II.
The split with Keyes was Mart’s major regret at the moment, but he knew that it was but the first of a long series of such incidents that would follow the promotion of the Nagle Rocket. Keyes, however, symbolized the whole class of unpleasant incidents and broken friendships that would occur. On Project Levitation, directed by Keyes at ONR the year before, Mart and Berk had worked to produce an antigravity device. And as a by-product they had developed an entirely new insight into the operation and workings of the human mind, and had produced fundamentally new methods of thinking. To exploit and explore what they found, they organized their own office of Basic Research Consultants.
As Mart left the ONR building, feeling the eyes of Keyes staring at him from the second-floor window, he was not at all sure of the wisdom of their present program. But it had all the qualities of a road full of burned bridges, and uncertainty was futile. Keyes at least would be quiescent for a time. As he had said, an open accusation now would tell the Russians that spaceships with antigravity propulsion were a fact, and Mart’s explanation had thrown him sufficiently off center so that it would take him time to plan any new and definite move. By then it wouldn’t matter —
The sale of the toy rocket was not delayed until Christmas. It was pushed hard as soon as Sam Marvenstein’s refitted plant was able to put it on store counters. At once it was seized upon by the country’s small fry citizens as the successor to all horse and pistol paraphernalia and the pseudo rocket equipment with which they had been kidding themselves. This was the real thing. Re-orders flowed into the plant almost on the heels of the shipments going out.
Within two weeks of initial manufacture Sam Marvenstein was hopelessly behind schedule. He called Mart on the phone. “The toy business is like flowers and fresh vegetables,” he said. “One minute you’re in and the next minute you’re out. One good item and a man can retire. A real blooper and you have to start all over again.”
“What’s the matter?” said Mart. “The rocket is selling, isn’t it?”
“That’s the trouble. It’s selling too well.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We need more factory space. We’re behind far enough on the orders we’ve got now to warrant doubling our floor space. But how long can we sell rockets without reaching the saturation point?
“It looks to me like Christmas would do it. If we turned them out, we could sell a rocket to every kid in the country above crawling age. So suppose we went ahead and increased our floor space with all the necessary jigs and dies — what happens afterwards? Can you give us a new item that will make the expansion worth while, or do you intend to be strictly a one-shot?”