Howie And Andy Have A Talk
by Rob Morris
LATE FALL, 1946
Howard Stark liked to entertain in this out-of-the-way house, bought and paid for (utilities as well, paid in massive advance, payments and bills checked over by Jarvis for shenanigans) in ways that didn't automatically red-flag it as being his.
The people he liked to entertain were people who were nicely shaped and apportioned or those (shapely or not) who were his peers in some fashion or level. Only one of those few who knew about the place believed him when he said the truth : He had bought the place for another man, a friend who died during the war.
He'd found other uses for it, of course. But he'd give up every last one of those trysts to hand the keys over, if only that guy would show up, alive and well-if in somewhat understandable need of a blanket.
"He is here, Mister Stark."
"Both punctual as well as punctilious. Jarvis, show him into this study, then go upstairs and tune in WQXR on the big system. We should have symphonies to mask this cacophony."
Jarvis proved once more he was a butler of the classic mold.
"Actually, Mister Stark, until I just now had to deal with him for all of ninety seconds, I never truly understood your dislike for him. By description alone, one would think that he and Howard Stark would be great friends."
Of course, since Jarvis had one hell of a lot more than description alone to go on with that, Howard dismissed him without comment or correction.
"Now the fun begins. I could be with a lady most of America would kill to date, or chatting and exchanging snark with my erudite butler. Instead, I do this. Gee, Howard-you're such a super-genius."
He didn't chastise himself for this self-conversation, realizing he would soon be in a state where this was small potatoes, mental health-wise.
Andrew Ryan, financier, manufacturer, and titan of business, entered and nodded to one of his few true peers. Howard wished that they could have been friends, but Stark had been, with some reservations, a three-time FDR supporter. If Ryan had been at all religious, Stark was certain, he would have had Roosevelt's body checked for a birthmark of three sixes.
"Your manservant's manners could use some polishing."
Of course, there were other reasons their friendship was likely impossible.
"He's a butler, Andy. Manservant sounds like I found and captured him in the wilds of Lancashire and broke him to serve champagne and horderves. "
In fact, there were many reasons.
"He-did not once tell me what a pleasure and an honor my presence is. Just what did you teach him about manners and civility? Because it's sorely lacking."
Howard wanted to resist the opening, but it was chasm-like, and beckoned to him seductively.
"Actually, I'm the one who learns those things from him. Jarvis is all business. He knew you weren't here to chat with him, so he moved you to me quickly. That's a trait to be appreciated, in my book."
The 'big audio system' - a personal and painstaking concoction of gadgets Stark worked on whenever he was bored - came on just then from upstairs. Ryan seemed to appreciate the way the music flowed through the house, if little else.
"QXR? You actually play a station that refused to let you become its owner?"
Stark let the sounds suffuse him, hoping they would aid him in his imminent stress.
"Actually, that's why I play it. They proved they had class when they wouldn't let me anywhere near it."
Jarvis soon emerged with tea and crackers, then crisply withdrew and sealed the impromptu meeting room's doors.
"I take it back, Stark. He knows his place, well enough. Also knows not to get underfoot."
Howard was in a nice place with all the comforts in very nice weather. For all that, his skin was starting to crawl.
"Andy, we've so far had an extensive conservation about Edwin Jarvis, and while I love the guy, I think we should move on to other subjects."
Ryan proved he could counter-attack, even when it probably wasn't needed.
"Of course, Howard-we could discuss, say, how it feels to no longer be hunted down like a dog?"
Howard for his part didn't bother to smile as he gave back better than he got.
"You tell me, Andrei Rayanovsky."
Ryan bristled, and tried hard to act like he wasn't.
"I am not ashamed of my origins-I don't even attempt to disguise them. I was trying to offer empathy to someone else who's been swatted by the heavy hand of the autocrat."
Stark opened his mouth to speak, stopped and took out a pen and paper instead. Ryan shook his head.
"What are you doing?"
Howard finished writing.
"Andy Ryan mentions the word empathy without veins appearing on his forehead. That's a historical event worth noting."
Ryan was also not one to resist an opening.
"If you can stop your vain effort at being a very poor man's Groucho-Marx-we can make some real history here today."
Howard indeed bypassed a whole boatload of quips and one liners, but not for Ryan's request, so much as to see the visit done more quickly.
"I'm listening."
Almost surprised at the non-sarcastic response, Ryan took half a second longer than his norm to start.
"Howard, they came after you recently. With everything they had, and they always have quite a bit, don't they? Those committees that never really dissolve, and love to impugn and accuse while the ones sitting on them coast to easy reelection sliding on your blood-trail. Their guys and gals on radio and newsreel, gleefully repeating whatever their masters tell them to bark up. Their secret police, focusing on you with both myopia and monomania. And why? I'll tell you why? Because a few years back, one of their jack-booted thugs stole what was yours and used it to kill innocents, enraging an equally short-sighted commie functionary into targeting-not the thug, but the man the thug robbed. And-Justice For All."
Howard again dialed back his sarcasm to manageable levels.
"If you're trying to convince me that this year's little episode wasn't Uncle Sam's finest hour, then Andy, you are preaching to the choir's lead tenor. Being as I've said as much in the press, it still makes me wonder what you're getting at."
Howard also wondered how Ryan knew of matters whose fine details were by definition top secret, but didn't press. Stark had long suspected that, if the so-called 'Rich Man's Plot' against FDR had any reality, Andrew Ryan was among the ones at the center of it. It was no secret at all that Ryan had been recruiting returning officers - only officers, no enlisted - so the grapevine became not so mysterious, if still a little troubling.
"Howard, I have always been astounded by you. You play their game. You hide almost none of your wealth, and so Uncle Sugar comes calling on you twice as hard - not that any of that bend-over bought you protection when our 'concerned' legislators began barking. You fritter one third of your assets away, you give away another third, and half of that, you push into what I have to at least term esoteric research of dubious value. But you still have money to burn-even if a good deal of that comes from bowing and scraping to that pinko couple and their failed haberdasher heir apparent."
Howard again tried to keep it mild (for him), but was rapidly failing to see the point of doing so.
"There's no shame in government work, Andy. Should I deny myself a huge customer? Not good business."
Ryan may have thought he was being gracious in his response, and more's the pity.
"Yes. You do like to suck off the teat, don't you?"
At that opening, Howard's restraint flew straight out the window.
"At every last opportunity!"
Ryan was not slow on the uptake, and sneered at this.
"Do you and people like you have to turn every last thing someone says into innuendo?"
Howard knew he was prolonging the visit, but again, the invitation was too much to resist.
"That all depends. Just whose endo are we innuing?"
As Ryan rose, his finger pointing, Howard raised a hand in the air, calling for a truce.
"You-I believe-were telling me that despite my many flaws, I am someone who brings something to the table."
A reminder of why he came was all it took to bring Ryan's blood pressure back to normal.
"Yes. I think that, the most amazing thing about you, Howard, is that despite laboring under the twin weights of your own peccadilloes and the heavy hand upon all our backs and necks, you thrive. That makes me want to propose to you an idea for the ages. It's one only someone like you would possibly comprehend and also be able to lend something to."
Howard, for all those admitted flaws, knew when to shut up and listen to an interesting offer. Whatever flaws Ryan had, he was never short of having something interesting in the making. Ryan saw that he had Stark's attention, and nodded.
"Proposed - the Russians will one day have the bomb. Agreed?"
Howard nodded.
"Sure. Even barring moles or spies, the damned thing exists and is known of. The fact that one group made it work means that another can and will eventually achieve the same result. Britain tried to keep the secrets of its industrial mills, but we nabbed some information and figured out the rest. Some things are just inevitable. Depressingly so, in this case."
Ryan smiled and brought home his point.
"Dead depressing. As in the Russian policy of Scorched Earth is taken planet-wide. As in Manifest Destiny, as it played out for the Indians in the Americas, played out for us one and all. When these two nuclear-powered foes clash, it won't matter which side's madmen called the first strike, now will it? Any more than it will matter who gets in the last licks. Once it's all done, a world of shadows like Hiroshima, and the sick growing ever sicker, with no one left to tend them except those slightly less ill. Of course, that's just based on current technology. Do you think these lunatics won't press for ever-higher yields, and more destructive versions of what we now know?"
Howard searched his internal dictionary and thesaurus for something, anything to counter this practical cynicism.
"It is what they tend to do."
He had nothing. Unable to turn it back, he used his fantastic memory to recall odd moments with Andrew Ryan.
"You're talking about your Gulch, aren't you?"
Ryan shook his head.
"My old romantic notions about finding a piece of land so deep in the Rockies, even the hungry parasites of the coming economic collapse could never reach it, fell away with the corruption of Doctor Einstein's work. Hard radiation is a poor respecter of mountain ranges. But you have a good recall, Howard. Because while the Gulch is dead, long live the Gulch. I have a notion of a place where those who spend their lives limiting and turning back the ideas and work of others will simply have no place. I even took a page from the Bible-Thumpers own good book to name it. Rapture."
Howard stopped for a second. In this case his sarcasm was not in play, but his ever-over-clocking mind was.
"Rapture really isn't in the Bible, per se. The ideas most describe when talking about it are a combination of some vague passages in Revelation with a lot of extrapolation by British and American evangelical preachers. The whole notion is less than a hundred years old."
Whether Howard was being deliberately difficult or just an information maven, Ryan looked and sounded annoyed.
"Yes, and Coca-Cola's Santa Claus gave us the modern design over the last two decades! Whether twenty, one hundred, or two thousand years, a myth is a myth, except to the gullible, to whom it is meat and manna. To the select, the driven, it is irony to be appreciated and moved forward from."
Howard had hoped to avoid becoming like his father, apt to relate endlessly on any given topic broached, and now wondered if it wasn't somewhere in the Stark makeup to be just that way.
"I'm sorry, Andy, really. But just where would this place of yours be? A city in the clouds, like some who believe in the Rapture see Heaven?"
Ryan again seemed flustered, though this time not upset.
"What? A city in the...No! That's utterly ridiculous. As to where it will be? That's something I'm keeping close to my vest. The only people I want to know about it are the people I bring there to stay. Howard Stark, I would want one of those people to be you. I could use partners on this world-altering venture. Common sense knows I don't always get you, Howard Stark, but I know results, and you know how to get those. Your ideas are always five to ten years ahead of the curve at minimum. I find more in some of your grand failures-like that flying car and Horton's Flaming Man-than I do in some people's so-called successes. Do you know what Detroit is trying to do to Preston Tucker, while peddling their less-than-quality wares with a smile and a poisoned handshake? Make no mistake, Howard-they'd all gladly do the same to either of us."
Howard was starting to get his equilibrium back, and with that he spotted some gaping holes in these ideas.
"So your unknown site will not only be proof against atom bombs, but also greed?"
Ryan didn't counter, but instead moved in on these words.
"Petty greed, yes. Self-interest should not be disguised with grandiloquent wordplay, but spoken of openly, without shame. When did it become a crime to make a buck, and say it straight that I am out to make a buck? Oh, I forgot-in March of 1933."
Howard Stark had in fact buried two friends in 1945, and in neither case were these men he ever expected to call friend.
"Do you really want to get into this one again, Andy? Because I'll be glad to. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not some communist ruinator. The fact that we even still have a capitalist system can be laid at his doorstep."
Swords had been drawn, and fire exchanged. There was no going back.
"How can a man who has made so much himself be so brainwashed by the cult surrounding the High King Of All Takers? His programs took a bad situation and spun it into near open revolt on every front you can name. A son of wealth did his damnedest to make sure no one was wealthy, ever again."
Howard was not even near to letting this one go.
"Andy, while you-and even I-and all the others just like us were bemoaning incipient socialism, the actual commies and fascists were gaining ground. You call it a bad situation? I wouldn't even call it a Depression. Our economy went away. For several months, maybe even a couple of years, it vanished. To my eyes, it was starting to look like it would never come back. The people-the paying customers we rich guys need to become and stay rich guys-had lost all hope, not only because of the downturn itself, but for a feeling no boot-strap talk could fix, that it was all a big fix, with no chance of those who weren't already in doing anything but falling further and harder. I shuddered in November of 1932, same as you. But then I went and talked to the man. His plan was overly dependent on government programs, a bit on the preachy side, and relied way too much on wishful thinking. And Yet-It was a plan. All our class could tell these folks was-get a job. Well, there weren't any. So when someone comes along with the promise that he can actually get them something with which to feed themselves and their own-they took to it. You know what I found out when I talked to the man?"
Ryan tried to borrow a page from Stark.
"That the wheels on his chair were hypnosis discs?"
Howard pointed.
"That was actually pretty good, Andy-but No. I learned that he himself had qualms about laying out as much as he ended up. That he had the same fears about dependence and a lack of motivation among those he wanted to help. In short, he offered up a businessman's analysis about why all the things he and his were doing might cause a bigger problem than was already there."
Ryan was perhaps buoyed by his prior quip.
"Doctor Einstein offered a classic definition of insanity-doing the same thing over and over again, and then wishing against hope for a different result. Tell me how Roosevelt's madness differs even an iota from that truism."
Howard shrugged.
"A recognition of madness by the mad? He told me that he just couldn't come up with anything tangible except trying everything. Things were exactly that bad. There were missteps, sure. Some of his people didn't exactly know how to sell a program, and caused some unneeded panic. Our circle didn't help matters, declaring war based on campaign promises and proposals rather than actual efforts and laws. But based solely on the idea that things could eventually get better, things eventually started to. After a certain point, even after I disagreed with certain steps, I saw what my pulling out would do to what little we had accomplished, so I stayed, even during the court-packing scheme."
Ryan then surprised Stark, at least a little.
"Court-packing-hah! Why is it that the one thing the man did that I understood, even his sycophants vilify? I mean, when faced with unyielding opposition, you take a creative look at the existing rules of operation, and you move to neutralize them. And what about all the moaning over the Japanese relocations? Unconstitutional, depriving of liberty? Certainly. But whatever his own role in creating Pearl Harbor, the man saw race riots in the offing, and moved to make them moot."
Okay, he surprised him a lot, and disappointed him greatly.
"What about all their property that got snatched up, when they were taken away to the camps?"
Ryan shrugged.
"Do I really need to go into what untended property does to real estate values, and therefore the greater economy? Sad for those that lost, but this is the real world. There tend to be winners and losers."
Only the fact that Ryan chose not to add 'and some of them could have been spies, after all' to his words kept Howard from punching him in the mouth. To make matters worse, he wasn't even sure that Ryan even meant all this, and wasn't just provoking him by backhandedly praising FDR at his worst moments.
"Obviously, we disagree on Roosevelt's actions and legacy, Andy. Are you sure you want someone like me to join your club?"
Ryan nodded, never offering so much as a clue as to Howard's theory on his provocative words.
"You've made some bad and foolish choices, Howard. But who hasn't? Mister Hughes and his wooden plane. He'll be lucky if that beast flies once. Coke not buying out Pepsi when they had the chance? Myself-believing that land I owned and trees I planted might belong solely to me? The list of folly goes ever on. But Rapture is the chance to start with a fresh slate in so many ways."
Howard mused that while no one would ever call Andrew Ryan an Evangelical, only an idiot would say that he was not an evangelist, for those things he believed in.
"If you won't tell me where, will you tell me who?"
An evangelist is also always a salesman, and Howard knew the way to get a salesman to reveal more was to show just enough interest to get them excited.
"Simply the best. The innovators-the makers. Those who have the drive, the edge, the spirit of wanting to be ahead, because ahead is the place to be. Because those who are behind never quite catch up, do they? Full of excuses and aided ably by fellow travelers, they stay good, lazy and fat - so the dictators have something slow to eat, easy to catch when things start to go south."
Howard didn't roar, but his counter was no less ferocious for that lack.
"Sometimes good, hard-working people can fall behind. Fall off the track. In and of itself, accepting some kind of helping hand doesn't mean they're all a bunch of lazy bums."
Ryan nodded.
"Well yes, there are always exceptions to every rule, of course. I myself accepted a basket of food at the docks, when I first came here. But I made damned sure this was among the only things I ever took. I'd taken my fill of false promises in the place I left."
He resumed his pitch.
"Howard, how often have you been held back by those who thought they knew better than you?"
If Howard's response sounded like more sarcasm, it was in fact among the most serious the man had ever said or likely would say.
"Not often enough. Not nearly often enough."
"More snark? Another acid response when I at least merit a real one?"
Howard's face showed none of its usual humor, a look that almost unnerved Ryan.
"I am in deadly earnest. I just got past the worst several months of my life, because of stuff I created, merely because I could, never once asking if I should. There are those times, Andrew, even for people with our drive and brainpower. You ask me if there are times I was held back? I say I pray to the God you flatly deny and that I doubt that someone had stopped me. So if one of your selling points is that I'll have no one to hold me back in your planned community utopia, you're already down one strike going in."
Ryan shook his head.
"You want someone to keep you from crossing into new frontiers? What the hell kind of an attitude is that for an entrepreneur?"
Howard was again deadly serious.
"One that I hope to transmit to my heirs. There are places you shouldn't go, doors you shouldn't open, breakthroughs that shouldn't be broken through, and goals that shouldn't be met. There's plenty enough places to go without traipsing into the mine field that you yourself planted."
Ryan looked up and about him, before finally looking back at Howard.
"I am really terribly sorry that those Hyde Park trust-fund liberals robbed you of your manhood, Howard. I admire your mind and your drive, and when the day comes that I learn how you died in fire along with this world, I think that I will even mourn you."
Stark drew himself in, and reminded himself that perhaps making an outright enemy of Andrew Ryan was also not desirable, even if things seemed to leading just that way.
"Well, I was presuming you had other selling points. That the one you first offered was a non-starter shouldn't be the end of it."
Seeing that his colleague was neither smoking with fury nor snarking, Ryan continued.
"How many laws operate under the presumption that other people can tell you who you can associate with, employ, be employed as-marry? How many laws-crafted by both sides of the political spectrum-tell a writer what they can and cannot write, record, or film?"
Howard nodded, both to be peaceable and because he found nothing to contradict.
"Too damned many laws, in all those things."
Ryan chuckled.
"The damn thing is, for some of those, even the government doesn't want to regulate it. But the one tyranny that trumps theirs forces even their heavy hand, taking them away from the robbing and pillaging they're experts at. The tyranny of the busybody runs and ruins more lives than Frankie Fed and Joe Stalin combined. People actually occasionally manage to tell the governments No. But the busybody always outs, because everyone is afraid of what they might do, if they get really upset-never once realizing that they are permanently upset, and that they in fact like being upset."
Howard thought back to recent events.
"Say, like an uptight matron running the lives of young women in her apartment building, tossing them on the street if a man is anywhere near their rooms?"
Ryan thought for a moment.
"I would argue that a property owner, or that owner's authorized agent, has the right to run things as they see fit within reason. But really, they should be chiefly concerned with noise, property damage and late rent. Yes. I can say that within Rapture, such a person would not do very well. But I'm speaking more of the matron who writes harsh words about a play she doesn't understand to a hack newspaper columnist who smells blood being able to shut down an entire production."
Howard thought to lighten the mood once again, and in this he would fail.
"Well, if it's one of Sander Cohen's cortex-melting wonders, I might want to give the sweet old dame a new car."
Ryan did not chuckle at this, and Howard drew from that who one of his other partners would be. But Ryan, to his credit, turned things right around.
"A production like that should stand or fall on whether a lot of people are willing to pay to see it. A marriage should take place based on attraction and possibly, affection. A job should be filled by that person best able and most willing to do it the best anyone can. Am I crossing a line, Howard?"
Stark now had the bare stirrings of interest in what he was hearing, filtered though that was by his dislike of much of what Ryan stood for. So he asked more questions.
"In such a removed location, how do you propose we create a standing for this new nation in international trade and commerce?"
Ryan could not realize that the answer he gave was likely the first and final nail in the coffin of his proposal.
"I propose-that we don't. All trade and commerce will be among the citizens of Rapture. No, international trade invites in the parasite. Gives them treaties that force you to obey, and limits your choices to-chiefly their own. Trade from outside also begs the weaker, cheaper product, and poor production methods. No mediocre people, no mediocre goods. Trade among only the sharpest means innovation will never, and indeed can never halt. No one will dare to be lazy, for how quickly they can and will be overtaken."
Howard, a man never shy about speaking up or speaking out, dropped to silence for a full thirty seconds as he considered every last word Ryan had just said.
"So-you'll only trade among yourselves-alone? No goods from the outside, ever?"
Ryan made a pshaw motion.
"I'm not an idiot, Howard. For a time, we will need supplies from elsewhere-certain amenities impossible to introduce right away where we're going. To that end, I have retained the services of a rough-and-tumble but able shipping service."
Howard made his last attempt to lighten the mood that meeting, and it was if anything, an even bigger failure than before.
"Just so long as it's not Fontaine's operation, you should do alright for yourself."
When Ryan did not laugh and indeed sneered at this, Howard felt compelled to keep on, whether he liked Ryan or not.
"Andy, Frank Fontaine? He's got more faces than a campaigning politician. Crooks call him crooked. A noted-ehh, entrepreneur of Italian-American extraction-yeah, he was a mobster-once told me something. He said, that if he had a child molester, a dirty squealer, and Fontaine at his mercy, and he had only two bullets, you know what he said he'd do?"
Ryan rolled his eyes.
"I know, I know. He'd shoot Fontaine twice."
Howard shook his head.
"Nope. He'd make an offer to the squealer and the molester that, whoever does a better job of beating Fontaine to death gets to live. Then he'd have them fight it out, and pistol-whip the one who survives. Hey, it was a mobster."
Ryan seemed to be doing some mental math.
"Well, he did make his goals, and saved the cost of two bullets. Who did you say this mobster was?"
When Ryan saw Stark's disbelieving face, he concluded his pitch.
"Look, whether Mister Fontaine is rogue or thief, the combined brainpower I'm assembling in Rapture can run rings around one little con artist. So at long last, Howard, will you be a part of what we are building? I can't give you names at the moment, except to say that they will one and all be names you would know and respect. So - in or out?"
Howard knew the answer he had to give.
"The answer is No."
Ryan, who honestly expected to at least receive a plea for more time to consider, had himself never considered an easy No as a possible response.
"You'll excuse me if I demand to know why my time was wasted."
Howard found his words even more easily than he found his no.
"First of all, you came here. You asked to come here, so don't bark at me about wasted time. I heard what you had to offer, and I turned down that offer. We even had a spirited debate on a lot of related matters, and some stupid crap, that's mostly on my side of things, so sorry. You want to know why I turned you down so flat, Andy?"
"I think that I deserve to know that, yes."
Howard pointed at the house around them.
"I didn't originally buy this place for myself. I bought it for a returning war veteran-who never made it home. He had nothing in common with us. For a while, he was one of those chumps working every NRA job he could find, and sometimes, yes, taking checks he didn't precisely earn, but always while seeking a real job that no blustering Congressman could vote out of existence. He was as scrawny and unfit a specimen as you could ever hope to find-"
Ryan raised a hand in front of Stark.
"Stop. Just stop right there. Because the story of Steven Rogers doesn't disprove my point. It's not even the exception that proves the rule. Rogers was all those things you mentioned, but his desire to serve his country, such as it is, placed him in line for a risky opportunity that paid off and made of him an over-man, and eventually, a legend. That man proves all my points, and I shame you for leaning on his memory."
Howard got right back to it.
"I'm very much unashamed, in my love for the memory of Steven Rogers. He was an over-man before his first test, just like you said. But he, in becoming the Super Soldier, still never forgot where he came from. He, in becoming super-human, never lost his empathy for the little guy. Yes, some of them are whiners and moaners, but I've met enough of our class to say they're not alone, in that or in feeding off-you know. I don't see how you say that with a straight face. The name Steven means Crowned Ruler - a king. But he never wanted any crown. To the end, he was in his own mind just a kid from the streets of New York who wanted to stop a bully named Adolf Hitler. So, Andy? It is in the name and memory of Captain America that I reject your offer. But I wish you well in your hidden city. I hope it works out for you."
Ryan did not shake Stark's proffered hand as he got up to leave.
"Don't offer me your phony charity. Also, don't think you've done me any disservice, Stark. You just promoted yourself to one day being the smartest man on the atomic ash-pile."
Enraged and confused and looking it, Ryan was out the door and in his waiting car very quickly. When it drove off and was well down the path, Howard nodded.
"So what did you think?"
Emerging from a well-hidden anteroom next to what had been a meeting room, Agent Peggy Carter gave her assessment.
"He's well on his way to building his hidden city. According to Thompson, he's purchased a copious amount of materials from all over the world, all of which seem to go to his massive private yacht, parked a few hundred miles off of Greenland."
Howard sighed.
"Too bad the US doesn't have a major base in that region. Andy is building Atlantis, and he thinks no one notices."
Carter shrugged.
"When one builds a miracle for the ages in well-traveled waters near to a rather sizable military base equipped with every variety of radar known, well, people are apt to talk. Even people paid not to. By the way, it was very gracious of you to wish him well, after all that, even if you didn't mean it."
Howard shook his head.
"Peggy, I meant every last word. I hope he does well. Sometimes, the heavy hand doesn't know it's own strength. Other times, it knows it all too well. The people I want holding me back are my friends, not Officious Under-Secretary Number Five-Thirty-Five. If a place like his can work, it could produce great things."
Peggy inferred something from his words.
"You don't believe it will, do you?"
Howard looked out the window, wishing Steve could have seen the stunning view. That his could-have-been-almost-widow could was some consolation, though.
"I don't believe it can. To hear Andy tell it, he's surrounding himself with people like himself, and that cannot go well. Just like Steve never left behind who he really was, Andy is still that bitter kid who watched everything his family had taken from them by people who insisted he thank them for their theft. I suspect he always will be. Fill a whole city with nothing but go-getters? It sounds great on paper, but you need a mix of personalities to really keep things moving. If nothing but self-interest runs that city, then it will eventually run it into the ocean floor."
Carter pulled out an atlas with a map of the Atlantic Ocean next to Greenland as she responded.
"Well, no one philosophy can satisfy everyone. Supposedly, pure self-interest motivates everyone to keep up, but they forget for someone to be ahead, someone else must by definition be left behind. The inverse can also be true - even without the Russian model, pure communalism becomes a psychotic devotion to what is seen as sharing but can easily become stealing. Howard?"
Stark broke away from the window and looked at the map.
"Yeah?"
"There have been the oddest energy anomalies in the area Mister Ryan is building in. Two individuals have been witnessed observing him repeatedly in surveillance photos - a man and a woman dressed in impeccable late Victorian clothing-possibly siblings. Yet that's not the oddest thing of all."
She marked the map several hundred miles from Ryan's position.
"There are signs of other underwater activity here we cannot account for. Didn't you and Steve once drive your yacht over that area? Forge a treaty-with a local potentate, so to speak?"
Stark seemed to suddenly recall something.
"Yeah. That one really changed up the U-Boat situation. Oh, Andy. Be careful where you build."
Howard shook his head as he looked at the map.
"Do you think I should have told Andy about Prince Namor?"
(Author's Note : The NRA Howard mentions in passing is not the modern gun lobby, but the New Deal employment program, the National Recovery Administration)