He was a little optimistic there. It took almost three weeks before that number had bought a franchise on the Volcano. He was able to deliver the first one within two days, however, and almost before the delivery truck was back at the warehouse he received a call. Mart recognized the cigar-in-mouth voice of the gambler with whom he had made his first deal.
“What’s the matter with these things? Can’t you build them so they will stay operating more than ten minutes? We put the marbles in the hole and all they do is come rolling down the outside. They won’t stay in!”
“You put the machine back together the way it was and quit tinkering with it,” said Mart. “It will work all right the way we had it.”
The gambler adjusted his cigar with a crunching sound in the phone. “We got to change the percentages. You don’t expect us to play Santa Claus, do you? How do you make the adjustments?”
“Listen, I told you when we made the deal that these devices are straight. They operate strictly at random. A dozen balls in the pit gives you odds of eleven to one on each bet. What more do you want? The minute you tinker with the machines they’ll quit working. Now do you want to buy, or not?”
The gambler guessed he did, and hung up.
“Can you imagine these guys?” said Mart. “They talk about the one-armed bandits — how about the two-armed ones?”
There was a similar problem with every one of the clubs in which a machine was installed, but when it was finally straightened out, and the gamblers were resigned to operating an honest game, their relationships became one of distant respect based on mutual expediency. Mart and Berk needed the club installations to expose the machines to public view, and the gamblers found it somewhat like discovering a vein of high-grade gold ore under the floor of the roulette room.
Neither Mart nor Berk had any desire to prolong their stay in the gambling paradise. There was still no response, however, from the one source they hoped to disturb with the machine.
“We’ve proven the machines are effective as gambling devices,” said Berk. “But we’re wasting time. We ought to give Sam the go-ahead on the bar and drugstore models. We’re not going to get the roulette wheel’s successor into the Bureau of Standards and the University of Chicago by sitting here in Las Vegas.”