Watching Royce himself, he had been wondering how Aloysius's father might have reacted to the news that control of the hotel might soon pass on to other hands. Probably with a shrug. Possessions and money had meant little to the old man. Warren Trent could almost hear him now, asserting in his cracked, sprightly voice, "Yo' had yo' own way so long, could be a passel o' bad times'll be fo' yo' own goodness. God bends our backs an' humbles us, reminding us we ain't nothin' but His wayward children, 'spite our fancy notions other ways." But then, with calculated contrariness the old man might have added, "All th' same, 'f yo' believe in something, yo' fight fo' it shore. After yo' dead yo' won't shoot nobody, cos yo' cain't hardly take aim."
Taking aim - he suspected, waveringly - Warren Trent insisted, "Your way, you make everything to do with a hotel sound so damned antiseptic. Your kind of hotel lacks warmth or humanity. It's for automatons, with punch-card minds, and lubricant instead of blood."
O'Keefe shrugged. "It's the kind that pays dividends."
"Financial maybe, not human."
Ignoring the last remark, O'Keefe said, "I've talked about our business the way it is now. Let's carry things a shade further. In my organization I've had a blueprint developed for the future. Some might call it a vision, I suppose, though it's more an informed projection of what hotels - certainly O'Keefe hotels - are going to be like a few years ahead.
"The first thing we'll have simplified is Reception, where checking in will take a few seconds at the most. The majority of our people will arrive directly from air terminals by helicopter, so a main reception point will be a private roof heliport. Secondarily there'll be lower-floor receiving points where cars and limousines can drive directly in, eliminating transfer to a lobby, the way we do it now. At all these places there'll be a kind of instant sorting office, masterminded by an IBM brain that, incidentally, is ready now.
"Guests with reservations will have been sent a keycoded card. They'll insert it in a frame and immediately be on their way by individual escalator section to a room which may have been cleared for use only seconds earlier. If a room isn't ready - and it'll happen," Curtis O'Keefe conceded, "just as it does now - well have small portable way stations.
These will be cubicles with a couple of chairs, wash basin and space for baggage, just enough to freshen up after a journey and give some privacy right away. People can come and go, as they do with a regular room, and my engineers are working on a scheme for making the way stations mobile so that later they can latch on directly to the allocated space. That way, the guest will merely open an IBM cleared door, and walk on through.
"For those driving their own cars there'll be parallel arrangements, with coded, moving lights to guide them into personal parking stalls, from where other individual escalators will take them directly to their rooms.
In all cases we'll curtail baggage handling, using high-speed sorters and conveyors, and baggage will be routed into rooms, actually arriving ahead of the guests.
"Similarly, all other services will have automated room delivery systems - valet, beverages, food, florist, drugstore, newsstand; even the final bill can be received and paid by room conveyor. And incidentally, apart from other benefits, I'll have broken the tipping system, a tyranny we've suffered - along with our guests - for years too long."
There was a silence in the paneled dining room as the hotel magnate, still commanding the stage, sipped coffee before resuming.
"My building design and automation will keep to a minimum the need for any guest room to be entered by a hotel employee. Beds, recessing into walls, are to be serviced by machine from outside. Air filtration is already improved to the point where dust and dirt have ceased to be problems. Rugs, for example, can be laid on floors of fine steel mesh, with air space beneath, suctioned once a day when a timed relay cuts in.
"All this, and more, can be accomplished now. Our remaining problems, which naturally will be solved" - Curtis O'Keefe waved a hand in his familiar dismissing gesture - "our remaining problems are principally of coordination, construction, and investment."
"I hope," Warren Trent said firmly, "that I never live to see it happen in my house."
"You won't," O'Keefe informed him. "Before it can happen here we'll have to tear down your house and build again."
"You'd do that!" It was a shocked rejoinder.
O'Keefe shrugged. "I can't reveal long-range plans, naturally. But I'd say that would be our policy before too long. If you're concerned about your name surviving, I could promise you that a tablet, commemorating the original hotel and possibly your own connection with it, would be incorporated in the new structure."
"A tablet!" The St. Gregory's proprietor snorted. "Where would you put it - in the mens washroom?"
