that faith in our money is going and may soon be gone. What we have to do is to restore that faith.”
“Wouldn't the easiest way to restore faith be just to keep shipping gold to whoever asks for it and is entitled to it?" asked the Secretary of the Interior. “There will surely come a time when the whole thing will taper off, when the price of gold abroad will drop below the thirty-five dollars an ounce we ourselves have fixed. Then the gold will start coming back to us.”
“We may run out of gold ourselves before that time comes,” said Roberts. “The government has long realized that faith, not gold, is what supports our currency and we have allowed our gold reserve to become depleted as a result of demands over the years and our refusal to pay more than thirty-five dollars an ounce for the metal.”
“Well,” said the Secretary of the Interior, “we’ve got gold mines closed all over the United States. Let's open them up and mine ourselves a few thousand tons more.”
Mr. Roberts smiled gently. “It costs about forty dollars to mine, crush and refine every ounce of gold we can produce here,” he said. “We would be losing about five dollars an ounce—a big sum when you start talking in hundreds of tons.”
“Why not raise the price of gold?” asked the Secretary of Commerce.
“Because to do so would be to devalue our paper currency,” replied Roberts. “Right now, thirty-five dollars in paper will theoretically buy an ounce of gold. If we put the price up to forty dollars, then the paper currency is worth less and we have, in effect, cheated all our customers abroad who have dollar credits. More than that—loans we have made to other nations would have to be increased because they would have become devalued.”
Something very close to a groan went up from the various members of the Cabinet. They felt themselves trapped. They were getting into an area which some felt was very close to magic and they felt incompetent to deal with the intangibles with which they were surrounded.
“Whatever did we do to Grand Fenwick that they should do this to us?” demanded one.
“There is a misunderstanding about Grand Fenwick which I see is present even in this Cabinet meeting,” said the Secretary. “Grand Fenwick had no intention whatever of visiting financial disaster upon the United States. I have been in direct communication with Her Grace, Duchess Gloriana the Twelfth, and with her Minister of Finance, the Count of Mountjoy. The fact of the matter is, astounding as it may appear, that Grand Fenwick was not trying to wreck our economy but was trying to avoid getting rich. The Duchy had no other ambition or aim than to remain in the economic situation which has served its people so well in the past. It found riches thrust upon it and it very sensibly resisted them.”
The explanation of the whole situation, thoroughly documented, took two hours. It left the whole Cabinet silent and chastened.
“You know,” said the Secretary of Commerce, breaking the silence that followed and speaking in a shaky voice, “we’ve got to preserve that country. That may be the last completely sane nation left on the face of the earth.”
“Well,” said the President, who had heard the story for the first time, “what are your recommendations? What do we do?”
“Through our embassy in France—we have, of course, not got an ambassador in Grand Fenwick—I have discussed this whole matter with both the Duchess and the Count of Mountjoy,” said the Secretary. “The solution they offer appeals to me, though I do not understand it all, and I recommend that it be adopted, for I can think of nothing else.
“They ask that the treaty of peace between Grand Fenwick and the United States be amended to relieve them of the necessity of operating that chewing gum factory over here. They won’t want any more profits.”
The President swallowed hard. “Go on,” he said in the silence that greeted the statement.
“They want the rest of their money, in dollars, sent to them, but they are prepared to pledge their national honor that they will not attempt to turn any part of it into gold.
“In return, the Duchess Gloriana will hold an international press conference at which she will assert her complete faith in the finances of the United States, the government of the United States, and the future of American industry and the capitalist system. She will say that she withdrew from the stock market here because she concluded that it was lacking in ethics for a nation as such to be a heavy investor in the stocks of another country, since nations should not compete against private individuals. She will further state that her country has greater faith in American paper currency, related to American production and marketing, than in gold, which has nothing but a romantic value and is not even a rare metal. And in proof of this, she will show the assembled press the bundles of American bank notes in the dungeon of the castle of Grand Fenwick.”
There was a long pause while everyone considered this. “That sounds so wacky to me,” said the President at last, “that, coming from the Duchy of Grand Fenwick, I believe it will work. Certainly it costs us nothing. So let’s send them the rest of their money, revise the treaty and see what happens.”
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THE international press conference in Grand Fenwick, designed to restore world faith in the finance and industry of the United States, was a vast success. Every variety of communications representative was there�
�newspaper, radio, magazine and television. The conference was held in the dungeon, where Gloriana sat prettily in a gold lame dress (a touch suggested by Mountjoy and frowned upon by Bentner) surrounded by stack after stack of American bills. The presence of so much money, mounting in tiers on every side, had a subduing effect upon the newsmen and the few selected financial experts who were present—among them Eben Roberts, Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.
It was he who handed to Gloriana from her hoard a sheaf of thousand-dollar bills so she could display them before the camera and say that these represented an investment in faith in the industry of the strongest nation of the world, and that was good enough for Grand Fenwick. Gold the Duchy did not require. The nation was quite happy to have its American credits in the form of bills.
“Whatever others may say,” said Gloriana in concluding, “we in Grand Fenwick have complete faith in the United
States and its people/' That concluding statement brought a little flutter of applause from those present, and after a few words from Mountjoy and a few more from Bentner, who said that the riches of nations lay in the goods they produced and that the grape harvest that year would be of the usual superior quality, the interview closed.
Mountjoy was the last to leave the dungeon, taking a final look around before, as Minister of Finance, he pulled the heavy iron-studded door shut. Before pulling the door shut he turned to Roberts, the American Secretary of the Treasury, who had remained behind with him. “Do you happen to have a match?” Mountjoy asked.
“Certainly,” said the Secretary and produced a box.
The Count lit the whole box and flung it into the dungeon among the stacks of currency.
“That makes you a gift of a billion dollars/' he said. “I trust you will remember it in our favor.”
“Such an act,” said the Secretary piously, “will never be forgotten.”
They shook hands and mounted the steps together, followed by a few wisps of smoke coming from beneath the dungeon door.
All then was resolved at last. The economy of the Duchy of Grand Fenwick was saved and so also, almost a by-product, was the economy of the United States of America. The world returned to its usual round of crises—a peace conference here, a threat of war there, a nuclear explosion in one place and a rocket launched to the planets in another. There was nothing now to disturb the Duchess Gloriana, or to occupy the busy mind of the Count of Mountjoy, who, to relieve his tedium, had set himself the task of solving the Times crossword puzzle daily without the use of any reference books, including dictionaries.
A month after the last of the financial crisis, when all had settled down, Mountjoy recalled that Dr. Kokintz had ordered some curious equipment some months earlier and went down to the great physicist’s laboratory to see how things were with him.
The equipment he found in place and Kokintz gave him a very obscure explanation of its use, which, as far as Mountjoy could understand, started with canaries and wound up with linking sound and light together.
“You have heard, of course, of the speed of light and the speed of sound,” said Kokintz, “the speed of light being an absolute by our methods of measure and the speed of sound varying according to the medium through which it is transmitted. Well, I have found that it is possible to accelerate the speed of sound and in effect to produce a sound which will travel faster than sound—to use a layman’s concept. I have found that sound can be accelerated to very close the speed of light and that sound can then be transformed into light and thus from one kind of energy to another.”
“Quite,” said Mountjoy, who was beginning to regret the visit. “I hope that will have no effect on the immortal scores of Mozart,” he added.
“Oh no,” said Kokintz. “Who would want to tamper with Mozart? But it has some interesting possibilities.”
“Such as?” asked Mountjoy.
“Well, look at that,” said Kokintz, pointing. Mountjoy looked. What he saw was the brick from the castle wall which Kokintz had been using for a plant press. Only it was a dull yellow in color.
“You painted it?” asked Mountjoy.
“No,” said Kokintz, “it’s solid gold except for a small area in the center where the vibrations were . . .”
Mountjoy didn’t wait for the rest. He reached for the brick and found it so heavy that he nearly dropped it.
“Solid gold?” he cried. “You mean you turned that stone to gold?”
“Yes,” said Kokintz. “It was a matter of interfering with the nuclear orbits so as to produce an entirely different arrangement of the nucleus . . .”
“You can do that to anything?” asked Mountjoy, cutting him off.
“Just granite so far,” said Kokintz humbly. “But with a big enough apparatus I could turn this whole castle into gold. But then, what would be the use of that? Who would want a solid gold castle?”
Mountjoy’s head was in a whirl. Without going into details he saw immediately that Kokintz, able to mass-produce gold from granite, had stumbled on a device which could utterly ruin world finances. If gold, mass-produced, was worth no more than a few cents a ton, nation after nation would be ruined.
“Doctor,” he said, “not a word of this discovery of yours must even be hinted at outside this room. While you have been busy here, we have just saved the Duchy and the United States from financial chaos. Now your discovery could undo everything and produce utter disaster and ruin in every nation of the world. You must dismantle your apparatus and discontinue your whole line of investigation.”
Kokintz took his big Oompaul pipe from his pocket, filled it with tobacco, lit it and took a few puffs. “I will do that on condition of one promise,” he said.
“What is it?” asked Mountjoy.
“Next time you want to bum a lot of paper in the dungeon please tell me. My birds suffered very badly from the smoke. They were very sick.”
“I promise,” said Mountjoy.
Kokintz nodded and, taking a can of dark-gray paint, proceeded to daub the gold brick with it thoroughly. “When it is dry I will put it back in the wall,” he said. “It is too heavy now, in any case, to be of use to me, even for pressing my plants.”
A Note About the Author
Leonard Wibberley was born in Dublin, Ireland, in 1915. When he was nine, his family moved to London. Seven years later, when his father died, he went to work as a stockroom apprentice for a publisher and later became a reporter. After various jobs, he came to the United States in 1943 and engaged in newspaper work here for ten years. Mr. Wibberley now devotes himself full time to writing. He lives in Her-mosa Beach, California, with his wife and six children.
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The Mouse on Wall Street Page 14