"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 far-away
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 came. We were just resting for
a moment, with no cars in sight, when we looked around and there he
stood. It startled us, because absolutely no one was allowed in the
basement.
"What do you want?" Slim asked, and just then a car appeared on the
ramp, coming down to the reducer.
"I'm the building inspector. I'm checking on the weight you're putting
in this building. It's an old building, you know." And all the time his
eyes were darting everywhere.
"Did LaBombard send you?" asked Slim. The car was halfway down.
"Well, not exactly; we're interested in this from the safety angle."
A second car's nose showed around the curve. I began to sweat.
"Okay," said Slim. "Look us over. We do the parking upstairs."
"What do you do down here?" The inspector stared at the reducing stall.
"That's a new-fangled washing apparatus."
"What are all these toy cars on the floor down here?"