“But look,” I said, suddenly stricken with a horrible thought. “What if you don’t get a car back exactly the size it was at first? Then new tires wouldn’t fit, new parts wouldn’t fit—oh, my goodness!” I was abruptly overwhelmed with the enormity of such damage.
“That’s all taken care of,” he assured me. “The electrons in any given object seem to have a tendency to resume their former orbits if they get a chance. In other words, if I expand a car to almost its normal size and then cut off the power, the electrons will sort of coast into their original orbits and the car will resume its exact former size. Sort of a quantum jump, I suppose.”
I breathed a deep sigh of relief.
“Of course, if you go too far, you’ll have an oversize car, but you could reduce it again,” said Slim. “Now in the morning we’ll hang out a parking sign and let them drive onto the main floor. You run the cars into the basement, and we’ll have this thing down under the ramp, out of sight.” Slim’s deep eyes were glowing. “We’ll make a million,” he said, rubbing his hands.
Well, by the end of the next day it began to look as if we had, indeed, solved the most urgent problem of modern civilization—the parking problem. We had a sign out that said, Parking All Day 50c—No one Turned Away
, and by the end of the day we had taken in nearly five hundred dollars.
But it was a mankiller. I handed out claim checks and drove cars to the basement. Slim reduced them and hauled them across the room to a lineup. That was funny—seeing a car shrink to three or four inches long. It was an irresistible impulse to pick it up, but when you tried, you changed your mind. The cars were practically as heavy in their small size as in their big size, and that made it something of a problem to get them moved around.
We had borrowed a toe-and-heel, a sort of crowbar with rollers on it, and with the reduced friction from the extremely small tires of the cars, it wasn’t too hard to move them, but it was still a mankiller to move a thousand in one day, and move each twice. We took turns at the reducer. I could handle them best by catching them under the front axle, but we decided to make them six inches long so it would be easier. The metal in its smaller size seemed as tough as it had been normally, but the parts were pretty small to get hold of with anything strong enough to handle them.
Slim solved this problem the second day when he put a long piece of gas-pipe on the heel-and-toe and shrank it considerably. The second day, too, we had two men working upstairs. The third day we had a gadget made so that we could roll a car’s front wheel on it and then pull the car anywhere. That was when we began to get our breath. The other way had been tough. I don’t know how Slim stood it at all; if I hadn’t worked in the wheat-fields all summer I would have fallen from exhaustion.
We had two of those gadgets made and then we tilted the reducing stall a little. We’d block the wheels with a two-by-four after we had a car inside, then reduce it, take out the block, let the car roll onto the gadget and haul it away. We arranged them on the concrete floor in rows about four feet apart. When somebody came back to get their car out we had to pinch-bar the car back up on the gadget and wheel it to the stall.
The second week we had two stalls, one reducing and one expanding, and Slim was talking of having a new sloping floor put in to help in handling. By that time we were handling two thousand cars a day; you can do your own arithmetic.
On the last day of the month, LaBombard came in to collect his next month’s rent. He was all eyes and he said he didn’t see how we could do it. “You took in twenty-two hundred cars yesterday and this building won’t hold over six hundred,” he said, his eyes darting all around. “You must have a fast turnover.”
Slim kidded him. “We put ’em on the roof,” he said, and paid him and pushed him out. I didn’t like the look in that man’s eyes as he left.
“Well,” said Slim exuberantly to me, “we’re sitting on thirty thousand dollars. Think you can get through college on that?”
“I hope I can take time off to get a haircut,” I said fervently. It was embarrassing to have people look at me and suddenly snicker and turn away to hide their faces. The trouble was, we didn’t dare turn the reducing over to anybody else, and so we both worked like robots.
By the beginning of the second month we had a moving ramp. The boys upstairs put the car on the ramp, the car came downstairs and went through the reducer, came out on the other side and onto a platform. We had a tow-truck that just backed up, reached down a steel platform under the front axle, and walked away. It was funny to see that two-ton truck hauling a toy car across the floor.
Yes, we had a deal. Late at night, after we’d closed up and had time for some coffee, Slim would talk about how we were going to build a chain of parking ramps across the country.
“We’ll make billions,” he said, his deep eyes shining with a faraway fanaticism that only Slim Coleman can exhibit, “and we’ll be known as the saviors of civilization. We’ll call ourselves Parking Unlimited.”
Then one night the building inspector
