‘You just gave him a quarter of a million dollars,’ said Tom Fairleigh. ‘You made me get it out of the vault.’
‘I did?’
‘You did!
They looked at each other.
Mr. LaFarge said at last: ‘It’s been a long time since we had any of that in Pung’s Corners.’
3
Now I have to tell a part that isn’t so nice. It’s about a girl named Marlene Groshawk. I positively will not explain any part of it. I probably shouldn’t mention it at all, but it’s part of the history of our country. Still -
Well, this is what happened. Yes, it’s in a book too - On Call, by One Who Knows (And we know who ‘One Who Knows’ is, don’t we?)
She wasn’t a bad girl. Not a bit of it. Or, anyway, she didn’t mean to be. She was too pretty for her own good and not very smart. What she wanted out of life was to be a television star.
Well, that was out of the question, of course. We didn’t use live television at all in Pung’s Corners those days, only a few old tapes. They left the commercials in, although the goods the old, dead announcers were trying to sell were not on the market anywhere, much less in Pung’s Corners. And Marlene’s idol was a TV saleslady named Betty Furness. Marlene had pictures of her, dubbed off the tapes, pasted all over the walls of her room.
At the time I’m talking about, Marlene called herself a public stenographer. There wasn’t too much demand for her services. (And later on, after things opened up, she gave up that part of her business entirely.) But if anybody needed a little extra help in Pung’s Corners, like writing some letters or getting caught up on the back filing and such, they’d call on Marlene. She’d never worked for a stranger before.
She was rather pleased when the desk clerk told her that there was this new Mr. Coglan in town, and that he needed an assistant to help him run some new project he was up to. She didn’t know what the project was, but I have to tell you that if she knew, she would have helped anyhow. Any budding TV star would, of course.
She stopped in the lobby of Pung’s Inn to adjust her makeup. Charley Frink looked at her with that kind of a look, in spite of being only fifteen. She sniffed at him, tossed her head and proudly went upstairs.
She tapped on the carved oak door of Suite 41 - that was the bridal suite; she knew it well - and smiled prettily for the tall old man with snapping eyes who swung it open.
‘Mr. Coglan? I’m Miss Groshawk, the public stenographer. I understand you sent for me.’
The old man looked at her piercingly for a moment.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I did. Come in.’
He turned his back on her and let her come in and close the door by herself.
Coglan was busy. He had the suite’s television set in pieces all over the floor.
He was trying to fix it some way or another, Marlene judged. And that was odd, mused Marlene in her cloudy young way, because even if she wasn’t really brainy, she knew that he was no television repairman, or anything like that. She knew exactly what he was. It said so on his card, and Mr. LaFarge had shown the card around town. He was a research and development counsellor.
Whatever that was.
Marlene was conscientious, and she knew that a good public stenographer took her temporary employer’s work to heart. She said: ‘Something wrong, Mr. Coglan?’
He looked up, irritable. ‘I can’t get Danbury on this thing.’
‘Danbury, Connecticut? Outside? No, sir. It isn’t supposed to get Danbury.’
He straightened up and looked at her. ‘It isn’t supposed to get Danbury.’ He nodded thoughtfully. ‘This forty-eight-inch twenty-seven tube full-colour suppressed sideband UHF-VHF General Electric wall model with static suppressors and self-compensating tuning strips, it isn’t supposed to get Danbury, Connecticut.’
‘That’s right, sir.’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘That’s going to be a big laugh on the cavern in Schenectady.’
Marlene said helpfully: ‘It hasn’t got any antenna.’
Coglan frowned and corrected her. ‘No, that’s impossible. It’s got to have an antenna. These leads go somewhere.’
Marlene shrugged attractively.
He said: ‘Right after the war, of course, you couldn’t get Danbury at all. I agree. Not with all those fission products, eh? But that’s down to a negligible count now. Danbury should come in loud and clear.’
Marlene said: ‘No, it was after that, I used to, uh, date a fellow named Timmy Horan, and he was in that line of business, making television repairs, I mean. A couple years after the war, I was just a kid, they began to get pictures once in a while. Well, they passed a law, Mr. Coglan.’
‘A law?’ His face looked suddenly harsh.
‘Well, I think they did. Anyway, Timmy had to go around taking the antennas off all the sets. He really did. Then they hooked them up with TV tape recorders, like.’ She thought hard for a second. ‘He didn’t tell me why,’ she volunteered.
‘I know why,’ he said flatly.
‘So it only plays records, Mr. Coglan. But if there’s anything you want, the desk clerk’ll get it for you. He’s got lots. Dinah Shores and Jackie Gleasons and Medic. Oh, and Westerns. You tell him what you want.’
‘I see.’ Coglan stood there for a second, thinking. Not to her but to himself, he said: ‘No wonder we weren’t getting through. Well, we’ll see about that.’
‘What, Mr. Coglan?’
‘Never mind, Miss Groshawk. I see the picture now. And it isn’t a very pretty one.’
He went back to the television set.
He wasn’t a TV mechanic, no, but he knew a little something about what he was doing for sure, because he had it all back together in a minute. Oh, less than that. And not just the way it was. He had it improved. Even Marlene could see that. Maybe not improved, but different; he’d done something to it.
‘Better?’ he demanded, looking at her.
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘I mean does looking at the picture do anything to you?’
‘I’m sorry, Mr. Coglan, but I honestly don’t care for Studio One. It makes me think too hard, you know?’
But she obediently watched the set.
He had tuned in on the recorded wire signal that went out to all of Pung’s Corners TV sets. I don’t suppose you know how we did it then, but there was a central station where they ran off a show all the time, for people who didn’t want to bother with tapes. It was all old stuff, of course. And everybody had seen all of them already.
But Marlene watched, and funnily, in a moment she began to giggle.
‘Why, Mr. Coglan’ she said, though he hadn’t done anything at all.
‘Better,’ he said, and he was satisfied.
He had every reason to be.
‘However,’ said Mr. Coglan, ‘first things come first. I need your help.’
‘All right, Mr. Coglan,’ Marlene said in a silky voice.
‘I mean in a business way. I want to hire some people. I want you to help me locate them, and to keep the records straight. Then I shall need to buy certain materials. And I’ll need an office, perhaps a few buildings for light industrial purposes, and soon.’
‘That will take a lot of money, won’t it?’
Coglan chuckled.
‘Well, then,’ said Marlene, satisfied, ‘I’m your girl, Mr. Coglan. I mean in a business way. Would you mind telling me what the business is?’
‘I intend to put Pung’s Corners back on its feet.’
‘Oh, sure, Mr. Coglan. But how, I mean?’
‘Advertising,’ said old man Coglan, with a devil’s smile and a demon’s voice.
Silence. There was a moment of silence.
Marlene said faintly: ‘I don’t think they’re going to like it.’
‘Who?’
‘The bigwigs. They’re aren’t going to like that. Not advertising, you know. I mean I’m for you. I’m in favour of advertising. I like it. But -’
‘There’s no question of liking it!’ Coglan said in a terrible voice. ‘It’s what has made our country great! It tooled us up to fight in a great war, and when that war was over, it put us back together again!’
‘I understand that, Mr. Coglan,’ she said. ‘But -’
‘I don’t want to hear that word from you, Miss Groshawk,’ he snapped. ‘There is no question. Consider America after the war, ah? You don’t remember, perhaps. They kept it from you. But the cities all were demolished. The buildings were ruins. It was only advertising that built them up again - advertising, and the power of research! For I remind you of what a great man once said: “Our chief job in research is to keep the customer reasonably dissatisfied with what he has.” ‘
Coglan paused, visibly affected. ‘That was Charles F. Kettering of General Motors,’ he said, ‘and the beauty of it, Miss Groshawk, is that he said this in the Twenties! Imagine! So clear a perception of what Science means to all of us. So comprehensive a grasp of the meaning of American Inventiveness!’
Marlene said brokenly: ‘That’s beautiful.’
Coglan nodded. ‘Of course. So you see, there is nothing at all that your bigwigs can do, like it or not. We Americans - we real Americans - know that without advertising there is no industry; and accordingly we have shaped advertising into a tool that serves us well. Why, here, look at that television set!’
Marlene did, and in a moment began again to giggle. Archly she whispered: ‘Mr. Coglan!’
‘You see? and if that doesn’t suffice, well, there’s always the law. Let’s see what the bigwigs of Pung’s Corners can do against the massed might of the United States Army!’
‘I do hope there won’t be any fighting, Mr. Coglan.’
‘I doubt there will,’ he said sincerely. ‘And now to work, eh? Or -’ he glanced at his watch and nodded - ‘after all, there’s no real hurry this afternoon. Suppose we order some dinner, just for the two of us. And some wine? And!’
‘Of course, Mr. Coglan.’
Marlene started to go to the telephone, but Mr. Coglan stopped her.
‘On second thought, Miss Groshawk,’ he said, beginning to breathe a little hard, ‘I’ll do the ordering. You just sit there and rest for a minute. Watch the television set, eh?’