"How have you set it up?"
Harker drew the papers from his portfolio. "Twenty million is to be established as a trust fund for your grandchildren and for the children of your grandson Frederick. Thirty million is to be granted to the Bryant Foundation for Astronautical Research. Fifty thousand is to be divided among your children, ten thousand to each."
"Is that last bit necessary?" Bryant asked with sudden ferocity.
"I'm afraid it is."
"I wanted to cut those five jackals off without a penny!" he thundered. Then, subsiding, he coughed and said, "Why must you give them so much?"
"There are legal reasons. It makes it harder for them to overthrow the will, you see."
The old man was reluctant to accept the idea of giving his children anything, and in a way Harker could see the justice of that. They were a hateful bunch. Bryant had garnered millions from his space journey, and had invested the money wisely and well; there had been an undignified scramble for the old hero's wealth when a stroke appeared to have killed him in '28. He had confounded them all by recovering, and by cutting most of them out of his revised will—a document that was being contested in the courts even while the old man still lived.
At three-thirty, the penguinish doctor knocked discreetly at the bedchamber door, poked his head in, and said, "I hope you're almost through, Mr. Harker."
At that moment old Bryant was trying to sign a power-of-attorney Harker had prepared; his palsied hand could barely manage the signature, but in time he completed it. Harker looked at it: a wavy scrawl that looked like a random pattern on a seismograph drum.
"I'm leaving now," Harker told the doctor.