“All you could get?” I asked.
“Went to three hardware stores. All of them were out. Went to a fourth and they had this shotgun. So I bought it.”
So the guns, I thought, were being bought. Soon, perhaps, there’d not be any to be had. Other frightened people who felt a little safer if they could reach out their hand and pick up a weapon.
He looked down at the ground and scrubbed a pattern with the toe of his shoe.
“Funny thing happened,” he said. “I haven’t told the wife about it because it might upset her. Drove out to get some groceries and went out of my way to go past our house—the one we sold, I mean. First time I had driven past it since we left it. Neither had my wife. She told me several times she wanted to but didn’t, because it would make her feel too bad. But, anyhow, I drove past it today. And there it was—empty, like we moved out of it. Even in this short a time beginning to look shabby. They made us get out of it a month ago and they haven’t moved in yet. They said they needed it. They said they had to have it. But they didn’t need it. What do you make of it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
I could have told him. Maybe I should have told him. I know I wanted to. For he might have believed what I had to tell him. He had taken weeks of punishment, he was softened up, he was ready to believe. And, God knows, I needed someone to believe me—someone who could huddle with me in a little pit of fear and misery.
But I didn’t tell him, for it would have served no purpose. At the moment, at least, he was far happier not knowing. Now he still had hope, for he could ascribe all that had happened to an economic malady. A malady that he could not understand of course, but a misadjustment that lay within a familiar framework and one that Man could cope with.
But this other—the true—explanation of it would have left him without hope and facing the unknowable. And that would spell pure panic.
If I could have made a million people understand, then it would have been all right, for out of that million there would have been a few who would have viewed it calmly and objectively and given leadership. But to tell it to a little puddle of people in a single city had no point at all.
“It makes no sense,” said Quinn. “The whole thing makes no sense. I’ve laid awake at night to get it figured out and there’s no way to figure it. But that’s notthe reason I came out. We would like to have you and the wife eat dinner with us. It won’t be too much, but we have a roast and I could fix a drink or two. We could sit and talk.”
“Mr. Quinn,” I said, “Joy is not my wife. We are just two people who got sort of thrown together.”
“Well,” he said, “I’m sorry. I had just presumed she was. It really makes no difference. I hope you’re not embarrassed.”
“Not at all,” I said.
“And you will eat with us?”
“Some other time,” I said. “But thank you very much. I may have a lot to do.”
He stood there and looked at me. “Graves,” he said, “there’s something that you haven’t told me. Something about this business you said the other night. You said it was the same all over, that there was no place to run. How did you know that?”
“I’m a newspaperman,” I told him. “I’m working on a story.”
“And you do know something.”
“Not very much,” I said.
He waited and I didn’t tell him. He flushed and turned around. “Be seeing you,” he said, and went back to his unit.
I didn’t blame him any. I felt like a heel myself.
I went into the unit and there was no one there. Joy was still at the office. Gavin, more than likely, had found things for her to do.
I took the greater part of the money out of my pockets and hid it underneath the mattress on my bed. Not too imaginative or too good a place, but no one knew I had it and I wasn’t worried. I had to put it somewhere. I couldn’t leave it lying out where anyone could see it.
I picked up the rifle and took it out and put it in the car.
Then I did something I’d been intending to do ever since I’d left the Belmont place.
I went over the car. I went over all of it. I lifted the hood and checked the motor. I crawled beneath it and checked it entirely out. There wasn’t a part of it I failed to examine.
And when I had finished, there could be no doubt.
It was what it was supposed to be. It was an expensive but entirely ordinary car. There was nothing different. There wasn’t a thing left out or a thing put on. There was no bomb, no malfunctioning that I could find. It wasn’t, I could swear, some-
thing fashioned by the artistry of a bunch of bowling balls that had clubbed together to simulate a car. It was honest steel and glass and chrome.
I stood beside it and patted the fender and wondered what I should do next.
And maybe the thing to do, I thought, was to put in another call for Senator Roger Hill. When you get sobered up, he’d said, call me back again. If you still have something to tell me, call me back tomorrow.
And I was sober and I still had something to tell him.
I was pretty sure what he would say, but still I had to call him.
I headed for the little restaurant to call the senator.
“Parker,” said the senator, “I am glad you called.”
“Maybe,” I said, “you will listen to me now.”
“Certainly,” said the senator in that oily way of his, “if you don’t insist on that cock and bull about invading aliens.”
“But, Senator. . .”
“I don’t mind telling you,” said the senator, “that there’ll be hell to pay look, you know, of course, I’m talking off the record.”
“I guessed that,” I told him. “When you come up with something interesting, it’s always off the record.”
“Well, there’ll be hell to pay come Monday morning when the market opens. We don’t know what’s happened, but the banks are short of money. Not one bank, mind you, but damn near every bank. There’s not a one of them that can get its cash to balance. Every bank right now has its people in on overtime to find out where all that cash went to. But that is not the worst of it.”
“What is the worst of it?”
“That money,” said the senator. “There was too much of it to start with. A way too much of it. You take the cash on hand as of Friday morning and add it up and there is more of it, a good deal more of it, than there had any right to be. There isn’t that much money, I tell you, Parker, in the whole United States.”
“But it’s not there any more.”
“No,” said the senator, “it’s not there anymore. The money, so far as we can figure out, is back to somewhere near the figure one would expect to see.”
I waited for him to go on, and in the little silence I heard him take a deep breath, as if he were strangling for air.
“Something else,” he said. “There are rumors. Just all sorts of rumors. A new one every hour. And you can’t check them out.,,
“What kind of rumors?”
He hesitated; then he said: “Remember, off the record.”
“Sure, it’s off the record.”
“There’s one rumor that someone, no one knows quite who, has grabbed control of U. S. Steel and a slew of other corporations.”
“Same people?”
“God, Parker, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything to any of it or not. You hear one rumor one minute and there’s another one the next.”
He paused a moment; then he asked:
“Parker, what do you know about this?”
I could have told him what I knew, but I knew it wasn’t smart to do it. He’d just get sore and chew me out and that would be the end of it.
“I can tell you what to do,” I said. “What you have to do.”
“I hope it’s a good idea.”
“Pass a law,” I said.
“If we passed every law—”
“A law,” I said, “outlawing private ownership. Every sort of private ownership. Make it so that no one can own a foot of ground, an industrial plant, an ounce of ore, a house—”