Philip Dick - In Milton Lumky Territory

He thought, Once you get used to spending your nights with someone else, men you are sunk for this. Once you learn how it feels to wake up and see another face near yours. And have another person flop over against you in the early hours of dawn when the room gets cold. It’s more than sex. Sex is over with in a few minutes. This is peaceful, and it goes on as long as you have her lying with you. It puts an end to an awful thing; it starts something better than anything else in life.

It changes everything, he thought. Spreads out and covers every kind of event.

That was something he had not expected or known about. Sleeping a night now and then with a girl had no relationship with it. His anticipation of what it would be like with Susan had fallen short of the actuality. It had a much greater hold on him than he would have expected. That nine or ten days could completely change him, his views and preferences, affecting even this, his sense of driving, his feel of the road…

After his meal he picked up his car and continued the drive on down California to the Bay Area. He arrived late at night, crossed the Bay Bridge to San Francisco, found an underpass that took him off the freeway, and at last reached Market Street. He parked and got out, feeling shaky but excited.

Something about Market Street had changed. He walked along the well-lit sidewalk, past the towering noble movie houses, and then he realized what it was. The clanking old streetcars had gone. Instead, buses shot quietly along at the curb.

Hands in his pockets he strolled in the direction of the waterfront. When he reached First and Market he began to notice small shops that sold Army surplus pots and clothing and shoes, so he crossed to the other side and started back. At Fifth and Market he wandered off onto one side street and then another, seeing all the different small shops, some prosperous and some not. After an hour or so he found himself staring at a display of tape recorders and cameras and typewriters, among which was a small aluminum portable that he had never seen before. The brand name was Mithrias . Presently he noticed a cord hanging out of the back. The thing was electric. And he could make out a belt disappearing from the carriage inside to the motor, so it had an electric carriage return. Nothing on it stated that it was an import, but he recognized it as the Japanese portable Milt had told him about.

The tag could be partly read. He read it, but it gave ordinary information, in acceptable and idiomatic English. But he knew that this was the Japanese machine. His instincts, his talent, told him.

The store, of course, was shut. But he did not have to know any more than this; the machine, to some extent, had been distributed in the Bay Area. Someone had jobbed it to this retailer. Naturally San Francisco and Los Angeles would be the most likely spots to find it, since the machines would come in by ships and these were ports. As were Seattle and San Diego. But the retail trade was higher, here.

A glance told him that this was not a regular outlet for typewriters. He saw no popular lines represented, and no display material. This was simply an enterprising small merchant who stocked a bit of this and a bit of that, from microscope sets and fancy fabrics to rocks that glowed in the dark, mother of pearl cigarette lighters and redwood wall planters. Something on the order of a gift shop, with an emphasis on metals, glass, and plastics, rather than bric-a-brac.

That raised his hopes. The Mithrias people hadn’t yet worked out their franchise arrangement, or they hadn’t been able to call back the machines already sold. Either way, the machines had gotten out of ordinary franchised outlets. No reason on earth why he couldn’t buy on the same terms as any retailer. Of course, he would have to figure out how to transport them to Boise. But he wouldn’t need very many.

Unless, he thought, I want to make it an all-or-nothing buy. Pick up as many as I can get. Make only a few dimes on each one, advertise with spotlights and free gardenias and sound trucks.

A one-cent sale. Buy an electric portable for such-and-such, get a second one for a penny.

But he still had to discover a warehouse of them, and one which the owner wanted to dump. His best bet would perhaps be—not in San Francisco or in L.A. — but in a smaller town in-between, where a local jobber had tried to do in his town what had been done elsewhere. An in-between town like Bakersfield, where perhaps an outlet of some chain drug company or department store or supermarket had been given a quota of them but hadn’t made its sales.

The valley towns. Salinas, Fresno, Stockton, Livermore. He would have to comb them, one after another.

It might take weeks.

No, he could not allow it to take weeks. A week at the most. So if he seriously intended to track down a warehouse of Mithrias portables, he would have to find a direct route to them.

Goddamn, he thought. When he had worked for C.B.B. he had been on company time, free to prowl and poke at leisure. Sometimes he and his boss Ed von Scharf spent a month, off and on, digging up a buy and hazarding a variety of tenuous half-joking offers, until finally, almost out of sheer boredom, the owner let it fall their way.

Image of his boss, black mustache and all, seated among pasteboard cartons, eating a Popsicle and scratching out an inventory. A professional with two decades of buying experience, back to the days of army surplus—the genuine army surplus—and then wholesale groceries, and after that home freezers and half-cows on the installment plan, and then whole sale direct to you at no mark-up, and, at last, in with the Pareti brothers and their discount house that operated out in the open.

Returning to his Merc he consulted a map. He could take US 40 or 50 direct from the East Bay and be in Reno in four hours. The length of a long baseball game.

The time at this moment—he checked—was one-thirty. He could be in Reno before sunup. Better yet, sleep a couple of hours in the car and then start, so that he would have daylight when he reached me Sierras. Then when he got to Reno, go to a friend’s house to bathe and shave and change his shirt, perhaps bum breakfast, and then drop by C.B.B. and talk to Ed von Scharf.

Starting up the Merc he drove off in the direction of the Oakland Bay Bridge.

The highway through the Sacramento Valley was as wide and flat as anyone could want. He made good time, rushing along between the fields and at last over a narrow bridge built not over water but over miles of reeds. The metal railing of the bridge mumped noisily, and the sound and the nearness of it made him tense. He had done this part in darkness, but now, as he entered Sacramento, the sky to the East started to turn white. If he meant to get across before the big trailers and trucks and interstate rigs blocked everyone’s way, he would have to hurry.

But in downtown Sacramento he became lost, even though the streets were empty. Signs reading “truck route” pointed off in various directions. Finally he found himself driving up and down bumpy tree-shaded streets of shacks and corrugated iron machine shops and sheds. Could this be the highway out of Sacramento? He blundered across a wide intersection of train tracks and rutted dirt and a number of alley-like roads, onto a two-lane highway with closed-up diners and fruit stands and gas stations on each side of it. Making a left turn he followed the highway. It wound around a hill, rising, and on the shoulder he saw four trucks with their lights on, their diesel engines rattling away as they warmed up. The trucks were about to get back on the road. The drivers had been asleep all night but now they were awake and on the job. He put on more speed, flying around the curves.

The road rose continually. It remained narrow, but well-kept. The fruit stands fell away and he saw wooded countryside. Meanwhile, the sky became brighter. It shone a brisk white, and once, as he reached the top of a rise, he saw what seemed to be mountains.