The Fourth K

After a week together they returned to their normal lives, refreshed with new hope, a desire to help mankind, and a sharper perception of how all their activities could be meshed to preserve the structure of their society, and perhaps with closer personal relationships that could help them do business.

This present week had started on the Monday after Easter Sunday. Because of the crisis in national affairs with the killing of the Pope and the hijacking of the plane carrying the President's daughter and her murderer, the attendance had dropped to less than twenty.

George Greenwell was the oldest of these men. At eighty, he could still play te

Greenwell considered the national crisis none of his business unless it involved gr~4in in some way, for his company was privately owned and controlled most of the wheat in America. His shining hour had been thirty years ago when the United States had embargoed grain to Russia as a political ploy to muscle Russia in the cold war.

George Greenwell was a patriot but not a fool. He knew that Russia could not yield to such pressure. He also knew that the Washington-imposed embargo would ruin American farmers. So he had defied the President of the United States and shipped the forbidden grain by diverting it to other foreign companies, which relayed it to Russia. He had brought down the wrath of the American executive branch on his head. Laws had been presented to Congress to curtail the power of his family-held company, to make it public, to put it under some sort of regulatory control. But the Greenwell money contributed to congressmen and senators soon put a stop to that nonsense.

Greenwell loved the Socrates Club because it was luxurious but not so luxurious as to invite the envy of the less fortunate. Also, because it was not known to the media-its members owned most of the TV stations, newspapers and magazines. And also it made him feel young, enabled him to participate socially in the lives of younger men who were equal in power.

He had made a good deal of extra money during that grain embargo, buying wheat and corn from embattled American farmers and selling it dear to a desperate Russia. But he had made sure that the extra money benefited the people of the United States. What he had done had been a matter of principle, the principle being that his intelligence was greater than that of government functionaries. The extra money, hundreds of millions of dollars, had been fu

Greenwell prided himself on being civilized, based on his having been sent to the best schools, where he was taught the social behavior of the responsible rich and a civilized feeling of affection for his fellowman.

That he was strict in the dealings of his business was his form of art; the mathematics of millions of tons of grain sounded in his brain as clearly and sweetly as chamber music.

One of his few moments of ignoble rage had occurred when a very young professor of music in a university chair established by one of his foundations published an essay that elevated jazz and rock 'n' roll music above Brahms and Schubert and dared to call classical music "funereal."

Greenwell had vowed to have the professor removed from his chair, but his inbred courtesy prevailed. Then the young professor had published another essay in which the unfortunate phrase was "Who gives a shit for Beethoven?"

And that was the end of that. The young professor never really knew what happened, but a year later he was giving piano lessons in San Francisco.

The Socrates Club had one extravagance, an elaborate communications system. On the morning that President Ke

Only Greenwell knew that this information had been supplied by Oliver Oliphant, the Oracle.

It was a matter of doctrine that these yearly retreats of great men were in no way used to lay plans or organize conspiracies; they were merely a means for communicating general aims, to inform a general interest, to clear away confusion in the operation of a complicated society. In that spirit George Greenwell on Tuesday invited three other great men to one of the cheerful pavilions just outside the te

The youngest of these men, Lawrence Salentine, owned a major TV network and some cable companies, newspapers in three major cities, five magazines and one of the biggest movie studios. He owned, through subsidiaries, a major book-publishing house. He also owned twelve local TV stations in major cities. That was in the United States alone. He was also a powerful presence in the media of foreign countries. Salentine was only forty-five years old, a lean and handsome man with a full head of silvery hair, a crown of curls in the style of the Roman emperors but now much in fashion with intellectuals and people in the arts and in Holly wood. He was impressive in appearance and in intelligence, and was one of the most powerful men in American politics. There was not a congressman or senator or a member of the Cabinet who did not return his calls. He had not, however, been able to become friendly with President Ke

The second man was Louis Inch, who owned more important real estate in the great cities of America than any other individual or company. As a very young man-he was now only forty-he had first grasped the true importance of building straight up into the air to a seemingly impossible degree. He had bought airspace rights over many existing buildings and then built the enormous skyscrapers that increased the value of buildings tenfold. He more than anyone else had changed the very light of the cities, had made endless dark canyons between commercial buildings that proved to be more needed than anyone had supposed. He had made rents so impossibly high in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles for ordinary families that only the rich or very well off could live comfortably in those cities. He had cajoled and bribed municipal officials to give him tax abatements, and to do away with rent controls to such a degree that he boasted that his rental charge per square foot would someday equal Tokyo's.

His political influence, despite his ambitions, was less than that of the others meeting in the pavilion. He had a personal fortune of over five billion dollars, but his wealth had the inertness of land. His real strength was more sinister. His aims were the amassing of wealth and power without real responsibility to the civilization he lived in. He had extensively bribed public officials and construction unions. He owned casino hotels in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, shutting out the mobster overlords in those cities. But in doing so, he had, in the curious way of the democratic process, acquired the support of the secondary figures in criminal empires. All the service departments of his numerous hotels had contracts with firms that supplied tableware, laundry services, service help, liquor and food. He was linked through subordinates to this criminal underworld. He was, of course, not so foolish as to allow that link to be more than a microscopic thread. The name of Louis Inch had never been touched by any hint of scandal-thanks not only to his sense of prudence, but to the absence of any personal charisma.

For all these reasons he was actually despised on a personal level by nearly all the members of the Socrates Club. He was tolerated because one of his companies owned the land surrounding the club and there was always the fear that he might put up cheap housing for fifty thousand families and drown the club area with Hispanics and blacks.