Garrison let his eyes go down to the final paragraph:
It might be a good idea to clip this story and the diagram, putting the clipping in your billfold or purse. So that if, some morning, you find one of the cars parked in your driveway.
Garrison said to Gold, "This was a good idea. It relates the reader directly to the cars. It's something everyone will read. I'm glad you thought of it."
"Well, hell," said Gold, "it's time I began to earn my salary."
Hal Russell came loping down the aisle. He stopped before the city desk and said to Garrison, "More of the visitors have been spotted. One bunch in Idaho. Another of them in Maine."
"All making cars," said Gold.
"All making cars," said Russell.
"They're beginning to surface," said Garrison. "By this time tomorrow, we'll have spotted a fair number of them."
"Thing is," said Russell, "people are out there looking for them."
"They have reason now to look," said Gold. "A new ear in everyone's garage."
"The next big story," said Garrison, "will be the delivery of the cars. People waking up and finding them parked in their driveways.
Gold shook his head. "It might not happen that way. Maybe drawings will be held to see who gets the ears. A sort of nationwide lottery. Or maybe they'll just be dumped out in a field or in vacant city lots and let the people fight for them. A car to the fastest and the meanest."
"You have some damn strange ideas," Garrison told him.
"For myself," said Gold, "I want a robin's-egg-blue ear. My wife never let me have one. We've always had red cars. She likes red."
"Maybe there'll be enough of them," said Russell, "that you both can get one—you a blue one and your wife a red."
"In that case," said Gold, "we'll have two reds. She'd never let me have a blue. She thinks blue is sissy."
"Have either of you figured out the mathematics on this?" Garrison asked. "Could the visitors really make that many ears? Have we ever had a solid figure on how many of them there are?"
"I don't think a solid figure," Russell said. "Several thousand, I would guess. According to Kathy, three of them made more than a hundred ears in less than a week. Say it was a week. That's more than thirty cars a visitor. Put five thousand of them at it and that's a hundred and fifty thousand cars a week. The figure could be higher, but, even so, that's more than a quarter million cars a month."
"Our population is two hundred fifty million," said Gold.
"You wouldn't be making cars for everyone. A lot of those two hundred fifty million are babies and kids underage. You wouldn't
give them cars. And remember all those baby visitors who are growing up. In another year, maybe in another six months, they could be making ears. As I remember it, the babies were pupped in fairly large litters. Say an average of ten babies to every visitor. In a year's time, say, several million cars a month."
"All right," said Garrison. "All right. I guess it could be done."
"And then," said Gold, "they'll start making beer. They could make beer a lot faster than ears. Say a case a week for every male adult. A case a week would be about right, I'd judge."
"Hot dogs," said Russell. "And pretzels. They'd have to make hot dogs and pretzels to go along with beer."
The phone rang. Annie answered it. "It's for you," she said to Garrison. "On two."
Garrison stabbed a button and picked up his phone.
"Garrison. City desk."
"This is Porter at the ‘White House," said the voice on the other end. "I called you earlier."
"Yes, I remember. What can I do for you?"
"Does Miss Foster happen to be around?"
"I'll look and see."
He rose, with the phone in hand, located Kathy at her desk. He waved the phone above his head. "Kathy," he bawled. "A call for you on two."
48. WILDERNESS AREA
Norton steadied the canoe with choppy paddle strokes, staring at what the bend in the river had revealed. There, straight ahead of him, five masses of square blackness loomed above the deep green of the pines.
Visitors, he told himself. What would visitors be doing here, deep in the wilderness? Although, once he thought of it, he realized it might not be strange at all. More than likely many of the big black boxes had landed in areas where they would not readily be found.
He chuckled to himself and dipped the paddle deep, driving the canoe toward shore. The sun was dipping toward the western horizon and he'd been looking for a place to camp. This place, he told himself, would do as well as any. He'd beach the canoe and look over the visitors. After that, he'd build a fire and settle for the night. He was surprised to find that he was pleased at finding the visitors. There was, he thought, something companionable about them—as if unexpectedly he had come upon some neighbors whose existence he had not suspected.
He hauled the canoe up the shelving, pebbly beach and strode into the forest, heading for the visitors. There was, he thought, one strange thing about it—not the strangeness of finding the visitors here, but the fact that there was no racket. They were not sawing down or ingesting trees. More than likely they had processed all the cellulose they needed, had budded young and now were simply taking it easy, a time for resting once their chores were done.
He burst into the clearing they had made and skidded to a surprised halt. In front of him stood a house. It was a somewhat lopsided house, leaning drunkenly to one side, as if the builder had done a poor job of it and it had come unstuck. Just beyond it stood a second house. This one stood foursquare, but there was still a certain wrongness to it. It was a moment before he could make out what the wrongness was, and then he knew—it hadn't any windows.
Beyond the houses stood the visitors, so closely ranged together that they gave the impression of a group of great buildings clustered in a city's downtown district.
Norton stood undecided and confused. No one in their right mind, he told himself, would have come into this wilderness, built two houses, then gone away and left them. Nor would any builder construct a lopsided house and another without windows. And even if the hypothetical builder had wanted, for some unfathomable reason, to do so, he would have had no reasonable way in which to transport his materials to the building site.