“Well ... I don't know. Daddy was awfully silly about it. He tied his handkerchief around my eyes near the end. But the others complained about me anyway, and Daddy got awfully mad and said something about the young people of the country participating in their emancipation and all, but the others got mad too, and said there wasn't any kind of help I could do around headquarters anyway, and I'd be better off in school. Everybody got awfully mad, but after the second time Daddy promised not to take me to headquarters any more.”
“But where did you find the money, Zusannette?” Larry said.
“At headquarters. There's tons and tons of it there.”
Larry cleared his throat and said, “When you say tons and tons, you mean a great deal of it, eh?”
She was proudly definite. “I mean [pg 018] tons and tons. A ton is two thousand pounds.”
“Look, Zusanette,” Larry said reasonably. “I don't know how much money weighs, exactly, but let's say a pound would be, say, a thousand bills.” He took up a pencil and scribbled on a pad before him. “A pound of fifties would be $50,000. Then if you multiply that by 2,000 pounds to make a ton, you'd have $100,000,000. And you say there's tons and tons?”
“And that's just the fifties,” Susan said triumphantly. “So you can see the two little packages I picked up aren't really important at all. It's just like I found them.”
“I don't think there's quite a thousand bills in a pound,” Steve said weakly.
Larry said, “How much other money is there?”
“Oh, piles. Whole rooms. Rooms after rooms. And hundred dollar bills, and twenties, and fives, and tens—”