“You and your nephew are sole owners of the firm?”
“You bet your boots we are. We kept it for ourselves. We took no one in with us.”
“Mr. Packer, for some time the Government has been attempting to negotiate with Mr. Camper. He’s told you nothing of it?”
“Not a thing,” said Packer. “I’m busy with my stamps. He doesn’t bother me.”
“_We_ have been interested in your service,” Griffin said. “_We_ have tried to buy it.”
“It’s for sale,” said Packer. “You just pay the price and -”
“But you don’t understand. Mr. Camper insists on a separate contract for every single office that we operate. That would run to a terrific figure -”
“Worth it,” Packer assured him. “Every cent of it.”
“It’s unfair,” said Griffin firmly. “We are willing to buy it on a departmental basis and we feel that even in that case we would be making some concession. By rights the Government should be allowed to come in under a single covering arrangement.”
“Look,” protested Packer, “what are you talking to me for? I don’t run the business; Tony does. You’ll have to deal with him. I have faith in the boy. He has a good hard business head. I’m not even interested in Efficiency. All I’m interested in is stamps.”
“That’s just the point,” said Griffin heartily. “You’ve hit the situation exactly on the head.”
“Come again?” asked Packer.
“Well, it’s like this,” Griffin told him in confidential tones. “The Government gets a lot of stamps in its daily correspondence. I forget the figure, but it runs to several tons of philatelic material every day. And from every planet in the galaxy. We have in the past been disposing of it to several stamp concerns, but there’s a disposition in certain quarters to offer the whole lot as a package deal at a most attractive price.”
“That is fine,” said Packer, “but what would I do with several tons a day?”
“I wouldn’t know,” declared Griffin, “but since you are so interested in stamps, it would give you a splendid opportunity to have first crack at a batch of top-notch material. It is, I dare say, one of the best sources you could find.”
“And you’d sell all this stuff to me if I put in a word for you with Tony?”
Griffin grinned happily. “You follow me exactly, Mr Packer.”
Packer snorted, “Follow you! I’m way ahead of you.”
“Now, now,” cautioned Griffin, “you must not get the wrong impression. This is a business offer – a purely business offer.”
“I suppose you’d expect no more than nominal payment for all this waste paper I would be taking off your hands.”
“Very nominal,” said Griffin.
“All right, I’ll think about it and I’ll let you know. I can’t promise you a thing, of course.”
“I understand, Mr. Packer. I do not mean to rush you.”
After Griffin left, Packer sat and thought about it and the more he thought about it, the more attractive it became.
He could rent a warehouse and install an Efficiency Basket in it and all he’d have to do would be dump all that junk in there and the basket would sort it out for him.
He wasn’t exactly sure if one basket would have the time to break the selection down to more than just planetary groupings, but if one basket couldn’t do it, he could install a second one and between the two of them, he could run the classification down to any point he wished. And then, after the baskets had sorted out the more select items for his personal inspection, he could set up an organization to sell the rest of it in job lots and he could afford to sell it at a figure that would run all the rest of those crummy dealers clear out on the limb.
He rubbed his hands together in a gesture of considerable satisfaction, thinking how he could make it rough for all those skinflint dealers. It was murder, he reminded himself, what they got away with; anything that happened to them, they had coming to them.
But there was one thing he gagged on slightly. What Griffin had offered him was little better than a bribe, although it was, he supposed, no more than one could expect of the Government. The entire Governmental structure was loaded with grafters and ten percenters and lobbyists and special interest boys and others of their ilk.
Probably no one would think a thing of it if he made the stamp deal – except the dealers, of course, and there was absolutely nothing they could do about it except sit and howl.
But aside from that, he wondered, did he have the right to interfere with Tony? He could mention it to him of course, and Tony would say yes. But did he have the right?
He sat and worried at the question, without reaching a conclusion, without getting any nearer to the answer until the door chimes sounded.
It was the Widow Foshay and she was empty-handed. She had no broth today.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “You are a little late.”
“I was just opening my door to come over when I saw you had a caller. He’s gone now, isn’t he?”
“For some time,” said Packer.
She stepped inside and he closed the door. They walked across the room.
“Mr. Packer,” said the Widow, “I must apologize. I brought no broth today. The truth of the matter is, I’m tired of making it all the time.”
“In such a case,” he said, very gallantly, “the treats will be on me.”
He opened the desk drawer and lifted out the brand new box of PugAlNash’s leaf, which had arrived only the day before.
Almost reverently, he lifted the cover and held the box out to her. She recoiled from it a little.
“Go ahead,” he urged. “Take a pinch of it. Don’t swallow it. Just chew it.”
Cautiously, she dipped her fingers in the box.
“That’s too much,” he warned her. “Just a little pinch. You don’t need a lot. And it’s rather hard to come by.”
She took a pinch and put it in her mouth.
He watched her closely, smiling. She looked for all the world as if she had taken poison. But soon she settled back in her chair, apparently convinced it was not some lethal trick.
“I don’t believe,” she said, “I’ve ever tasted anything quite like it.”
“You never have. Other than myself, you may well be the only human that has ever tasted it. I get it from a friend of mine who lives on one of the far-out stars. His name is PugAlNash and he sends it regularly. And he always includes a note.”
He looked in the drawer and found the latest note.
“Listen to this,” he said.
He read it:
_Der Fiend: Grately injoid latter smoke you cent me. Ples mor of sam agin. You du knot no that I profetick and wach ahed for you. Butt it be so and I grately hapy to perform this taske for fiend. I assur you it be onely four the beste. You prophet grately, maybee.
Your luving fiend,
PugAlNash_
He finished reading it and tossed it on the desk.
“What do you make of it?” he asked. “Especially that crack about his being a prophet and watching ahead for me?”
“It must be all right,” the widow said. “He claims you will profit greatly.”
“He sounds like a gypsy fortune-teller. He had me worried for a while.”
“But why should you worry over that?”
“Because I don’t want to know what’s going to happen to me. And sometime he might tell me. If a man could look ahead, for example, he’d know just when he was going to die and how and all the -”
“Mr. Packer,” she told him, “I don’t think you’re meant to die. I swear you are getting to look younger every day.”
“As a matter of fact,” said Packer, vastly pleased, “I’m feeling the best I have in years.”
“It may be that leaf he sends you.”
“No, I think most likely it is that broth of yours.”
They spent a pleasant afternoon – more pleasant, Packer admitted, than he would have thought was possible.
And after she had left, he asked himself another question that had him somewhat frightened.
Why in the world, of all people in the world, had he shared the leaf with her?
He put the box back in the drawer and picked up the note. He smoothed it out and read it once again.
The spelling brought a slight smile to his lips, but he quickly turned it off, for despite the atrociousness of it, PugAlNash nevertheless was one score up on him. For Pug had been able, after a fashion, to master the language of Earth, while he had bogged down completely when confronted with Pug’s language.
_I profetick and wach ahed for you._