Halfway through the second hour, they cued Hubble in, and he nodded, stopped piddling around with his two-dollar and five-dollar coppered bets and began following Nome’s lead. Mundin and Don Lavin had switched to thousand-share lots by now, more than a million dollars’ worth of stock at every movement, and were sullenly hammering old 333 off a point, another point—a point and a half——
Three times already the conditioned cashier’s messenger had come down through the aisles with the Exchange’s certified checks, taking away stock certificates and leaving the money; the transactions were getting that big. He came again and Mundin, catching a glimpse of the amount the check was made out for, felt his eyes pop. All of a sudden things came into focus: Charles Mundin, tossing millions of dollars’ worth of stock into the hopper every couple of minutes, Charles Mundin who ninety days before couldn’t scare up the price of his monthly installments on the Sleepless Secretary! He almost panicked; he looked up wildly, staring around at the watching hangers-on, the touts, the fascinated investors who had abandoned their own windows, the guards, the children of the civics class and their sedate teacher….
Something glinted and caught his eye. He hissed to the nearest kid, “Ixnay on the ottlebay!” The eight-year-old, squirming La his unaccustomed clothes, flushed and tucked the busted bottle farther out of sight hastily, but not so hastily that
the eldest of the “class,” a bony but sweet-faced thirteen, didn’t catch it and move ominously closer. “Forget it, Lana,” Mundin whispered. “Just keep them out of sight.” He glanced at the “teacher,” and then turned to the “teacher’s” brother, beside him.
“How much have we dumped?” he demanded.
Don Lavin looked up from his penciled computations. “I make it just over eighteen thousand shares.” A drop in the bucket, thought Mundin. They had started out with twenty-five per cent of G.M.L.’s entire stock issue—roughly seven million shares, hi all, and their bloc close to two million. At that rate, he thought, they’d be there all year.
“Don,” he said. “Don—both together, from now on. And twenty-five hundred shares at a time.”
Fourteen billion dollars.
Fourteen billion dollars is massive, fourteen billion dollars has inertia; you don’t shake it easily. Ram a Juggernaut into fourteen billion dollars. The Juggernaut crumples and spills its Hindic gods into the street; the fourteen billion dollars stands unmoved.
But fourteen billion dollars, or anything else that God ever made, has a natural rate of swing. Slap it with a feather, and wait; slap it again; slap it again. The oscillation builds. The giant construct vibrates and wobbles and sways.
And Don Lavin’s twenty-five per cent interest was no feather.
The Sgures on the Big Board were plunging now—”333, off 10″; “333, off 6”; And even once, incredibly: “333, off 42.” By working like dogs, Mundin and Bligh and Hubble and the Lavins had succeeded in cutting their collective fortunes in half, or just about. And it was time for something to happen.
Something did. “Hup, two. Hup, two. Hup, two.” It was an eight-man squad of the City’s Finest, and in their vanguard——
Del Dworcas.
He stepped coldly up to Mundin through a lane that opened in the slackjawed mob. “You,” he said bitterly, “you cheat, you ingrate, you deadbeat, you!” Oh, no! thought Mundin, incredulously. Dworcas couldn’t be—— “I hand you herewith,” Dworcas said formally, “this Summons & Complaint—
give it to him, Herb—and attach all of your property pending adjudication thereof. Eight hundred dollars, Mundin! Loaned to you, to help you out, and you try to stiff me. With all the money you’ve got, too. Look at those stock certificates 1 Look at those checks! Boys, pick up his junk, and let’s get out of here.” He dried his eyes in a businesslike way and turned to go, as the cops reached for Mundin’s and Lavin’s stock.
“Hold it,” squawked Mundin. “Del, listen—you’re monkeying with something bigger than you are.” Dworcas involuntarily stepped back away from him, glanced behind him, and looked nervously again at Mundin. He licked his lips.
“Yeah, mister,” chimed in the sweet-faced thirteen-year-old by Dworcas’s elbow. “Give the guy a chance. Go ahead.”
Dworcas appeared to have trouble breathing. “Uh—all right,” he got out. “Let’s go, Herb.”