another store wouldn’t be quite as bad. I started walking in the opposite direction, staying on the wide main street, where all the big stores seemed to be, and two blocks down, I ran into luck, because there was a big bracket sticking out over the sidewalk from the front of a store halfway down a side street, and it had the three gold balls hanging from it that I knew, from television, meant the kind of place I wanted. When I walked down to it, I saw too that they had a sign painted over the window: “We buy old gold and diamonds.”
Just how lucky that was, I didn’t realize till quite some time later. I was going to look in the Classified Directory for “Hock Shops.” I didn’t know any other name for them then.
Inside, it looked exactly like what I expected, and even the smell was nothing to complain about. Camphor and dust and mustiness were strong enough to cover most of the sweaty smell, and those were smells of a kind I’d experienced before, in other places.
The whole procedure was reassuring, because it all went just the way it was supposed to, and I knew how to behave. I’d seen it in a show, and the man behind the grilled window even looked like the man on the screen, and talked the same way.
“What can we do for you, girlie?”
“I’d like to sell a diamond,” I told him.
He didn’t say anything at first, then he looked impatient. “You got it with you?”
“Oh . . . yes!” I opened my purse, and took out one of the little packages, and unwrapped it, and handed it to him. He screwed the lens into his eye, and walked back from the window and put it on a little scale, and turned back and unscrewed the lens and looked at me.
“Where’d you get this, lady?” he asked me.
“It’s mine,” I said. I knew just how to do it. We’d gone over this half a dozen times before I left, and he was behaving exactly the way we’d expected.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Can’t do much with an unset stone like this . . . .” He pursed his lips, tossed the diamond carelessly in his hand, and then pushed it back at me across the counter. I had to keep myself from smiling. It was just the way they’d said it would be. The people here were still in the Mech Age, of course, and not nearly conscious enough to communicate anything at all complex or abstract any way except verbally. But there is nothing abstract about avarice, and between what I’d been told to expect, and what I could feel pouring out of him, I knew precisely what was going on in his mind.
“You mean you don’t want it?” I said. “I thought it was worth quite a lot . . . .”
“Might have been once.” He shrugged. “You can’t do much with a stone like that any more. Where’d you get it, girlie?”
“My mother gave it to me. A long time ago. I wouldn’t sell it, except . . . . Look,” I said, and didn’t have to work hard to sound desperate, because in a way I was. “Look, it must be worth something?”
He picked it up again. “Well . . . what do you want for it?”
That went on for quite a while. I knew what it was supposed to be worth, of course, but I didn’t hope to get even half of that. He offered seventy dollars, and I asked for five hundred, and after a while he gave me three-fifty, and I felt I’d done pretty well—for a greenhorn. I put the money in my purse, and went back to the car, and on the way I saw a policeman, so I stopped and asked him about a hotel. He looked me up and down, and started asking questions about how old I was, and what was my name and where did I live, and I began to realize that being so much smaller than the other people was going to make life complicated. I told him I’d come to visit my brother in the Academy, and he smiled, and said, “Yourbrother, is it?” Then he told me the name of a place just outside of town, near the Academy. It wasn’t a hotel; it was a motel, which I didn’t know about at that time, but he said I’d be better off there. A lot of what he said went right over my head at the time; later I realized what he meant about “a nice respectable couple” running the place. I found out later on, too, that he called them up to ask them to keep an eye on me; he thought I was a nice girl, but he was worried about my being alone there.
By this time, I was getting hungry, but I thought I’d better go and arrange about a place to stay first. I found the motel without much trouble, and went in and registered; I knew how to do that, at least—I’d seen it plenty of times. They gave me a key, and the man who ran the place asked me did I want any help with my bags.
“Oh, no,” I said. “No, thanks. I haven’t got much.”
I’d forgotten all about that, and they’d never thought about it either! These people always have a lot of different clothes, not just one set, and you’re supposed to have a suitcase full of things when you go to stay anyplace. I said I was hungry anyway, and wanted to go get something to eat, and do a couple of other things—I didn’t say what—before I got settled. So the woman walked over with me, and showed me which cabin it was, and asked was everything all right?
It looked all right to me. The room had a big bed in it, with sheets and a blanket and pillows and a bedspread, just like the ones I’d seen on television. And there was a chest of drawers, and a table with more small drawers in it, and two chairs and a mirror and one door that went into a closet and one that led to the bathroom. The fixtures in there were a little different from the ones they’d made for me to practice in, but functionally they seemed about the same.
I didn’t look for any difficulty with anything there except the bed, and that wasn’t her fault, so I assured her everything was just fine, and let her show me how to operate the gas-burner that was set in the wall for heat. Then we went out, and she very carefully locked the door, and handed me the key.
“You better keep that door locked,” she said, just a little sharply. “You never know . . . .”
I wanted to ask her what you never know, but had the impression that it was something everybody was supposed to know, so I just nodded and agreed instead.
“You want to get some lunch,” she said then, “there’s a place down the road isn’t too bad. Clean, anyhow, and they don’t cater too much to those . . . well, it’s clean.” She pointed the way; you could see the sign from where we were standing. I thanked her, and started the car, and decided I might as well go there as anyplace else, especially since I could see she was watching to find out whether I did or not.
*
These people are all too big. Or almost all of them. But the man behind the counter at the diner was enormous. He was tall and fat with a beefy red face and large open pores and a fleshy mound of a nose. I didn’t like to look at him, and when he talked, he boomed so loud I could hardly understand him. On top of all that, the smell in that place was awful: not quite as bad as the drugstore, but some ways similar to it. I kept my eyes on the menu, which was full of unfamiliar words, and tried to remember that I was hungry.
The man was shouting at me—or it was more like growling, I guess—and I couldn’t make out the words at first. He said it again, and I sorted out syllables and matched them with the words on the card, and then I got it:
“Goulash is nice today, miss . . . .”
I didn’t know what goulash was, and the state my stomach was in, with the smells, I decided I’d better play safe, and ordered a glass of milk, and some vegetable soup.
The milk had a strange taste to it. Not bad—just different.
