"What happens when the men who are out of work need more than just a gift of food?" asked Vickers. "When their families are in tatters and they need clothes? What happens when they're thrown into the street?"
"I think I can answer that. Some other philanthropic society will spring up over night and will furnish clothes and shelter. They're selling houses now for five hundred a room and that's no more than token payment. Why not give them away? Why not clothing that will cost no more than a tenth, or a twentieth of what you pay today? A suit for five dollars, say. Or a dress for fifty cents."
"You have no idea of what is coming next?"
"We've tried to dope it out," said Crawford. "We figured the car would come quickly, and it did. We figured houses, too, and they have put them out. Clothing should be one of the next items to go on the market."
"Food, shelter, transportation, clothing," said Vickers. "Those are four basics."
"They also have fuel and power," Crawford added. "Let enough of the world's population shift to these new houses, with their solar power, and you can mark the power industry completely off the books."
"But who is it?" asked Vickers. "You've told me you don't know. But you must have some idea, some educated guess."
"Not an inkling. We have tables of organization for their corporation setups. We can't find the men themselves; they are names we've never heard of."
"Russia?"
Crawford shook his head. "The Kremlin is worried, too. Russia is co-operating. That should prove how scared they are."
For the first time, Crawford moved. He unfolded his hands from across his paunch, grasped the arms of his massive chair and pulled himself straight, sitting upright now.
"I suppose," he said, "that you are wondering where you fit in on this."
"Naturally.
"We can't come out and say, 'Here we are, a combine of the world's industrial might, fighting to protect your way of life. We can't explain to them what the situation is. They'd laugh at us. After all, you can't tell people that a car that will last forever or a house that cost only five hundred a room is a bad thing for them. We can't tell them anything and yet this needs telling. We want you to write a book about it."
"I don't see…" Vickers began, but Crawford stopped him in mid-sentence.
"You would write it as if you had doped it out yourself. You would hint at informed sources that were too high to name. We'd furnish all the data, but the material would appear as yours."
Vickers came slowly to his feet. He reached out a hand and picked up his hat.
"Thanks for the chance," he said. "I'm not having any."
CHAPTER SEVEN
ANN CARTER said to Vickers: "Some day, Jay, I'm going to get sore enough at you to take you apart. And when I do maybe I'll have a chance to find what makes you tick."
"I got a book to write," said Vickers. "I'm writing it. What more do you want?"
"That book could keep. You could write it anytime. This one won't."
"Go ahead, tell me I threw away a million bucks. That's what you're thinking."
"You could have charged them a fancy fee for writing and gotten a contract with the publisher like there never was before and…"
"And pushed aside the greatest piece of work I've ever done," said Vickers, "and come back to it cold and find I'd lost the touch."
"Every book you write is your greatest one. Jay Vickers, you're nothing but a literary ham. Sure, you do good work and your darn books sell, although sometimes I wonder why. If there were no money in it you'd never write another word. Tell me, honest, why do you write?"
"You've answered it for me. You say for money. All right, so it's for money."
"All right, so I have a sordid soul."
"My God," said Vickers, "we're fighting as if we were married."
"That's another thing. You've never married, Jay. It's an index of your selfishness. I bet you never even thought of it."
"Once I did," said Vickers. "Once long ago."
"Here, put your head down here and have a good long cry. I bet it was pitiful. I bet that's how you got some of those excruciating love scenes you put into your books."
"Ann, you're getting maudlin drunk."
"If I'm getting drunk, you're the man who drove me to it. You're the one who said, 'Thanks for the chance, but I'm not having any."
"I had a hunch there was something phoney there," insisted Vickers.
"That was you," said Ann. She finished off her drink.
"Don't use a hunch," she said, "to duck the responsibility for turning down the best thing you ever had. Any time someone dangles money like that in front of me, I'm not letting any hunch stand in my way."
"I'm sure you wouldn't," Vickers agreed.
"That was a nasty thing to say," Ann told him. "Pay for the drinks and let's get out of here. I'm putting you on that bus and don't you come back again."
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE huge sign was draped diagonally across the front of the huge show window. It read:
HOUSES
TAILORED TO ORDER
$500 a room
LIBERAL TRADE-IN ON YOUR OLD HOME
In the window was a five or six room house, set in the middle of a small, beautifully planned lawn and garden. There was a sundial in the garden and a cupola with a flying duck weather vane on the attached garage. Two white lawn chairs and a white round table stood on the clipped grass and there was a new and shiny car standing in the driveway.
Ann squeezed Vickers' arm. "Let's go in."
"This must be what Crawford was talking about," said Vickers.
"You got lots of time to catch the bus," Ann said.
"We might as well. If you get interested in looking at a house you won't be chewing me."
"If I thought it were possible, I'd trap and marry you."
"And make my life a hell."
"Why, certainly," Ann told him sweetly. "Why else would I do it?"
They went in the door and it swung to behind them and the noise of the Street was shut away and they walked on the deep green carpeting that doubled as a lawn.
A salesman saw them and came over.
"We were just passing by," said Ann, "and we thought we would drop in. It looks like a fine house and…"
"It is a fine house," the salesman assured them, "and it has many special features."
"Is that true what the sign said?" asked Vickers. "Five hundred dollars a room?"
"Everyone asks me that. They read the sign, but they don't believe it, so the first thing they ask me when they come in is whether it is really true we sell these houses for five hundred a room."
"Well, is it?" insisted Vickers.
"Oh, most certainly," said the salesman. "A five room house is twenty-five hundred dollars and a ten room house would be five thousand dollars. Most people of course, aren't interested in a ten room house at first."
"What do you mean, at first?"
"Well, you see, it's this way, sir," the salesman said. "This is what you might call a house that grows. You buy a five room house, say, and in a little while you figure that you want another room, so we come out and redesign the house and make it a six room house."
"Isn't that expensive?" Ann asked.