There were surprised whistles. “Wrote it just as slick as Doc!” said a ten-year-old tow-headed male, bug-eyed with awe.
Jake stared at Alvah, then spun half around to wave his papers under Artie’s nose. “Well, you satisfied now, Artie Brumbacher? I guess that ain’t on my list, is it?”
“No,” Artie admitted, “I guess it ain’t―not if you can read the list, that is.”
Everybody but Alvah laughed, Jake louder than anyone. “All right,” he said, turning back to Alvah, “you just hitch up your brutes and get that thing out of here. If you ain’t gone by the time I―”
“Jake!” called a businesslike female voice, and a small figure came shouldering through the crowd. “They need you over in the salamander shed―the Quincies are ready to move in, but there’s some Sullivans ahead of them.” She glanced at Alvah, then at the floater behind him. “You having any trouble here?”
“All settled now,” Jake told her. This feller ain’t on the list. “I just give him his marching orders.”
“Look, if I can say something―” Alvah began.
The girl interrupted him. “Did you want to exhibit something at the Fair?”
“That’s right,” said Alvah gratefully. “I was just trying to explain―”
“Well, you’re late, but maybe we can squeeze you in. You won’t sell anything, though, if it’s what I think it is. Let me see that list, Jake.”
“Now wait a minute,” said Jake indignantly. “You know we ain’t got room for nobody that ain’t on the list. We got enough trouble―”
“The Earth-movers won’t be here from Butler till tomorrow,” said the girl, examining the papers. “We can put him in there and move him out again when they get here. You need any equipment besides what you brought?”
“No,” said Alvah. “That would be fine, thanks. All I need is a place―”
“All right. Before you go, Jake, did you tell those Sullivans they could have red, green and yellow in the salamander shed?”
“Well, sure I did. That what it says right there.”
SHE handed him back the papers and pointed to a line. “That’s Quincy, see? Dot instead of a cross. Sullivans are supposed to have that corner in the garden truck shed, keep the place warm for the seedlings, but they won’t budge till you tell them it was a mistake. Babbishes and Stranahans are fit to be tied. You get over there and straighten them out, will you? And don’t worry too much about him.”
Jake snorted and moved away, still looking ruffled. The girl turned to Alvah. “All right, let’s go.”
Unhappy but game, Alvah turned and climbed back into the floater with the girl close behind him. The conditioning he’d had just before he left helped when he was in the open air, but in the tiny closed cabin of the floater the girl’s triply compounded stench was overpowering.
How did they live with themselves?
She leaned over the control chair, pointing. “Over there, she said. See that empty space I’m pointing at?”
Alvah saw it and put the floater there as fast as the generator would push it. The space was not quite empty―there were a few very oddly assorted Muckfeet and animals in it, but they straggled out when they saw him hovering, and he set the floater down.
To his immense relief, the girl got out immediately. Alvah followed her as far as the platform.
III
IN a tailor shop back in Middle Queens, the proprietors, two brothers named Wynn, whose sole livelihood was the shop, stared glumly at the bedplate where the two-hundred-gallon Klenomatic ought to have been.
“He say anything when he took it away?” Clyde asked.
Morton shrugged and made a sour face.
“Yeah,” said Clyde. He looked distastefully at a dead cigar and tossed it at the nearest oubliette. He missed.
“He said a month, two months,” Morton told him. “You know what that means.”
“Yeah.”
“So I’ll call up the factory,” Morton said violently. “But I know what they’re gonna tell me. Give us a deposit and we’ll put you on a waiting list. Waiting list!”
“Yeah,” said Clyde.
In a factory in Under Bronnix, the vice president in charge of sales shoved a thick folder of coded plastic slips under the nose of the vice president in charge of production. “Look at those orders,” he said.
“Uh-huh,” said Production.
“You know how far back they go? Three years. You know how much money this company’s lost in unfilled orders? Over two million―”
“I know. What do you expect? Every fabricator in this place is too old. We’re holding them together with spit and string. Don’t bother me, will you, Harry. I got my own―”
“Listen,” said Sales. “This can’t go on much longer. It’s up to us to tell the Old Man that he’s got to try a bigger bribe on the Metals people. Mortgage the plant if we have to―it’s the only thing to do.”
“We have more mortgages now than the plant is worth.”
Sales reddened. “Nick, this is serious. Last fall, it looked like we might squeeze through another year, but now … You know what’s going to happen in another eight, ten months?” He snapped his fingers. “Right down the drain.”
Production blinked at him wearily. “Bribes are no good any more, Harry. You know that as well as I do. They’re out.”
“Well, then what are we going to do?”
Production shook his head. “I don’t know. I swear to God, I don’t know.”
OVER in Metals Reclamation Four, in Under and Middle Jersey, the night shift was just beginning. In the blue-lit cavern of Ferrous, this involved two men, one bald and flabby, the other gray and gnarled. They exchanged a silent look, then each in turn put his face into the time clock’s retinoscope mask. The clock, which had been emitting a shrill irritating sound, gurgled its satisfaction and shut up.
“Well, that’s it,” said the gray one. “I’ll be your work gang and you be mine, huh?”
The flabby one spat. “Wonder what happened to Turk.”
“Who cares? I never liked him.”
“Just wondering. Yesterday he’s here, today where is he? Labor pool, army―” he spat again, with care―“repair, maintenance … He was fifteen years in this department. I was just wondering.”
“Scooping sewage, probably. That’s about his speed.” The gray man shambled over to the control bench opposite and looked at the indicators. Then he lighted a cigarette.
“Nothing in the hoppers?” the flabby one asked.
“Nah. They ought to put Turk in the hoppers. He had metal in his goddam teeth. Actual metal!”
“Turk wasn’t old,” the flabby one said reproachfully. “No more than sixty.”
“I never liked him.”
“First it was the kid―you know. Pimples. Then, lessee, the next one was that big guy, the realie actor―”
“Gustad. The hell with him.”
“Yeah, Gustad. What I mean is, where do they go to? It’s the same thing on my three-to-seven shift, over in Yeasts. Guys I knew for ten, fifteen, twenty years on the same job. All of a sudden, they’re gone and you never see them. Must be a hell of a thing, starting all over again somewhere else―guys like that―I mean you get set in your ways, kind of.”
His eyes were patient and bewildered in their watery pouches. “Guys like me―no kids, nobody that gives a damn about ’em. Kind of gives you the jumps to think about it. You know what I mean?”
The gray one looked embarrassed, then irritated, then defiant. “Aah,” he said, and produced a deck of cards from his kit―the grimy coating on the creaseless, frayless plastic as lovingly built and preserved as the patina in a meerschaum. “Cut for deal. Come on! Let’s play.”