He'd been playing God for two years and coming out on top. He'd reshaped history, built a secret atomic arsenal, and laid the foundation of a global techno-financial conglomerate. But the future, as it developed, proved to be a hungry and impatient creditor.
The first trouble started to appear on the horizon from the infinite, empty sweep of the Nevada desert. Out on a remote test stand, carved out of the desert wastelands at tremendous expense, the mockup of his "Neptune" rocket loomed in the scorching sun. The culmination of months' worth of building work, a three-stage giant that was Ezra's own ancestor of the Saturn V, it loomed over the desert floor. In the reinforced-concrete blockhouse building, David Sterling and Werner Heisenberg stood side by side, strange union of American practicality and German genius, gazing out over the countdown clock.
The countdown ticked downward to zero. The motors roared on the launch with a deafening crescendo of controlled flame that shook the desert floor. The rocket bucked, rose clear of the launchpad on its securing struts by a few feet, and then, in a maddening lurch, it listed. A crack in the first-stage engine mount caused a catastrophic imbalance. The Neptune, laden with hundreds of thousands of gallons of highly combustible rocket fuel, fell back on the pad and blew up in a towering, rolling fireball that engulfed the entire launch complex. The cost was astronomical. The time and morale lost were even higher.
Thousands of miles away, in his New Jersey lab, still another of Ezra's ambitious plans was foundering. The team tasked with developing the transistor, the solid-state marvel that was to revolutionize the digital world, was struggling. The device was coaxed to operate sometimes but not reliably. The germanium crystals so lovingly grown possessed minute flaws and the transistors shorted or produced erratic readings. The project was six months late and its cost had grown triple the original estimate. "It's a question of raw materials, Mr. Prentice," said the lab director over the phone, his voice strained. "We're attempting to write a perfect line using a blunt piece of charcoal."
The story was the same at his new computer division. His "supercomputer," a towering room-sized array of racks of wire and several thousand glowing vacuum tubes, was an engineering catastrophe. It consumed as much electricity as a small town and generated so much heat that the room was fitted with a revolutionary new kind of air conditioning just to prevent the parts from burning up. The machine ran perpetually apart, a single malfunctioning vacuum tube triggering a systems crash. "We've run into a physical barrier," the chief engineer reported grimly. "This sophisticated machine's heat and power requirements are beyond the limits we even know. We can't grow it or make it faster or it will destroy itself."
Ezra sat in a tense meeting in his New York office building, a second kind of fire seething in his belly. In front of him, his chief financial controllers, grim-faced men in black business suits, spread out the ugly truth. All of his books and charts told the same horrid story. His futuristic businesses were a money pit, burning up capital at a rate that proved unsustainable.
"Mr. Prentice," the chief controller ventured slowly but determinedly, "industrial units that do exist have lucrative profits. But collectively they are being completely consumed by the research and developmental expenses of the new businesses. The Neptune project, the solid-state division, the computer... they pose a tremendous strain on our cash flow. For the first time since you assumed the control of the Prentice Applied Science, the business is not growing; it is running in the red. Red ink. At this burn rate, we shall be faced with a critical liquidity crisis in a year or so."
Ezra listened, his face a mask of impassivity but in him a chilly knot was drawing tighter. He had the blueprint of the future but found its building a bloody, brutal, and prohibitively expensive war.
Later that afternoon, he met with his most unconventional and observant consultant: Baron von Hauser. In the reinforced, austere room that the Baron kept as his residence, Ezra laid out the string of disappointments and the foreboding financial dossiers. He expected a spark of schadenfreude, a gleam of triumph in his former enemy's eyes. But all he received was the dispassionate curiosity of a master tactician unpacking a stubborn problem.
The Baron listened intently, fingertips connected in front of him. "You find that a surprise?" he added after a while, his own voice a rich, urbane whisper. "You should not. You are not in the business of perfecting well-understood procedures for financial returns. You're involved in a battle. A battle against the physics and the inherent limits of current engineering. A battle like that is never neat. It is not the result of the flash of a solitary brilliant insight but the culmination of a thousand bloody, expensive setbacks."
He gestured toward the reports. "Your problem is not your vision; your vision is excellent. Your problem is your supply chain. You're assembling the machines of the year 2000 out of the equipment and raw materials of 1947. You cannot build a jet engine out of cast iron. You cannot build a microchip out of unpurified sand. You've been so obsessed about the end result—the rocket, the transistor. You've lost sight of the raw materials from out of which they must be built."
That lightning clinical examination of Von Hauser was like a flash of light and exposed before him the flaw in the master plan of Ezra. He so focused on the end objective that never once did he look into the road map and road condition. He assumed the materials. He would now have to manufacture the materials.
This realization called for a course correction. He would not give in; he would dig in.
He immediately launched a brand-new top-secret and highly funded project within Prentice Applied Science. He named it quite matter-of-factly the "Materials Division." He gathered his best minds—metallurgists, chemists, solid-state physicists, some of his brightest German researchers—and gave them a new set of mission-impossible tasks.
He told the first team, "The Neptune rocket didn't work out. The engine bells overheated and melted. I want you to design some all-new, very lightweight superalloys resistant to the kind of heat that would boil the steel to a soup."
To the second, he admonished, "Forget germanium. It is a faulty substrate. Your new focus is silicon. Develop a process—the Czochralski process, perhaps—for the growth of large ultrapure single-crystal silicon ingots. The future's not in the crystal; it's in the purity of the crystal."
To the third, "Our computer is perishing from the influence of warmth and electric leakage. I require new ceramic insulators, new coolers, new ways of coping with the inherent problems of energy and entropy."
This fresh undertaking would require a colossal new infusion of funds, monies his hemorrhaging business lacked. He was therefore driven back to the wellspring: the original Rockefeller family trust.
He stood before the board, an organization now grudgingly controlled on his behalf but still having a massive and influential faction governed by Junior. He didn't require financing for his flashy satellite project or his speculative computer venture. He called for a massive capital drawdown for a far less flashy reason.
"I need an immediate liquidation of one hundred million dollars," he announced, "to be directed into core materials science research."
The room erupted. Junior, his ego enhanced by the rumors about the financial troubles of Ezra, was outraged.
"A hundred million dollars?" said Junior. "To be spent on metallurgy?" "Ezra, we've heard the rumors! Your speculative enterprises are going belly-up!" "You're throwing good money after bad!" "Family funds," said his brother grimly, "aren't a bottomless well to finance your own hobby!"
Ezra's control over the vote shares, however strained, was still absolute. He looked once at his brother-in-law, his face set and unforgiving. The vote was taken. His loyalists who bound themselves to him through past victories and future possibilities voted. The capital call was pushed through.
He'd come out on top. But it was a Pyrrhic victory. He'd acquired the funding to build the very infrastructure of the next century but only by risking his vast empire and further alienating the conservative faction of his own family. The financial stranglehold tightened tighter still around his throat. He was more powerful yet more vulnerable than ever.