THE PASSIONATE PITCHMAN

By STEPHEN WILDER

Hector was just another salesman until the gorgeous Miss Laara came along with her Foolproof Method of Procurement. Miss Laara was fascinating. So were her methods. They introduced Hector into a world where inhibitions were unknown. Then the Syndicate moved in. They wanted to know about this procurement business. So will you.

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Fantastic October 1956.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

Patty put a working stranglehold on Laara but it was Hector, underneath, who got the business.

The large-headed little man cornered Hector Finch after Heck had had his fourth martini at the sales convention.

Heck functioned rather well after four martinis, but he never remembered much afterward. He did remember vaguely, though, that the little man's head seemed too large. Not freakishly so—just somewhat too large. Nor was the man's small stature something a circus sideshow could make money on. The man was almost but not quite five feet tall, Hector Finch judged.

"I want to see you a moment," he told Heck politely. "If I may."

Hector nodded. He way-laid a waiter and short-stopped two brimfull cocktail glasses which had been heading elsewhere.

"Drink?" he asked the little man.

The little man nodded, took one of the glasses and upended it. He had poured the martini—it was a very dry martini—down his throat without swallowing. That, Hector decided, as they found an unoccupied corner of the convention hall in which were displayed the various electronic products of Weatherby, Inc., for which Heck was a salesman, was a considerable feat.

"I've been watching you," the little man said.

"Oh?" It probably meant, Heck told himself, that the little man was an employee-scout for one of Weatherby's competitors. Such scouts often came to these conventions and had a go at recruiting top-flight sales personnel.

"You're passionate, Hector Finch," the little man said suddenly and unexpectedly.

"I'm which?" Hector asked in surprise.

"Passionate. As a salesman, of course. I wouldn't know about your love life. You truly like to sell things, don't you?"

"Why, yes," Heck said enthusiastically, surprised that he had admitted it. This was, in a way, Hector Finch's secret. Other men loved big sports cars or fishing or hunting or trips to exotic places. Hector Finch's first love was selling. There was something, he always told himself, soul-satisfying in selling someone a product which, while good in its own right, they didn't really need. Something thrilling and ego-boosting....

"... and you're healthy and young and ought to have a life-expectancy of some fifty-odd years after today. Yes, Heck. You're the man we want."

"I'm sorry," Heck said promptly. "But I like my work with Weatherby, Inc. I couldn't possibly—"

"You have, I believe," said the little man with a smile, "a fiancée in the home office of Weatherby, Inc. By name, Patty O'Conner. Irish and—shall we say, tempestuous?"

"What about Patty?" Heck groaned. He thought he knew what was coming.

"Last night, after the first evening of the convention, you and a blonde named—"

"Never mind her name!" wailed Heck, remembering the evening with delight. "How did you know?"

"I said I've been watching you. Now, unless you want the story of you and the blonde woman—very aesthetically pleasing, by the way—to go directly to Miss O'Conner, you must agree to—"

"Anything," Heck said in despair. He loved Patty O'Conner. He wanted to marry Patty, and would. But they weren't married yet. And Heck was a firm believer in wild oats, the more to make marriage lasting and unsullied. He also knew Patty's violent Irish temper.

"Splendid. Incidentally, that bit with the blonde was superb, Heck. I mean, the way you sold yourself. At the beginning she didn't even like you, you know."

Heck beamed. "Seduction, like selling—" he began, then scowled. "Let's just hear your proposition," he said.

"First, a question. What would you say is the chief factor in selling over which the salesman has no control?"

"Location, of course," Heck said promptly. "You've got to be where the customer is. You've got to get that old foot in the door, as the expression goes—"

"Precisely. But I can go you one better, Heck. Could you sell bottled water to a thirsting man? a greasy-spoon hamburger to a starving man? life insurance to a man who's just learned he has an incurable disease?"

"You wouldn't need much of a salesman. Anyone could make sales like that."

"Heck, what's a salesman's dream?"

"Walking through walls, I guess. Getting at the customer no matter what."

"But we're grown men. We know that walking through walls is impossible."

"It was only a matter of speaking," said Heck, downing his fifth martini and thinking of Patty. If Patty ever learned about that blonde....

"Yes, to be sure. A matter of speaking. But did you ever hear of teleportation?"

"No," said Hector Finch promptly. How his head was whirling!

"Teleportation is instantaneous transport from one position in space, from one location, to another. It needs no time; it negates the dimension of time. Neither time nor space—nor walls, Heck—are a barrier to teleportation. This is what I offer you. With it you can be with the right product at the right place at the right time, and a customer's 'no' and locked door won't mean a thing to you."

"But why—"

"Because of your passion. We want to see what the combination of passionate salesmanship and teleportation can mean on Earth."

"On Earth. Er—"

"No. Certainly not. I'm not from Earth."

"Then—"

"Does it matter? Does it really matter to you? I am from elsewhere. Isn't that enough. Anyway...."

"But what do you want me to sell?"

"Anything. Everything."

"I don't—" lamely—"understand."

"Whatever is needed. Wherever it is needed. We've already rented a warehouse in your home city. It's stocked to meet almost any contingency. You sell anything, Heck. You sell it, though, when and where it is absolutely needed. It's a salesman's paradise: no one can refuse you. No one."

"But—Patty! I'll have to quit Weatherby. And Patty—"

"You're a salesman, aren't you? A passionate salesman? Don't you love Patty? Sell her the idea of coming along as your secretary. You can do it—if anyone can."

"But, but—"

"Be firm, Heck! Believe in yourself. Here." The little man held out something. It was a business card. "Your business card," the little man said. The card said: HECTOR FINCH, Inc. We Sell Anything, Anywhere, Anytime. There was an address and a telephone number on the card. Like it or not, unless the little fellow were insane, Heck was in business.

Hector Finch blinked. The little man was gone. Hector spent the next hour wandering around the convention floor, seeking him. He was nowhere. It was as if the floor had swallowed him up. Maybe I imagined the whole thing, Heck thought. He'd heard of people getting the DT's, even if they didn't drink excessively....

Just then the blonde of last night came undulating across the convention floor. She was a sales analyst for Jason Spooner, Inc., Weatherby's chief competitor. She had a figure which Heck could only regard as fantastic. She looked like a calendar pin-up girl in three dimensions. Bite-size, Heck thought. I mean, life-size. Bite-size and ready to eat. That was an ad.... Hooo, I'm high. I'm high as the proverbial kite.

"Heck!" called the blonde. "Heck, darling, I've been looking just all over."

Heck could think of only one thing: Patty. Last night had been a mistake. Patty.

Everything went dark for a split second.

Heck opened his eyes.

He was standing in a bedroom. A bright moon was riding high, shining through the open window.

It was Patty's bedroom. At least, Heck assumed it was. He had never been there.

The girl sleeping on the bed was Patty.

Not having ever been a movie star, Patty had never told a columnist in what state of dress or undress she slept. Nor had Heck ever asked her. Patty was not a prim girl, but neither was she incontinent, verbally or otherwise.

Standing there on the threshold of Patty's bedroom in the moonlight, Heck learned how Patty slept.

She slept with a slight, contented smile on her lovely face. She slept with her long Titian hair in careless disarray, framing her heart-shaped head on the pillow. She slept with the light cover thrown back and covering only her left calf.

And she slept, as they say, in her birthday suit.

There were delightful curves. There were delightful hummocks. There were delightful valleys. And highlights and shadows....

Heck stood uncertainly on the threshold, gaping. Should he enter the room? Should he beat a hasty and strategic retreat? Should he....

He took a hesitant step into the room. His foot struck something. It wasn't much of a sound, but it was enough. Patty was a light sleeper. Her eyes blinked open. She looked at Heck without seeing him. Maybe the moonlight blinded her.

"Get—out!" she yelled.

A man, Heck thought. She sees a man. She doesn't know it's me yet.

She was sitting up now, clutching the cover to her chin. She pointed imperiously at the door. "How dare you come in here? How dare...." She stopped. Rage replaced surprise and fear on her face. Patty was definitely no clinging vine type of girl.

She leaped from the bed, draping the light cover over her body. She made straight for Heck, fire in her eyes. "No second-storey man's going to get away with coming in here!" she cried, her Irish wrath rising. Apparently she still hadn't seen Heck's face. He tried to flee, but stumbled over whatever he had stumbled over before.

Patty reached him just as he righted himself. She was a tall girl, tall as Heck. She was not exactly Amazonian, but had a lush, well-built figure. Heck, for his part, was not exactly Herculean. With anger and some little vestige of fear pumping adrenaline through her blood and with health and vigor and half a night's sleep behind her while Heck was still considerably potted, she would have been a good match for him.

But Heck was at a disadvantage. Heck did not want to fight.

She caught his shoulders and turned him around to face her. She butted at him with her head. She kicked him in the shin. She balled her fists and hit his face. Heck tripped for a third time, and this time he fell down.

In one sweeping motion, the cover trailing like a cape, Patty clawed for the telephone on the dresser and dove down on top of Heck. She sat on his middle and lifted the phone from its cradle and said, her voice surprisingly cool: "Get me the police."

Frantically, Heck clutched at the telephone, depressing the cradle. Patty raised the heavy instrument threateningly.

"Wait!" Heck cried. "It's me—Heck!"

Patty's mouth opened. She didn't say anything, though. Then she looked at Heck and threw her arms around him. "Oh, Hector, Hector, did I hurt you?" she wanted to know.

"You definitely did not hurt me. I tripped, is all."

"I'm sorry, if I had known—Just a minute! Hector Finch, what are you doing in my bedroom?"

"I can explain everything," said Heck in a voice which said he could not explain anything at all.

"Well, you had better start explaining." Patty got up, leaving the telephone on the floor near Heck, who was busy rubbing his throbbing jaw.

Just then the telephone rang.

Heck picked up the receiver. "Yes?" he said.

"Are you the party who asked for the police?" the operator demanded.

"No, I'm not," Heck said truthfully.

"Well, someone at that number did. Do you still want the police?"

"No."

"Then why did you—"

"It was the children," Heck blurted. "I'm terribly sorry, operator. You know how children will play with the phone."

"At three o'clock in the morning?" the operator asked.

"They have insomnia," Heck said with inspiration, and hung up.

Patty had adjusted the cover into graceful, toga-like folds. She stood with her hands on her hips. Heck got up and backed slowly toward the door.

"Well?" Patty demanded wrathfully.

"You're dreaming," Heck said. "Don't you realize you're dreaming?"

"Dreaming? But you—"

"Dreaming. Yes, dreaming. You ought to know me by now, Patty love. Would I barge into your bedroom at three in the morning? Would I?"

"Well, I hadn't thought you would," Patty admitted. "But I certainly don't feel like I'm dreaming. And besides," she went on suspiciously, "a person in a dream never tells the person who is dreaming that she's dreaming. It just isn't done."

"It's done in this dream. Here, I'll pinch you."

"No, keep away from me!"

"Patty, I'm in Cleveland at the salesman's convention. I called you long distance from Cleveland tonight, remember? So how can I be here? You must have been thinking of me when you went to sleep, so you dreamed...."

"Don't be so rational. I want to believe you. But dreams aren't so rational, Heck."

"Get back into bed," Heck commanded. "You'll see you are dreaming. You—you'll be sleeping soundly again in seconds."

"I'm not getting back into anything until I find out if—"

Heck walked toward her. Her bold attack on what she thought had been a prowler was done half in sleep. She was only now coming to full wakefullness. He had to prevent that, or she'd know the truth. Naturally, he couldn't tell her about the little man with the slightly too big head and the something which he called teleportation and which seemed to work.

"Keep away from me, Heck. I'm warning you. We—we're not married yet. If this isn't a dream we won't get married, either."

But boldly Heck advanced on her and with a quick bending and swooping and lifting motion scooped her up in his arms and went with her to the bed. Before he deposited her thereon he kissed her mouth. Her lips were delicious.

"Ooo," she said. "What a dream! What a dream—"

"Go to sleep," Heck ordered. "This obviously can't be anything but a dream. Can it?"

She looked up at him sleepily. Apparently it was working. "N-no, Hector." She looked up at him. "Hector?"

"Yes," he said, backing toward the door, "what is it?"

"Hector, why can't you be—well, assertive, like the man in the dream? The dream Hector."

"I am. I am exactly how I am. You dream very accurately."

It was a mistake. Her eyes opened wider. She seemed more awake. "But Heck—"

"Sleep," he coaxed. "It's only a dream. Sleep."

She wanted desperately to believe him, and that was a big help. Her eyelids fluttered, grew heavy, closed. She breathed regularly. Heck went to the door.

And tripped a fourth time.

"Hector!" Patty shouted.

He closed the door behind him and ran. He heard her footsteps pounding across the bedroom floor, heard the doorknob being turned. He had to vanish, here in her living room, at once. If he vanished, if the teleportation really worked and took him away instantly, before she could open the door and see him, she would be convinced she had dreamed everything.

He concentrated his will on the teleportation, but made a mistake. He forgot to designate a destination.

Darkness came for a split second.

Then soft light.

A living room—but not Patty's.

A woman screamed, staring at him. The man with her cursed and threw a cocktail glass in an automatic hostile response. It struck Heck's temple and shattered.

The woman was the blonde sales analyst for Jason Spooner. She gaped at Heck open-mouthed. The man seemed familiar. Heck had met him recently, he knew.

Suddenly it came to him. The man was Amos Weatherby of Weatherby, Inc. Met him? He'd known Weatherby for years!

And Heck had seen the living room before. It was the main room of the two-room suite Amos Weatherby had taken at the convention hotel.

"Finch!" Weatherby cried.

Heck stood there, staring blankly. He was near no door. He could not summon his will to vanish via teleportation. He would have to learn how to master that.

"Finch, what are you doing here?"

What Heck was doing there was not at all obvious. But what Amos Weatherby and the blonde had been doing was obvious. Weatherby seemed to be in a rumpled state, hair, clothing, general appearance. The blonde's off-the-shoulder gown was considerably further off the shoulder than it should have been. Cocktail glasses were scattered about. There was a bottle of champagne in an urn.

Last night she made a play for me, Heck thought. Tonight, the boss. Well, the ex-boss. It came to Heck that it might all be Jason Spooner's idea, and that seemed as good a way out as any. It's like selling, he thought. I sold Patty the idea that she was dreaming, didn't I? Selling was one part luck, one part determination and one part figuring out what the potential customer thought he wanted and tieing that in with what you had to sell.

"Listen, boss," Heck said. "This dame made a play for me last night. Now it's you. I wonder how much Jason Spooner is paying her?"

"That's a lie!" the blonde cried. "He made a drunken pass at me last night and I told him to try again on somebody else. This is his revenge."

"Boss," said Heck, "don't you see? Either Spooner wants to get some trade secrets on next year's models or else he—he wants to put you in a compromising spot. Why—why any minute," Heck improvised, "a photographer might rush in here and start shooting pictures. What a way to discredit Weatherby, Inc! After all, you're a family man, and you can't take—"

Even as Heck spoke, a photographer suddenly came into the room. Through the walls? wondered Heck in dismay. No, he had merely materialized, as Heck had done.

With camera and strobe unit he walked purposefully across the room. "Right here, boss?" he demanded. The others did not know this, but he was addressing Heck. Apparently Heck had summoned him, via teleportation. He was part of Heck's new company, all donated by the man with the big head, like the cards, and the warehouse.

The blonde looked more surprised than anybody. Amos Weatherby had gone white as a sheet. His mouth opened but he couldn't get any words out.

"Scram!" Heck shouted. "Get out of here." The photographer vanished.

"Finch," Amos Weatherby said, mopping his brow, "you had better be able to explain this. All of it."

The blonde, after her first surprise at the photographer, seemed amused. "But does he really?" she demanded. "Do you, Heck?"

The boss-image was very strong in Heck's mind. He'd been an employee of Weatherby, Inc., ever since his two years of business college. Amos Weatherby was The Boss. You had to obey The Boss. But still, in a way, the blonde was right. Wasn't Heck going into business for himself? Hadn't the arrangements already been made by the little man with the slightly outsized head? But what about the blonde? thought Heck suddenly. How did the blonde know this?

"Well, Finch?" Weatherby asked.

And Heck heard himself saying: "This seems as good a time as any to tell you, boss. I—er—am quitting."

Weatherby looked at him for a moment, then bellowed: "Did some goldarn sales representatives from The Spooner Company offer you some kind of deal? I'll match it, Heck. Plus an additional bonus. Amos Weatherby needs salesmen like you!"

"Thank you, sir, but I'm going into business for myself."

"Yourself? With what for capital?"

The blonde smiled. To Heck it looked like a knowing smile. The blonde knew, all right. She understood everything. "I'm afraid I can't tell you that," Heck said. The blonde took his arm.

"Shall we teleport?" she said.

The last thing Heck saw was Amos Weatherby's sweating face. Then, with the blonde, he plunged into the now familiar blackness.

"But it's still dark," Heck said a few moments later as they continued to travel.

"Sure," came the unseen blonde's voice. "We just haven't gone all the way through."

Something soft nibbled at Heck's face. Nibbled? That wasn't nibbling! he told himself. It was a pair of lips and the lips were kissing him in the utter darkness.

"Ummm," said the blonde between kisses, "if we're going to work together, we might as well have some fun, too."

"But what about Patty?" Heck demanded. While waiting for an answer he explored tentatively then more forcefully with his own lips and hands. After all, the circumstances were unusual.

"Patty?" asked the blonde dreamily. "Paa-tii? Oh, yes, the girl friend. Well, just you bring her along to work for us if you want, as a secretary or clerk or something."

"For—us?" Heck asked.

"Us, of course. I'm part of Hector Finch. We Sell Anything."

"What part?" Heck asked suspiciously.

"Don't say it like that, lover. It was Baldid's idea."

"Who the hell's Baldid?"

"Little man? Big head?"

"Go ahead," said Heck resignedly.

"I'm to be your procurement agent, is all."

"Procurer," said Heck, "of what?"

"Procurement agent, I said. What do you think a procurement agent does? He gets things. You sell them, I'll get them. O.K.?"

"If Mr. Baldid said so, I guess it's O.K."

"Splendid," came the voice of the blonde in utter darkness. She was very close. Heck could smell the scent of her perfume. He felt the faint brushing of her blonde hair against his face as she moved her head in the darkness. "Now, do you want to go back and get a hotel room, or sleep here?" she asked Heck matter-of-factly.

"Well, to tell you the truth—"

"Why bother to be conventional, Heck? Besides, those are just the conventions of your world which are holding you back. Now, on my world—"

"You stay here," Heck said. "Wherever here is. I'm going back home. I'll see you at the new office tomorrow. Er—you know the address?"

"I ought to. I picked the place out for Baldid."

"Well, goodbye," Heck said, and teleported to his bachelor apartment in Metropolitan City, about half a mile from where Patty lived. Conventions, he thought. It was always something. He didn't mean the conventions which had stopped him from doing what the eager blonde wanted to do because he was engaged to Patty. He meant sales conventions. If all this had happened at anything but a sales convention, Heck would have been too incredulous to go ahead with his plans to start the new business. But at a sales convention? Anything and everything could happen at a sales convention....

Heck drifted off to sleep and dreamed that Patty and Baldid, secret lovers, were conspiring against him.

He was at the new office building at nine o'clock promptly. He should have felt sleepy, but did not. He was raring to go.

The building was seven storeys high. Heck had expected a dilapidated warehouse and a dingy suite of offices above it. What he saw was a gleaming glass-walled new office building in one of the best sections of town. A sign in raised metal-on-metal bank-style letters proclaimed the edifice to be the Finch Building. And that, Heck told himself in amazement, was more than either Amos Weatherby or Jason Spooner had.

The doorman smiled and tipped his hat. At first Heck, who smiled back a little self-consciously, did not know how the maroon-uniformed doorman knew him. But then he saw a big full-color portrait of himself hanging just to the left of the bank of elevators. Apparently the blonde had found it somewhere, or had had it made from a snapshot. The blonde thought of everything.

Heck got into the elevator. It was crowded with white-collar workers all of whom, Heck realized with a start, worked for him. They'd been talking animatedly when he entered the car, but the talk settled quickly into nervous silence. After all, weren't they in the presence of The Boss?

When the elevator got to the top floor and when the last of the other passengers got off, Heck stepped out on a plush red carpet and across it through a gate and past a row of smiling secretaries to an opaque-glass-walled suite of offices marked with the legend: Executive Offices.

There must have been half a dozen secretaries and clerks in the large ante-room. All were busy. All were gorgeous. If the blonde was responsible for hiring them, the blonde had taste. And obviously wasn't the jealous type. Or perhaps, Heck thought, Baldid had done the hiring. Or perhaps the girls just came with the building. Were they Earth girls? wondered Heck, or girls from the blonde's world? He found himself sighing with contentment. If they all had a collective moral sense the equal of the blonde's.... But what am I thinking? There's Patty. Isn't there?

"... waiting for you," a voice said.

"Er, what was that?" Heck realized that the secretary closest to the door leading to the Executive Offices had spoken to him.

"I said, sir, there is a Miss O'Conner waiting for you in your office."

Patty, Heck thought. He gulped. How had Patty learned of his new business so quickly? He was going to tell her, of course, but not immediately. He needed time to think. Unprepared, how could you explain a setup like this to a girl like Patty?

"... has called twice," the secretary was saying.

"I—uh—whom did you say has called twice?"

"Miss Laara, sir. The procurement agent."

"Ah, yes. Miss Laara. I'd better see her. At once. Yes. Yes, at once. Don't tell Miss O'Conner...."

Just then the door to the Executive Offices opened. An angry Patty stood there, hands on hips. "Don't tell Miss O'Conner what?" she demanded. "Heck, are you trying to avoid me?"

"Why, no, sweetheart. Whatever—"

Then Patty's face changed. The anger and the certainty were replaced by a small-girl look of surprise and awe. "Heck," she said in a soft voice, "what is all this? What has happened to you? How—how can you afford a setup that could bankrupt Amos Weatherby?"

"I can explain everything," Heck said, realizing how ridiculous and incriminating the words sound. "No, I mean it, I can." Of course he could. But whether she believed or not was another story.

"Now?" Patty asked.

"Not now. Right now I'm busy."

Patty had a new expression on her face. Hurt look. "At least give me some idea," she pleaded.

Heck stared at her blankly. There was nothing he could say. She would never believe his story about Mr. Baldid. Who in his right mind would? "I—I saved up!" he said, blurting the words.

"Saved up? If you'd been saving half your paycheck since I met you you couldn't have put a down payment on just the furniture in this one room. Heck! Heck, you're lying to me!"

He didn't deny it. He stared at Patty and shrugged his shoulders and adjusted his tie and teleported. The last thing he saw was Patty's very angry face....

Heck re-materialized in the Procurement Office, or rather in the waiting room of the procurement office. He looked around. He shuddered. He wanted to run.

The faces. You didn't have to study the WANTED posters in the post offices to recognize them. They were all of a type—and the type belonged on wanted posters. They were hard faces, brutal faces, cynical faces. They went with big, powerful bodies and heavily-padded, loud-styled clothing. They went with suspicious jacket-bulges and unreadable expressions. They went with organized crime.

The secretary, a very small brunette in a low-cut dress, did not seem to mind. In fact, she seemed a shade disappointed when Heck's comparatively small form pushed its way through to her desk. "There's something?" she said, then gave Heck a closer scrutiny. "Mr. Finch! I'm sorry, sir. I didn't recognize you."

"Is Miss Laara in?"

"Yes, sir. Of course. Interviewing, sir."

"For what?"

The receptionist stared at him in surprise. "For the procurement staff, naturally. Shall I tell Miss Laara you're here?"

"No. I'll go right in, thanks."

And Heck went to the door, and opened it.

"... ten percent of the price received for all material procured by you," Miss Laara, her blonde hair in an upsweep and harlequin glasses perched on her pretty nose, was saying.

She looked up. "Oh, hi. Hi, Heck."

Heck grunted, sat down in the one empty chair. The second visitor's chair in the room was well-filled by the enormous bulk of one of the hoodlum types being interviewed for the procurement staff. "Gee, lady," he said. "I dunno. Ten percent ain't so hot. If we was to sell to a fence we could figure on maybe thirty percent of the value of the merchandise."

"Sure, but working with a fence is catch as catch can. I guarantee you a steady market. Besides, you will also be guaranteed a capture-proof method of procurement. I already explained that to you."

"Prohibition was never like this," said the thug.

"Well, what do you say, my man? Come, come. There are others. If you don't want—"

"Naw, I didn't say that. I guess I'll take the deal. Only, lemme see that trick again. Walk through that wall."

"I already told you it wasn't really walking through walls. It is teleporting."

"Teleporting, shmeleporting. Gimme the gadget."

"There is no gadget. You are now working for us. You can teleport. And your specialty, Mr. Manetti—?"

"Tires. Automobile tires." Manetti walked toward the wall, chuckling happily.

"We'll expect a shipment today."

"Today? But—"

"You can teleport it, remember?"

Manetti nodded his head, got halfway to the wall and disappeared.

Laara flashed a smile. "How'm I doing, Heck?"

"I don't know. I just don't know."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Laara asked in a hurt voice. "By noon I ought to have the whole procurement force, and you say—"

"Crooks. Gangsters."

"What did you expect, a staff of Little Lord Fauntleroys? After all, if they have to burgle—"

"Burgle!"

"Of course. We don't have any working capital. How do you expect to get any merchandise to sell? We burgle it—but safely—via teleportation."

"That's against the law," Heck said.

Laara looked at him blankly. "Is it? Do you really care?"

"I really, definitely, truly care! Call off your procurement force, Laara. That's an order. Go out and get us some money."

"Where?"

"Why, from Baldid, of course."

"But Baldid doesn't have any money."

"No? No money?" Heck said in alarm.

"But I can get some. I can rob a bank via teleportation. Shall I go now?"

"No." Heck cried. "Don't do that. I didn't mean like that. Dismiss the staff. Forget the whole thing. I'll get a job. Maybe Jason Spooner will hire me. But I won't be a party to any wholesale burglaries."

"Very well," the blonde Laara said. "If that's what you want. But first I'd like to point out we have a staff of over five hundred in this building. They've all been here an hour or so. They'll all demand at least a day's pay, if you let them go. Some of them will demand two weeks pay and the courts might decide they're entitled to it. Do you imagine—can you imagine—where that would put you? In debt for life, Hector Finch, unless you go through with our business arrangements."

"Crooks and all?" Heck said in despair.

"I'm handling this. Crooks and all, is that clear?" The blonde stared at him defiantly. Defiantly? he wondered. But defiantly meant she was trying to defy him. It wasn't that way at all. If there was any defying that had to be done, it would be on Heck's part. The blonde was in the driver's seat. Heck wondered: who really runs Hector Finch. We Sell Anything? It certainly wasn't Heck.

Gangsters, he thought. Criminals. And how many robberies a day? He shuddered, and teleported.

He blinked.

He stared.

He gaped.

He had begun to materialize in a locker room. He had of course been in locker rooms before. But never in ladies' locker rooms.

And this was very definitely a ladies' locker room.

Heck heard the hiss and roar of showers, heard the talk of many girls. He saw them, too, in the aisles between the lockers. Some were dressed in mufti. Some were dressed in a kind of uniform with the letters HF stitched across the left breast. Some were dressed in fractions of each, or either. Some were in undies. Some were in towels. Some were not dressed at all. And every girl in the locker room was a beauty, sleek and well-formed and lovely to look at except that with all of them there, Heck thought, it was something like a man dying of thirst in the middle of the Sahara being thrust suddenly head first into a vat of beer. He'd want to drink a lot but he couldn't drink that fast and if he didn't watch out he might even go—in seconds—from dying of thirst to drowning.

Heck flushed, and decided to teleport. Before he could, however, a woman wearing a towel and a lot of wet skin grabbed his arm. "Stick around, honey," she said. "You're the boss, aren't you?"

"That's right, Miss. I—"

"You like the new uniform?"

"Well, I—"

"Georgette!" called the woman, who seemed to be several years older than the others and reminded Heck of his impression of what a madam ought to be like.

A strawberry blonde came over in the HF uniform and slowly pirouetted for Heck. The uniform was maroon and silver, with a tight clinging bodice and tapered slacks that fit her buttocks and legs like sun-tan oil. Heck gaped.

"Like it?" the strawberry blonde asked.

"That's enough, Georgette," the older woman said. "This is the boss."

Georgette went away, wagging an acre of pulchritude.

"What are you all going to be," Heck asked, "elevator operators?"

"Elevator operators?" repeated the woman, and laughed. It was a loud, unrestrained sort of laugh, but somehow not uncouth—exactly what Heck would have expected if the woman had been what Heck thought the woman looked like. "Dear me, no. Elevator operators!" And she went off into a second fit of laughter.

"Then what?"

"We're the sales staff, of course."

"Sales?" Blankly.

"Sales. It's Miss Laara's feeling that a sales staff ought to be expert at selling."

"Obviously," Heck said.

"Look at these girls! Can they sell, d'you think? In those uniforms they could sell Union Station to the police chief and make it stick."

"But their experience—"

"They're all experienced. They're chorus girls or burlesque girls or party girls or pr—"

"That's enough!" Heck cried. "You've made your point."

"Then all I want to know is, do you approve of the uniform or don't you approve of the uniform?"

Heck couldn't think. Everybody was running Hector Finch but Hector Finch. He took one more look around the locker room. Most of the girls were in their uniforms now. They had not minded Heck's being there. Why should they? They were all used to that sort of thing.

Heck should have been happy. Access to this room alone might have been worth five years of a healthy young bachelor's life. But he wasn't happy at all. Yesterday the ace salesman of a big electronics outfit. An ace salesman, who loved selling, perfectly, splendidly, magnificently adjusted. Today, the owner of a huge—and illegally functioning or soon to be illegally functioning—company. Well, the so-called owner. The owner in name only.

Because he hadn't made one decision....

"Excuse me," a voice said timidly. "I was told I might find Hector Finch here. Is Hector—" The voice trailed off. It was Patty's voice and now Patty saw Heck, sitting apparently unconcernedly, among all the uniformed and ununiformed and partially uniformed beauties.

"Heck!" she cried. "You come out of there! You come with me this minute." But then she looked at his face, saw the worry, the indecision, the confusion. "Heck," she said, her voice softening. "Heck, you poor guy. You look so befuddled. You come on with me, Heck."

Mechanically, he went. Laara ran procurement. The madam-like woman ran selling. Patty ran Heck. He was one hell of an executive.

They ran smack into their first serious trouble three days after the company began to function.

In those three days, Heck almost succeeded in turning his own head. His job apparently consisted of signing a few routine interoffice memorandums, making a daily tour of inspection, spending as much time as he wanted with the sales force, arbitrating disputes between some of the more tempestuous beauties either of the sales force or the secretarial staff, and trying to convince Patty, who had come that first day because she had seen an ad Laara had placed in the papers in Heck's name, that everything was going to be all right. He never did actually get right down to it and tell Patty the truth, but he didn't have to. On the second day, Laara told her. And, coming from Laara, not Heck, Patty believed every word.

And they were making money, as the expression goes, hand over fist. The first day, four hundred thousand in net profits. The second day, six hundred and fifty thousand. The third day, just short of a million. In three years at this rate, Heck thought, he'd be a billionaire. So why worry about little details like how the procurement force got merchandise to sell or how the sales force did the selling?