Descent from Xanadu by Harold Robbins Read Free Book Online Page B

it.”
    He took a folded document from his jacket pocket. “You’ll have to sign this.”
    She looked down at the paper. “You knew I would agree, didn’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “How did you know?”
    “Because we all loved each other,” he said, kissing her cheek.
    She looked up at him. “You’re very like your father, but very different from him too. You haven’t the acquisitive desires that he had. He wanted to grab every business he could own. You’re content just to hold the line.”
    “Father did it all,” he said. “There was nothing more in that area I could do. He’s built a machine that takes care of itself. If all of us were gone the business would remain on its own. In a way it’s a kind of a perpetual motion machine.”
    “Is that why you did what you did three years ago?” she asked. “As a kind of experiment?”
    He nodded.
    “Your father was upset at first. Then I think he began to understand.”
    “I hope so,” he said. “I remember the day he turned his office over to me. It was the week I graduated from M.I.T. and the first time I told him I would begin the research facility at Boca Raton.”
    “He couldn’t see that at all,” she said. “It wouldn’t make any money.”
    “He was right,” Judd said. “But he didn’t stop me.”
    “He kept his word,” she said. “He said it would be your business and that’s what he meant.”
    ***
    He had walked into the office that day in June. His father was at his desk. For a moment he felt shock at how thin his father appeared, then he looked into his eyes and the brightness was still there. He kissed his father, then Barbara, and shook hands with Judge Gitlin and the three assistant attorneys and accountants seated across the conference table behind a pile of documents.
    A screen was standing against the far wall. The first picture projected was a company chart showing the Crane companies and their interlocking lines. Under each company was the managing director’s name and his first assistant.
    There were two chairs at the head of the conference table. His father rose and with the help of a cane walked to one chair and gestured Judd to the other. Barbara sat in the chair at his father’s left; Judge Gitlin joined them at the table to Judd’s right.
    There was a silence around the table. They looked at his father solemnly. His father took a deep breath. “The king is not dead,” he said quietly. “He has abdicated.”
    The room was still silent.
    “All of you knew what I had planned,” he continued. “Maybe you believed I would not really carry out that plan. I don’t know. Now you know that I meant it to be true.”
    The people at the conference table were still silent.
    “Judd kept his word to me also. He finished his last year at Harvard, completed his graduate studies at M.I.T., and in between his studies, he traveled and visited every company and factory we control around the world.”
    He paused a moment and sipped from a glass of water in front of him. “The transfer of power is always difficult. In companies as much as in governments.
    “My father’s ambition was to build the most effective and diversified company in the world. A company that encompassed all the strata of the American economy. That was my father’s ambition.
    “That was not mine. My ambition was to expand that business into a multinational corporation that would encompass the world. With the power and wealth that affect its influence throughout the governments of the world—in truth, the number one company in the Fortune 500.
    “But my vision is not necessarily my son’s. His vision will be his own. And all the wisdom I bequeath can be summed up in these words.”
    He sipped again from the glass of water. “Power is both evil and good. I have always been conscious of this. For myself, I like to think that I have tipped the scale toward good. But I admit that occasionally evil has held some sway. I hope that in the end good has