Got nothing, that is, in the way of your hazarded ration stamps. But the beauty of the machine, which was Morey’s main contribution, was that, win or lose, you always found a pellet of vitamin-drenched, sugarcoated antibiotic hormone gum in the hopper. You played your game, won or lost your stake, popped your hormone gum into your mouth and played another. By the time that game was ended, the gum was used up, the coating dissolved; you discarded it and started another.
“That’s what the man from the NRB liked,” Howland told Morey confidentially. “He took a set of schematics back with him; they might install it on all new machines. Oh, you’re the fair-haired boy, all right!”
It was the first Morey had heard about a man from the National Ration Board. It was good news. He excused himself and hurried to phone Cherry the story of his latest successes. He reached her at her mother’s, where she was spending the evening, and she was properly impressed and affectionate. He came back to Howland in a glowing humor.
“Drink?” said Howland diffidently.
“Sure,” said Morey. He could afford, he thought, to drink as much of Howland’s liquor as he liked; poor guy, sunk in the consuming quicksands of Class Three. Only fair for somebody a little more successful to give him a hand once in a while.
And when Howland, learning that Cherry had left Morey a bachelor for the evening, proposed Uncle Piggotty’s again, Morey hardly hesitated at all.
The Bigelows were delighted to see him. Morey wondered briefly if they had a home; certainly they didn’t seem to spend much time in it.
It turned out they did, because when Morey indicated virtuously that he’d only stopped in at Piggotty’s for a single drink before dinner, and Howland revealed that he was free for the evening, they captured Morey and bore him off to their house.
Tanaquil Bigelow was haughtily apologetic. “I don’t suppose this is the kind of place Mr. Fry is used to,” she observed to her husband, right across Morey, who was standing between them. “Still, we call it home.”
Morey made an appropriately polite remark. Actually, the place nearly turned his stomach. It was an enormous glaringly new mansion, bigger even than Morey’s former house, stuffed to bursting with bulging sofas and pianos and massive mahogany chairs and tri-D sets and bedrooms and drawing rooms and breakfast rooms and nurseries.