As Is

by Robert Silverberg

I

“As is,” the auto dealer said, jamming his thumbs under his belt. “Two hundred fifty bucks and drive it away. I’m not pretending it’s perfect, but I got to tell you, you’re getting a damned good hunk of car for the price”

“ ‘As is,’ ” Sam Norton said.

“As is. Strictly as is.”

Norton let the point pass. He walked around the car again, giving it a close look from all angles. It was a smallish dark green four-door sedan, with the finish and trim in good condition, a decent set of tires, and a general glow that comes only when a car has been well cared for.

The test drive had been fine.

There was only one small thing wrong with it. The trunk didn’t open. It wasn’t just a case of a jammed lock, either; somebody had fixed this car so the trunk couldn’t open. With great care the previous owner had apparently welded the trunk shut; nothing was visible back there except a dim line to mark the place where the lid might once have lifted.

What the hell, though. The car was otherwise in fine shape, and he wasn’t in a position to be too picky. Overnight, practically, they had transferred him to the Los Angeles office, which was fine in terms of getting out of New York in the middle of a lousy winter, but not so good as far as his immediate finances went.

The company didn’t pay moving costs, only transportation; he had been handed four one-way tourist class tickets, and that was that. So he had put Ellen and the kids aboard the first jet to L.A., cashing in his own ticket so he could use the money for the moving job. He figured to do it the slow but cheap way: rent a U-Haul trailer, stuff the family belongings into it, and set out via turnpike for California, hoping that Ellen had found an apartment by the time he got there. Only he couldn’t trust his present clunker of a car to get him very far west of Parsippany, New Jersey, let alone through the Mojave Desert.

So here he was, trying to pick up an honest used job for about five hundred bucks, which was all he could afford to lay out on the spot.

And here was the man at the used car place offering him this very attractive vehicle—with its single peculiar defect—for only two and a half bills. Which would leave him with that much extra cash cushion for the expenses of his transcontinental journey. And he didn’t really need a trunk, driving alone. He could keep his suitcase on the back seat and stash everything else in the U-Haul. And it shouldn’t be all that hard to have some mechanic in L.A. cut the trunk open for him and get it working again.

On the other hand, Ellen was likely to chew him out for having bought a car that was sealed up that way; she had let him have it before on other “bargains” of that sort. On the third hand, the mystery of the sealed trunk appealed to him. Who knew what he’d find in there once he opened it up? Maybe the car had belonged to a smuggler who had had to hide a hot cargo fast, and the trunk was full of lovely golden ingots, or diamonds, or ninety-year-old cognac, which the smuggler had planned to reclaim a few weeks later, except that something unexpected had come up. On the fourth hand—

The dealer said, “How’d you like to take her out for another test spin, then?”

Norton shook his head. “Don’t think I need to. I’ve got a good idea of how she rides.”

“Well, then, let’s step into the office and close the deal.”

Sidestepping the maneuver, Norton said, “What year did you say she was?”

“Oh, about a ’64, ’65.”

“You aren’t sure?”

“You can’t really tell with these foreign jobs, sometimes, You know, they don’t change the model for five, six, ten years in a row, except In little ways that only an expert would notice. Take Volkswagen, for instance—”

“And I just realized,” Norton cut in, “that you never told ate what make she is, either.”

“Peugeot, maybe, or some kind of Fiat,” said the dealer hazily. “One of those kind.”

“You don’t know?”

A shrug. “Well, we checked a lot of the style books going back a few years, but there are so damn many of these foreign cars around, and some of them they import only a few thousand, and—well, so we couldn’t quite figure it out.”

Norton wondered how he was going to get spare parts for a car of unknown make and uncertain date. Then he realized that he was thinking of the car as his, already, even though the more he considered the deal, the less he liked it. And then he thought of those ingots in the trunk. The rare cognac. The suitcase full of rubies and sapphires.

He said, “Shouldn’t the registration say something about the year and make?”

The dealer shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Matter of fact, we don’t have the registration. But it’s perfectly legitimate. Hey, look, I’d like to get this car out of my lot, so maybe we call it two-twenty-five, huh?”

“It all sounds pretty mysterious. Where’d you get the car, anyway?”

“There was this little guy who brought it in, about a year ago, a year last November, I think it was. Give it a valve job, be said. I’ll be back in a month—got to take a sudden business trip. Paid in advance for tuneup and a month storage and everything. Wouldn’t you know that was the last we ever saw of him? Well, we stored his damn car here free for ten, eleven months, but that’s it, now we got to get it out of the place. The lawyer says we can take possession for the storage charge.”

“If I buy it, you give me a paper saying you had the right to sell it?”

“Sure. Sure.”

“And what about getting the registration? Shifting the insurance over from my old heap? All the red tape?”

“I’ll handle everything,” the dealer said. “Just you take the car outa here.”

“Two hundred,” Norton said. “As is.”

The dealer sighed. “It’s a deal. As is.”

A light snow was falling when Norton began his cross-country hegira three days later. It was an omen, but he was not sure what kind; he decided that the snow was intended as his last view of a dreary winter phenomenon he wouldn’t be seeing again, for a while. According to the Times, yesterday’s temperature range in L.A. had been 66 low, 79 high. Not bad for January.

He slouched down behind the wheel, let his foot rest lightly on the accelerator, and sped westward at a sane, sensible 45 mph. That was about as fast as he dared go with the bulky U-Haul trailing behind. He hadn’t had much experience driving with a trailer—he was a computer salesman, and computer salesmen don’t carry sample computers—but he got the hang of it pretty fast. You just had to remember that your vehicle was now a segmented organism, and make your turns accordingly.

God bless turnpikes, anyhow. Just drive on, straight and straight and straight, heading toward the land of the sunset with only a few gentle curves and half a dozen traffic lights along the way.

The snow thickened some. But the car responded beautifully, hugging the road, and the windshield wipers kept his view clear. He hadn’t expected to buy a foreign car for the trip at all; when he had set out, it was to get a good solid Plymouth of Chevvie, something heavy and sturdy to take him through the wide open spaces.

But he had no regrets about this smaller car. It had as much power and pickup as he needed, and with that trailer bouncing along behind him he wouldn’t have much use for all that extra horsepower, anyway.

He was in a cheerful, relaxed mood. The car seemed comforting and protective, a warm enclosing environment that would contain and shelter him through the thousands of miles ahead. He was still close enough to New York to be able to get Mozart on the radio, which was nice. The car’s heater worked well. There wasn’t much traffic. The snow itself, new and white and fluffy, was all the more beautiful for the knowledge that he was leaving it behind. He even enjoyed the solitude.

It would be restful, in a way, driving on and on through Ohio and Kansas and Colorado or Arizona or whatever states lay between him and Los Angeles. Five or six days of peace and quiet, no need to make small talk, no kids to amuse—

His frame of mind began to darken not long after he got on the. Pennsylvania Turnpike. If you have enough time to think, you will eventually think of the things you should have thought of before; and now, as he rolled through the thickening snow on this gray and silent afternoon, certain aspects of a trunkless car occurred to him that in his rush to get on the road he had succeeded in overlooking earlier. What about a tool kit, for instance? If he had a flat, what would be use for a jack and a wrench? That led him to a much more chilling thought: what would he use for a spare tire? A trunk was something more than a cavity back of the rear seat; in most cars it contained highly useful objects.

None of which he had with him.

None of which he had even thought about, until just this minute.

He contemplated the prospects of driving from coast to coast without a spare tire and without tools, and his mood of warm security evaporated abruptly. At the next exit, he decided, he’d hunt for a service station and pick up a tire, fast. There would be room for it on the back seat next to his luggage. And while he was at it, he might as well buy—

The U-Haul, he suddenly observed, was jackknifing around awkwardly in back, as though its wheels had just lost traction. A moment later the car was doing the same and he found himself moving laterally in a beautiful skid across an unsanded slick patch on the highway.

Steer in the direction of the skid, that’s what you’re supposed to do, he told himself, strangely calm. Somehow he managed to keep his foot off the brake despite all natural inclinations, and watched in quiet horror as car and trailer slid placidly across the empty lane to his right and came to rest, upright and facing forward, in the piled-up snowbank along the shoulder of the road.

He let out his breath slowly, scratched his chin, and gently fed some gas. The spinning wheels made a high-pitched whining sound against the snow. He went nowhere. He was stuck.

II

The little man had a ruddy-cheeked face, white hair so long it curled at the ends, and metal-rimmed spectacles. He glanced at the snow-covered autos in the used-car lot, scowled, and trudged toward the showroom.

“Came to pick up my car,” he announced. “Valve job. Delayed by business in another part of the world.”

The dealer looked uncomfortable. “The car’s not here.”

“So I see. Get it, then.”

“We more or less sold it about a week ago.”

“Sold it? Sold my car? My car?”

“Which you abandoned. Which we stored here for a whole year. This ain’t no parking lot here. Look, I talked to my lawyer first, and he said—”

“All right. All right Who was the purchaser?”

“A guy, he was transferred to California and had to get a car fast to drive out. He—”

“His name?”

“Look, I can’t tell you that. He bought the car in good faith. You got no call bothering him now.”

The little man said, “If I chose, I could drew the information from you in a number of ways. But never mind. I’ll locate the car easily enough. And you’ll certainly regret this scandalous breach of custodial duties. You certainly shall.”

He went stamping out of the showroom, muttering indignantly.

Several minutes later a flash of lightning blazed across the sky. “Lightning?” the auto dealer wondered. “In January? During a snowstorm?”

When the thunder came rumbling in, every pane of plate glass in every window of the showroom shattered and fell out in the same instant.

Sam Norton sat spinning his wheels for a while in mounting fury. He knew it did no good, but he wasn’t sure what else he could do at this point, except hit the gas and hope for the car to pull itself out of the snow. His only other hope was for the highway patrol to come along, see his plight, and summon a towtruck. But the highway was all but empty, and those few cars that drove by shot past him without stopping.

When ten minutes had passed, he decided to have a closer look at the situation. He wondered vaguely if he could somehow scuff away enough snow with his foot to allow the wheels to get a little purchase. It didn’t sound plausible, but there wasn’t much else he could do. He got out and headed to the back of the car.

And noticed for the first time that the trunk was open.

The lid had popped up about a foot, along that neat welded line of demarcation. In astonishment Norton pushed it higher and peered inside.

The interior had a dank, musty smell. He couldn’t see much of what might be in there, for the light was dim and the lid would lift no higher. It seemed to him that there were odd lumpy objects scattered about, objects of no particular size or shape, but he felt nothing when he groped around. He had the impression that the things in the trunk were moving away from his hand, vanishing into the darkest corners as he reached for them. Sut then his fingers encountered something cold and smooth, and he heard a welcome clink of metal on metal. He pulled.

A set of tire chains came forth.

He grinned at his good luck. Just what he needed! Quickly he unwound the chains and crouched by the back wheels of the car to fasten them in place. The lid of the trunk slammed shut as he worked—hinge must be loose, he thought—but that was of no importance. In five minutes he had the chains attached.

Getting behind the wheel, he started the car again, fed some gas, delicately let in the clutch, and bit down hard on his lower lip by way of helping the car out of the snowbank. The car eased forward until it was in the clear. He left the chains on until he reached a service area eight miles up the turnpike. There he undid them; and when he stood up, he found that the trunk had popped open again.

Norton tossed the chains inside and knelt in another attempt to see what else might be in the trunk; but not even by squinting did he discover anything. When he touched the lid, it snapped shut, and once more the rear of the car presented that puzzling welded-tight look.

Mine not to reason why, he told himself. He headed into the station and asked the attendant to sell him a spare tire and a set of tools. The attendant, frowning a bit, studied the car through the station window and said, “Don’t know as we got one to fit. We got standards and we got smalls, but you got an in-between. Never saw a size tire like that, really.”

“Maybe you ought to take a closer look,” Norton suggested. “Just in case it’s really a standard foreign-car size, and—”

“Nope. I can see from here. What you driving, anyway? One of them Japanese jobs?”

“Something like that.”

“Look, maybe you can get a tire in Harrisburg. They got a place there, it caters to foreign cars, get yourself a muffler, shocks, anything you need.”

“Thanks,” Norton said, and went out.

He didn’t feel like stopping when the turnoff for Harrisburg came by. It made him a little queasy to be driving without a spare, but somehow he wasn’t as worried about it as he’d been before. The trunk had had tire chains when he needed them. There was no telling what else might turn up back there at the right time. He then drove on.

Since the little man’s own vehicle wasn’t available to him, he had to arrange a rental. That was no problem, though. There were agencies in every day that specialized in such things. Very shortly he was in touch with one, not exactly by telephone, and was explaining his dilemma. “The difficulty,” the little man said, “is that he’s got a head start of several days. I’ve traced him to a point west of Chicago, and he’s moving forward at a pretty steady 450 miles a day.”

“You’d better fly, then.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking too,” said the little man. “What’s available fast?”

“Could have given you a nice Persian job, but it’s out having its tassels restrung. But you don’t care much for carpets anyway, do you? I forgot.”

“Don’t trust ’em in thermals,” said the little man. “I caught an updraft once in Sikkim and I was halfway up the Himalayas before I got things under control. Looked for a while like I’d end up in orbit. What’s at the stable?”

“Well, some pretty decent jobs, There’s this classy stallion that’s been resting up all winter, though actually he’s a little cranky—maybe you’d prefer the bay gelding. Why don’t you stop around and decide for yourself?”

“Will do,” the little man said. “You still take Diner’s Club, don’t you?”

“All major credit cards, as always. You bet.”

Norton was in southern Illinois, an hour: out of St. Louis on a foggy, humid morning, when the front right-hand tire blew. He had been expecting it to go for a day and a half, now, ever since he’d stopped in Altoona for gas. The kid at the service station had tapped the tire’s treads and showed him the weak spot, and Norton had nodded and asked about his chances of buying a spare, and the kid had shrugged and said, “It’s a funny size. Try in Pittsburgh, maybe you can find some.”

He tried in Pittsburgh, killing an hour and a half there, and hearing from several men who probably ought to know that tires just weren’t made to that size, nohow. Norton was beginning to wonder how the previous owner of the car had managed to find replacements. Maybe this was still the original set, he figured. But he was morbidly sure of one thing: that weak spot was going to give out, beyond any doubt, before he saw L.A.

When it blew, he was doing about 35, and he realized at once what had happened. He slowed the car to a halt without losing control. The shoulder was wide here, but even so Norton was grateful that the flat was on the right-hand side of the car; he didn’t much feature having to change a tire with his rump to the traffic. He was still congratulating himself on that small bit of good luck when he remembered that he had no spare tire.

Somehow he couldn’t get very disturbed about it. Spending a dozen hours a day behind the wheel was evidently having a tranquilizing effect on him; at this point nothing worried him much, not even the prospect of being stranded an hour cost of St. Louis.

He would merely walk to the nearest telephone, wherever that might happen to be, and he would phone the local automobile club and explain his predicament, and they would come out and get him and tow him to civilization. Then he would settle in a motel for a day or two, phoning Ellen at her sister’s place in L.A. to say that he was all right but was going to be a little late. Either he would have the tire patched or the automobile club would find a place in St. Louis that sold odd sizes, and everything would turn out for the best. Why get into a dither?

He stepped out of the car and inspected the flat, which looked very flat indeed. Then, observing that the trunk had popped open again, he went around back. Reaching in experimentally, he expected to find the tire chains at the outer edge of the trunk, where he had left them. They weren’t there. Instead his fingers closed on a massive metal bar.

Norton tugged it part way out of the trunk and discovered that he had found a jack. Exactly so, he thought. And the spare tire ought to be right in back of it, over here, yes? He looked, but the lid was up only eighteen inches or so, and he couldn’t see much. His fingers encountered good rubber, though. Yes, here it is. Nice and plump, brand new, deep treads—very pretty. And next to it, if my luck holds, I ought to find a chest of golden doubloons—

The doubloons weren’t there. Maybe next time, he told himself. He hauled out the tire and spent a sweaty half hour putting it on. When he was done, he dumped the jack, the wrench, and the blown tire into the trunk which immediately shut to the usual hermetic degree of sealing.

An hour later, without further incident, he crossed the Mississippi into St. Louis, found a room in a shiny new motel over-looking the Gateway Arch, treated himself to a hot shower and a couple of cold Gibsons, and put in a collect call to Ellen’s sister. Ellen had just come back from some unsuccessful apartment-hunting, and she sounded tired and discouraged. Children were howling in the background as she said, “You’re driving carefully, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am.”

“And the new car is behaving okay?”

“Its behavior,” Norton said, “is beyond reproach,”

“My sister wants to know what kind it is. She says a Volvo is a good kind of car, if you want a foreign car. That’s a Norwegian car.”

“Swedish,” he corrected.

He heard Ellen say to her sister, “He bought a Swedish car.” The reply was unintelligible, but a moment later Ellen said, “She says you did a smart thing. Those Swedes, they make good cars too.”

The flight ceiling was low, with visibility less than half a mile in thick fog. Airports were socked in all over Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio. The little man flew westward, though, keeping just above the fleecy whiteness spreading to the horizon. He was making good time, and it was a relief not to have to worry about those damned private planes.

The bay gelding had plenty of stamina. He was a fuel-guzzler, that was his only trouble. You didn’t get a whole lot of miles to the bale with the horses available nowadays, the little man thought sadly. Everything was in a state of decline, and you had to accept the situation.

His original flight plan had called for him to overtake his car somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. But he had stopped off in Chicago on a sudden whim to visit friends, and now he calculated he wouldn’t catch up with the car until Arizona. He couldn’t wait to get behind the wheel again, after all these months.

III

The more he thought about the trunk and the tricks it had played, the more bothered by it all Sam Norton was. The chains, the spare tire, the jack—what next? In Amarillo he had offered a mechanic twenty bucks to get the trunk open. The mechanic had run his fingers along that smooth seam in disbelief.

“What are you, one of those television fellers?” he asked. “Having some fun with me?”

“Not at all,” Norton said. “I just want that trunk opened up.”

“Well, I reckon maybe with an acetylene torch—”

But Norton felt an obscure terror at the idea of cutting into the car that way. He didn’t know why the thought frightened him so much, but it did, and he drove out of Amarillo with the car whole and the mechanic muttering and spraying his boots with tobacco juice. A hundred miles on, when he was over the New Mexico border and moving through bleak, forlorn, winter-browned country, he decided to put the trunk to a test.

LAST GAS BEFORE ROSWELL, a peeling sign warned. FILL UP NOW!

The gas gauge told him that the tank was nearly empty. Roswell was somewhere far ahead. There wasn’t another human being in sight, no town, not even a shack. This, Norton decided, is the right place to run out of gas.

He shot past the gas station at fifty miles an hour.

In a few minutes he was two and a half mountains away from the filling station and beginning to have doubts hot merely of the wisdom of his course but even of his sanity. Deliberately letting himself run out of gas was against all reason; it was harder even to do than deliberately letting the telephone go unanswered. A dozen times he ordered himself to swing around and go back to fill his tank; and a dozen times refused.

The needle crept lower, until it was reading E for Empty, and still he drove ahead. The needle slipped through the red warning zone below the E. He had used up even the extra couple of gallons of gas that the tank didn’t register—the safety margin for careless drivers. And any moment now the car would—

—stop.

For the first time in his life Sam Norton had run out of gas. Okay, trunk, let’s see what you can do, he thought. He pushed the door open and felt the chilly zip of the mountain breeze. It was quiet here, ominously so; except for the gray ribbon of the road itself, this neighborhood had a darkly prehistoric look, all sagebrush and pinyon pine and not a trace of man’s impact. Norton walked around to the rear of his car.

The trunk was open again.

It figures. Now I reach inside and find that a ten-gallon can of gas has mysteriously materialized, and—

He couldn’t feel any can of gas in the trunk. He groped a good long while and came up with nothing more useful than a coil of thick rope.

Rope?

What good is a rope to a man who’s out of gas in the desert?

Norton hefted the rope, seeking answers from it and not getting any. It occurred to him that perhaps this time the trunk hadn’t wanted to help him. The skid, the blowout—those hadn’t been his fault. But he had with malice aforethought let the car run out of gas, just to see what would happen, and maybe that didn’t fall within the scope of the trunk’s services.

Why the rope, though?

Some kind of grisly joke? Was the trunk telling him to go string himself up? He couldn’t even do that properly here; there wasn’t a telephone pole. Norton felt like kicking himself. Here he was, and here he’d remain for hours, maybe even for days, until another car came along. Of all the dumb stunts!

Angrily he hurled the rope out of the trunk. It uncoiled as he let go of it, and one end rose straight up. The bottom of the rope hovered about a yard off the ground, rigid, pointing skyward. A faint turquoise cloud formed at the upper end, and a thin, muscular olive-skinned boy in a turban and a loincloth climbed down to confront the gaping Norton.

“Well, what’s the trouble?” the boy asked brusquely.

“I’m—out—of—gas.”

“There’s a filling station twenty miles back. Why didn’t you tank up there?”

“I—that is—”

“What a damned fool,” the boy said in disgust. “Why do I get stuck with jobs like this? All right, don’t go anywhere and I’ll see what I can do.”

He went up the rope again and vanished.

When he returned, some three minutes later, he was carrying a tin of gasoline. Glowering at Norton, he slid the gas-tank cover aside and poured in the gas.

“This’ll get you to Roswell,” he said. “From now on look at your dashboard once in a while. Idiot!”

He scrambled up the rope. When he disappeared, the rope went limp and fell. Norton shakily picked it up and slipped it into the trunk, whose lid shut with an aggressive slam.

Half an hour went by before Norton felt it was safe to get behind the wheel again. He paced around the car something more than a thousand times, not getting a whole lot steadier in the nerves, and ultimately, with night coming on, got in and switched on the ignition. The engine coughed and turned over. He began to drive toward Roswell at a sober and steadfast fifteen miles an hour.

He was willing to believe anything, now.

And so it did not upset him at all when a handsome reddish-brown horse with the wingspread of a DC-3 came soaring through the air, circled above the car a couple of times, and made a neat landing on the highway alongside him. The horse trotted along, keeping pace with him, while the small white-haired man in the saddle yelled, “Open your window wider, young fellow! I’ve got to talk to you!” Norton opened the window.

The little man said, “Your name Sam Norton?”

“That’s right”

“Well, listen, Sam Norton, you’re driving my car!”

Norton saw a dirt turnoff up ahead and pulled into it. As he got out the pegasus came trotting up and halted to let its rider dismount. It cropped moodily at sagebrush, fluttering its huge wings a couple of times before folding them neatly along its back.

The little man said, “My car, all right. Had her specially made a few years back, when I was on the road a lot. Dropped her off at a garage last winter account of I had a business trip to make abroad, but I never figured they’d sell her out from under me before I got back. It’s a decadent age.”

“Your—car—” Norton said.

“My car, yep. Afraid I’ll have to take it from you, too. Car like this, you don’t want to own it, anyway. Too complicated. Get yourself a decent little standard make flivver, eh? Well, now, let’s unhitch this trailer thing of yours, and then—”

“Wait a second,” Norton said. “I bought this car legally. I’ve got a bill of sale to prove it, and a letter from the dealer’s lawyer, explaining that—”

“—Don’t matter one bit,” said the little man. “One crook hires another crook to testify to his character, that’s not too impressive. I know you’re an innocent party, son, but the fact remains that the car is my property, and I hope I don’t have to use special persuasion to get you to relinquish it.”

“You just want me to get out and walk, is that it? In the middle of the New Mexico desert at sundown? Dragging the damned U-Haul with my bare hands?”

“Hadn’t really considered that problem much,” the little man said. “Wouldn’t altogether be fair to you, would it?”

“It sure wouldn’t.”

“And what about the two hundred bucks I paid for the car?”

The little man laughed. “Shucks, it cost me more than that to rent the pegasus to come chasing you! And the overhead! You know how much hay that critter—”

“That’s your problem,” Norton said. “Mine is that you want to strand me in the desert and that you want to take away a car that I bought in good faith for two hundred dollars, and even if it’s a goddam magic car I—”

He paused helplessly.

“Hush, now,” said the little man. “You’re gettin’ all upset, Sami We can work this thing out. You’re going to L.A., that it?”

“Ye-es.”

“So am I. Okay, we travel together. I’ll deliver you and your trailer there, and then the car’s mine again, and you forget anything you might have seen these last few days.”

“And my two hundred dol—”

“Oh, all right.” The little man walked to the back of the car. The trunk opened; he slipped in a hand and pulled forth a sheaf of crisp new bills, a dozen twenties, which he handed to Norton. “Here. With a little something extra, thrown in. And don’t look at them so suspiciously, hear? That’s good legal tender U.S. money. They even got different serial numbers, every one.” He winked and strolled over to the grazing pegasus, which he slapped briskly on the rump. “Git along, now. Head for home.”

The horse began to canter along the highway. As it broke into a gallop it spread its superb wings; they beat furiously a moment, and the horse took off, rising in a superb arc until it was no bigger than a hawk against the darkening sky, and then was gone.

The little man slipped into the driver’s seat of the car and fondled the wheel in obvious affection. At a nod, Norton took the seat beside him, and off they went.

“I understand you peddle computers,” the little man said when he had driven a couple of miles. “Mighty interesting things, computers. I’ve been considering computerizing our operation too, you know? It’s a pretty big outfit, a lot of consulting stuff all over the world, mostly dowsing now, some thaumaturgy, now and then a little transmutation, things like that, and though we use traditional methods, we don’t object to the scientific approach. Now, let me tell you a bit about our inventory flow, and maybe you can make a few intelligent suggestions, young fellow, and you might just be landing a nice contract for yourself—”

Norton had the roughs for the system worked out before they hit Arizona. From Phoenix he phoned Ellen and found out that she had rented an apartment just outside Beverly Hills, in what looked like a terribly expensive neighborhood but really wasn’t—at least, not by comparison with some of the other things she’d seen, and—

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’m in the process of closing a pretty big sale. I—ah—picked up a hitchhiker, and turns out he’s thinking of going computer soon, a fairly large company—”

“Sam, you haven’t been drinking, have you?”

“Not a drop.”

“A hitchhiker and you sold him a computer. Next you’ll tell me about the flying saucer you saw.”

“Don’t be silly,” Norton said. “Flying saucers aren’t real.”

They drove into L.A. in mid-morning, two days later. By then he had written the whole order, and everything was set; the commission, he figured, would be enough to see him through a new car, maybe one of those Swedish jobs Ellen’s sister had heard about. The little man seemed to have no difficulty finding the address of the apartment Ellen had taken; he negotiated the maze of the freeways with complete ease and assurance, and pulled up outside the house.

“Been a most pleasant trip, young fellow,” the little man said. “I’ll be talking to my bankers later today about that wonderful machine of yours. Meanwhile here we part. You’ll have to unhitch the trailer, now.”

“What am I supposed to tell my wife about the car I drove here In?”

“Oh, just say that you sold it to that hitchhiker at a good profit. I think she’ll appreciate that.”

They got out. While Norton undid the U-Haul’s couplings, the little man took something from the trunk, which had opened a moment before. It was a large rubbery tarpaulin. The little man began to spread it over the car. “Give us a hand here, will you?” he said. “Spread it nice and neat, so it covers the fenders and everything.” He got inside, while Norton, baffled, carefully tucked the tarpaulin into place.

“You want me to cover the windshield too?” he asked.

“Everything,” said the little man.

There was a hissing sound, as of air being let out of tires. The tarpaulin began to flatten. At it sank toward the ground, there came a cheery voice from underneath, calling, “Good luck, young fellow!”

In moments the tarpaulin was less than three feet high. In a minute more it lay flat against the pavement There was no sign of the car. It might have evaporated, or vanished into the earth. Slowly, uncomprehendingly, Norton picked up the tarpaulin, folded it until he could fit it under his arm, and walked into the house to tell his wife that he had arrived in Los Angeles.

Sam Norton never met the little man again, but he made the sale, and the commission saw him through a new car with something left over.

He still has the tarpaulin, too. He keeps it folded up and tied and wrapped and retied and carefully locked away in his basement He’s afraid to get rid of it, but he doesn’t like to think of what might happen if someone comes across it and spreads it out.

Content

As Is
by Robert Silverberg

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