The Destroyer - 81 - The Destroyer 081 - Hostile Takeover by Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir

Author:Warren Murphy & Richard Sapir [Murphy, Warren & Sapir, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Pulp Action
ISBN: 9780451166012
Publisher: PINNACLE BOOKS
Published: 1990-07-22T23:00:00+00:00

"I have no aptitude for publishing, Father," Smith had said with the simple, unchallengeable logic that dominated his thinking.

"You can learn, boy. The Smiths have been in publishing for over a hundred years."

"My mind is made up," Smith said stiffly. He did not want to remind his father that the family firm of Smith gotten its start publishing dime novels during the Civil War and graduated to cheap fiction magazines at the turn of the century. Nathan Smith never allowed one of his firm's magazines into the house. He didn't object to publishing them, but he felt it beneath the dignity of a true Smith to be caught reading one.

"Take the summer off. Come work for the firm." For the first time, Nathan Smith's voice lifted. It was almost wheedling.

"I am sorry, Father," Harold Smith said, and he meant it. It was the first time Harold had ever stood up to his father, and it was painful beyond endurance. He had received a full scholarship to Dartmouth. The matter was out of crotchety Nathan Smith's hands. To a man used to being obeyed without question, it was an unforgivable slight.

Smith's unwarm relationship with his father cooled completely after that day. He continued to pay the usual respects during family holidays, but as the years passed and his responsibilities increased, it became less and less possible to visit the family compound in New Hampshire.

His mother had passed away first, in her sleep. Harold and Nathan Smith, although over twenty years apart in age, were by then two aging men. At the funeral they spoke barely a word to one another. Harold had tried, but was curtly rebuffed. Nathan Smith's bitter disappointment in his son was expressed in his too-loud complaints to other mourners that Harold's lazy cousins were mismanaging the family firm, preventing Nathan Smith from entering honored retirement.

The next time Harold saw his father, six years later, he was in a wheelchair and his wheezing breath fogged the clear plastic oxygen mask affixed to his mouth. The eyes were unchanged, pale, disappointed, and cold as glacial ice.

Harold hadn't known what to say to his father. He never had. By that time, Smith had assumed his responsibilities as director of CURE.

"Father, I think we should put aside our differences," Smith had suggested in a quiet voice.

Old Nathan Smith looked daggers at his grown son. He spoke three words, the last words he would ever speak to his only son, who had always been dutiful except for that one matter.

"You disappoint me," Nathan Smith had croaked.

And as Harold Smith left his father in the Gilmore County Retirement Home-the same brick building he used to walk by every day on the way to high school-he felt an aching void in the pit of his stomach. By then the family firm was only a publisher of movie fan magazines and crossword-puzzle books, but CURE was the fire wall that stood between American democracy and anarchy.

Smith had fulfilled his resolute sense of duty to a degree his narrow-minded father could never have imagined, and never learned.

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