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was a money-loser for Howard Christian. It ate up almost a quarter of a billion dollars of his cash each year. Howard didn’t mind. At that rate, to misquote Charles Foster Kane, he’d be broke in…140 years.
    Howard Christian was different from most multibillionaires in many respects, and a big one was this: he bought things. Most members of that very small club that never had meetings and mostly couldn’t stand one another were content to husband their vast holdings of stock, and if they bought something, it was probably another corporation. What they did, mostly, was to move money around. Money in motion generates more money, as surely as one of Newton’s laws.
    Christian didn’t much care for money movement, for banking, for the stock market. He had bought companies in his time, naturally he had his bankers, and he owned a great deal of stock, but none of that was his main interest.
    He liked real estate, he liked building things on his property, just like the Monopoly games he had played as a child. He liked research and development, spent upwards of three billion dollars a year on projects most accountants would estimate as unlikely to return much profit. More often than not, they were wrong. His own fortune came from blue-sky research, and he never forgot it. He had, in fact, made two huge fortunes, though the second triumph wouldn’t have been possible without the infusion of vast amounts of money from the first fortune.
    Infusion.
He liked that. The source of his first fortune was discoveries and patents he held in the field of nanotechnology, specifically in the design and assembly of the kind of molecular transistors currently to be found in the CPUs of almost every computer on the planet, and in outer space, too. He had done the research for these devices in a tiny laboratory, funded with only a few hundred thousand in grant money.
    The path to the second fortune was paved and greased withbillions from his first company, Nanobyte. Everybody laughed, all the technobullies had kicked silicon sand in his face and scoffed that it couldn’t be done, but in seven years he had the first practical and functioning fusion reactor. It was beneath him now, over a hundred feet below Resurrection Tower, and it was the chief reason that all the lights on all the floors of the tower burned all night, in spite of southern California electric rates so ruinous that even Howard might not have been able to pay the bill year after year. But fusion power was cheap, once the reactor was built. A dozen such reactors were being built all around Los Angeles by his second company, ConFusion, Inc.
    But now that all that was done, now that he had revolutionized technology twice, and on a scale no one had equaled since Edison, Howard Christian devoted most of his time to his twin passions: show business and collecting.
    He had the means to be a second Hearst, pillaging the world’s museums for great art, but he had tried it and found it unsatisfying. He enjoyed some of the old masters of the Renaissance, but most of their work was not for sale or came onto the market so infrequently you could grow old waiting to have a crack at a particular Rembrandt or Titian. He was puzzled by the impressionists, and baffled by everything since then. What was he supposed to do? Hang an ugly mess by Pollock in his office and then stand and stare at it, wondering why anybody spent six dollars on crap like that, much less a million, and feeling like a fool? Pretend he really liked some stupid scrawl by Picasso? He owned quite an extensive collection of original Norman Rockwells, a single Monet that he found pleasant to look at, hanging behind his desk, and that was the extent of his fine art collection.
    No, Howard Christian’s mania was for things a lot more recent. He collected twentieth-century ephemera, and automobiles and aircraft of any vintage.
    His idea of a wonderful day was to drive his silver-gray 1937 Packard V-12 convertible coupe to a toy