Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

sat stone-faced and slit-eyed. To the casual observer at a distance—someone in the jury box, say—they might not even seem to be awake. But Praxis could see beads of sweat at Richard’s hairline. The boy was terrified. Good!
    A hundred and forty million buck-a-ding-dongs was a terrifying number. And the actual cash amount was only going to go up from there. Since the start of the Continuing Currency Crisis—which the news media promptly shortened to “C3”—a couple of years ago, the value of money had been eroding faster than a sugar cube in hot tea. In previous inflations, that might have been a good thing: take on a big debt today, watch it become pocket change in a decade or so. But these were modern times, and everyone had access to fast computers. All future payments—and that included jury awards, which would not become final until the verdict was in, as well as any scheme for amortization or delayed distribution—were now made in constant dollars, calculated with the “C$” button on the latest banking apps, and indexed to the value of money at the point of sale or, in this case, the date of actual loss. By the time this lawsuit played out, PE&C might be in the hole for a billion dollars of current value. While that might not be such a horrific number in the sweet by-and-by, the prospect of it bearing down on future balance sheets gave everyone the heebie-jeebies.
    Technically, ultimately, the buck stopped with John Praxis himself as chief executive officer and chairman of the board—for even a private company had bylaws and needed the appearance of being run by a council of elders. However, for the past two years he had been transitioning into an emeritus position, heading for semi-retirement, and was trotted out mainly for diplomatic functions like ribbon cuttings with governors and heads of state. And for buck-forty-million foul-ups—all right, fuck -ups—like the St. Brigid’s contract.
    At sixty-four years of age, he was now the firm’s strategic thinker and hadn’t involved himself in its daily operations for six or seven years, and not at the technical level, the ground level, for a dozen years more. That level of involvement was where you walked the site, smelled the dirt, and used your eyes and brain and accumulated knowledge from a hundred other sites to know the land and its geology, know which way the water table flowed, and which part of a hill was likely to collapse in a slide. Where you occasionally put a bare hand into the outflow from the cement mixer and rubbed it between your fingers, to know the consistency and quality of the sand and gravel you were pouring. Where you could just look in the eyes of your subcontractors and tell that a braying jackass like Stephen Macedo, their site superintendent on St. Brigid’s, wouldn’t question when his men started patching over cracks in the foundation. Where you could just shake hands with an operator like Howard Chisholm and tell from his distant, distracted manner that he didn’t know where he was getting his aggregate from and, furthermore, didn’t really care, so long as the price was right.
    Once John Praxis had those skills, because he’d worked his way up. Despite his standing as the sole male in the family’s third generation, and his holding an advanced engineering degree from Stanford University, his father Sebastian had still made John walk the ground, know the men, and run the numbers on each of his projects. At first, he was only allowed to assist a more experienced project manager. Only later, with experience of his own, did he get to manage the work himself. It was training he should have demanded of his own sons. But Leonard had never been any good at math, had flunked out of engineering while taking calculus and gone into art history, and finally earned a master’s degree in fine arts. He had come into the company on the administrative side, marketing and sales, and worked his way up from there. Richard, on the other