"Wouldn't two hundred and ninety-nine be enough?"
"No," said Slim. He looked back at me. He had always been that way; he
never compromised with my money.
I shuddered when I saw my hair in the mirror as we left. But, I knew
I'd better keep the dollar for cigarettes....
We paid the first month's rent; I put up the deposits, and Slim brought
a bunch of wire and stuff from his basement, and we worked till one
o'clock winding gadgets and building a regular stall to run a car into.
This garage had a ramp going to the basement floor, and we decided
to use that floor. Also, there was an old freight elevator up to the
second and third floors, and we could park a few on the main floor and
send a few upstairs when we had time, because of course we didn't want
the secret to get out.
Slim tried the squeezer-upper when he got it finished. He set a couple
of old saw-horses inside and, turned on the juice. It was uncanny to
see those things shrink. You could even hear the legs scrape on the
concrete floor as they pulled together. In just about three seconds the
saw-horses were an inch high. Then Slim reversed the current and they
expanded to normal size again. All this in about one breath.
"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."