I suppose the motor won’t start, he thought to himself as he slammed the door. Up this high the automatic choke always misfunctions. Imagine having to stay here a whole week … but the motor started.
Waiting until a car had hurtled by, he regained the road and in a moment or so had passed on by the top of the next hill. All at once the sun, which had been hidden by the hills and trees, appeared and stabbed him in the eyes; the shattering pale light startled him and confused him and he involuntarily braked his car. From behind him a small pick-up truck shot by and around.
I forgot. Hitting the top at dawn means I have to drive into it the rest of the trip. He had never seen the early-morning sun so spread-out, so large.
Presently he did get a look at the lake; at a couple of them, in fact. They were set off to one side of the road a distance below him, flat, cheerily blue, embedded on what appeared to be a plateau. The trees grew thicker near the lake. He continually glanced out of the window at the lakes, but then a sheer drop in the road, like the side of a ball, made him turn around to keep his mind on his driving. Now that he had passed the peak he found himself descending much more suddenly than he had gone up; the grade dropped him so frighteningly that for a time he did not notice that he had crossed the state line and entered Nevada.
The hills became lesser, unimportant. Once he passed between masses of rock, a dry, barren area. This really is Nevada, he thought. No more vegetation. The water has stopped. Soon he would be out on the desert. And sure enough, he soon was.
What a disappointment. As it had been before when he had driven it. Not like mountains at all … more like a wooded obstacle to commerce that eventually—to everyone’s satisfaction—would be leveled and carted off in trucks in the form of dirt and lumber.
That afternoon, in Reno, he and Ed von Scharf sat upstairs together in the familiar office overlooking the noisy, bazaar-like main floor of the Consumers’ Buying Bureau. His former boss made it known that he was taking his coffee break, so no one tried to interrupt them. To start it off, Bruce told him about his marriage; he showed him a snapshot of Susan that had been taken in Reno the day of their marriage.
“Is she older than you?” von Scharf asked.
“Yes,” he said. “She’s thirty.”
“Are you pretty sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Positive,” he said. He described the R & J Mimeographing Service. He put in every detail. His former boss listened with deep attention.
“Is sidewalk traffic fairly heavy?”
“Yes,” he said. “We get a lot of people who work in office buildings, between eleven and one.”
His former boss said, “I don’t think you’re using your head. What do you actually have? A good location and a small amount to invest, and you have some sort of an outlet with the minimal fixtures and front. Why are you thinking in terms of typewriters?”
“Because it’s a typewriter place.”
“No it isn’t. What did you learn here? To buy whatever was to be had at a good price that we thought we could sell. You should be out searching for anything that you can get cheap that you think you can move, typewriters or vegetables; it doesn’t matter what. But by insisting on a certain item you destroy your position. You enter a seller’s market. The first you know, you’ll start bidding against someone for these Jap machines. Look, you know nothing about typewriters. Second, you have no real reason to suppose you can get yourself a buy. I’ll tell you what’s hot right now. Gasoline. There’s a terrible gas war out on the Coast. Retail gas, the regular, got down to 19C a gallon on the Coast this last month. The wholesalers are overstocked out there.”
“We can’t sell gas,” he said. He asked him if he had ever seen the Mithrias machines.
“No,” von Scharf said. “I never even heard of them. As far as I know, none of them have gotten out here.”
“Then we’d have a clear field.”
“How many could you buy for twenty-five hundred dollars? Suppose you have to pay one hundred dollars apiece? That’s only twenty-five of the buggers. That’s nonsense.”
Up to now he hadn’t calculated that. It made him feel cold.
“Not enough to bother with,” his former boss said. “You just don’t have enough capital.”
“I might be able to pick up a bunch of Mithrias cheaper than one hundred apiece,” he said doggedly.
“Maybe so. Well, what did you come here to find out from me?”
“I came because I thought maybe you’d know where I could pick up some of them.”
“I don’t,” his former boss said. “I’ve never even seen an ad or an inventory list. I can ask around for you, if you want.”
“Thanks,” Bruce said.
His former boss phoned several people, including one of the Pareti brothers who had been out on the East Coast for a time. None of them knew anything about the Mithrias, but one of them believed that he had heard the name before. He thought he had read about it in a magazine article having to do with England.
“That’s something else,” Bruce said. “A tomb they dug up. An old tomb.”
“Well, I’m sorry,” von Scharf said.
“My own fault,” he said. After all, he could have phoned from the Coast and saved himself the trip.
Von Scharf said, “You’d be better off putting your money into children’s toy typewriters.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes. You can get a buy on them right now. Sell them at Christmas.”
“What I think I’ll do,” Bruce said, “is try to locate the man who originally told me about them. Milt Lumky.”
“Oh him,” von Scharf said, smiling. “Yes, he represents some paper manufacturer up in the Northwest. Little guy with a deep voice.”
“I didn’t know you knew him.”
“We got some paper through him, once. A hard man to deal with, but scrupulous. He told you about these Jap machines? Well, he’s smart. Maybe he owns a warehouse of them and wants to get rid of them.”
Bruce explained that Lumky was somewhere on his rounds, between Seattle and Montpelier.
“You can get hold of him,” von Scharf said. “You could call his company and ask what his schedule is. Or you could call them and tell them to have him get in touch with you the next time he calls in. Or you could get in touch with some big paper-buyer along his route and ask them to have him call you.”
He pondered. “I guess his company would know.”
He called the Whalen Paper Company on C.B.B.’s phone and told them that he wanted to get hold of Milton Lumky, their sales representative for the Pacific Northwest. After some delay they informed him that Mr. Lumky was on the road between Pocatello and Boise, but that on the 9th of the month he would definitely be in Pocatello. He had an appointment to meet with the owner of a dairy who wanted to order pasteboard milk cartons of a new style. The Whalen people gave him the address of the dairy and the exact time of the appointment. He thanked them and hung up.
“This is the 7th,” his former boss said, showing him a calendar.
“I think I’ll drive up to Pocatello,” he decided.
His former boss said, “If you want to stay here in Reno tonight you can have dinner with my wife and myself and as far as I’m concerned you can sleep on the couch in the living room.”
“Thanks,” he said, “but I want to get started.”
“Would you resent it if I gave you some advice?”