"Brad," he asked, "how much do you know?"

"Not a thing," I said. "Only what I told you. I talked with someone on the phone. They offered me a job."

"And you took the job?"

"No," I said, "I didn't, but I may. I could use a job. But what they whoever it was had to say didn't make much sense."

"They?"

"Well, either there were three of them — or one who used three different voices. Strange as it may sound to you, it seemed to me as if it were one person who used different voices." He picked up the glass and gulped at it again. He held it up to the light and saw in what seemed to be astonishment that it was nearly empty. He hoisted himself out of the chair and went to get the bottle. He slopped liquor in his glass and held the bottle out to me.

"I haven't started yet," I told him.

He put the bottle on the desk and sat down again.

"OK," he said, "you've come and talked with me. It's all right to take the job. Pick up your money and get out of here. More than likely Nancy's out there waiting. Take her to a show or something."

"And that's all?" I asked.

"That is all," he said.

"You changed your mind," I told him.

"Changed my mind?"

"You were about to tell me something. Then you decided not to."

He looked at me levelly and hard. "I suppose you're right," he said. "It really makes no difference."

"It does to me," I told him. "Because I can see you're scared." I thought he might get sore. Most men do when you tell them they are scared.

He didn't. He just sat there, his face unchanging.

Then he said: "Start on that drink, for Christ's sake. You make me nervous, just roosting there and hanging onto it." I had forgotten all about the drink. I had a slug.

"Probably," he said, "you are thinking a lot of things that aren't true. You more than likely think that I'm mixed up in some dirty kind of business. I wonder, would you believe me If I told you I don't really know what kind of business I'm mixed up in."

"I think I would," I said. "That is, if you say so."

"I've had a lot of trouble in life," he said, "but that's not unusual. Most people do have a lot of trouble, one way or the other. Mine came in a bunch. Trouble has a way of doing that." I nodded, agreeing with him.

"First," he said, "my wife left me. You probably know all about that. There must have been a lot of talk about it."

"It was before my time," I said. "I was pretty young."

"Yes, I suppose it was. Say this much for the two of us, we were civilized about it. There wasn't any shouting and no nastiness in court. That was something neither of us wanted. And, then, on top of that I was facing business failure. The bottom went out of the farm machinery business and I feared that I might have to shut down the plant. There were a lot of other small farm machinery firms that simply locked their doors. After fifty or sixty or more years as going, profitable concerns, they were forced out of business." He paused, as if he wanted me to say something. There wasn't anything to say.

He took another drink, then began to talk again. "I'm a fairly stupid man in a lot of ways. I can handle a business. I can keep it going if there's any chance to keep it going and I can wring a profit from it. I suppose that you could say I'm rather astute when it comes to business matters. But that's the end of it. In the course of my lifetime I have never really had a big idea or a new idea." He leaned forward, clasping his hands together and putting them on the desk.

"I've thought about it a lot," he said, "this thing that happened to me. I've tried to see some reason in it and there is no reason. It's a thing that should not have happened, not to a man like me. There I was, on the verge of failure, and not a thing that I could do about it. The problem was quite simple, really. For a number of good economic reasons, less farm machinery was being sold. Some of the big concerns, with big sales departments and good advertising budgets, could ride out a thing like that. They had some elbow room to plan, there were steps that they could take to lessen the effects of the situation. But a small concern like mine didn't have the room or the capital reserve. My firm, and others, faced disaster.

"And in my case, you understand, I didn't have a chance. I had run the business according to old and established practices and time-tested rules, the same sort of good, sound business practices that had been followed by my grandfather and my father. And these practices said that when your sales dwindled down to nothing you were finished. There were other men who might have been able to figure out a way to meet the situation, but not me. I was a good businessman, but I had no imagination. I had no ideas. Ad then, suddenly, I began to get ideas. But they were not my own ideas. It was as if the ideas of some other person were being transplanted to my brain.

"You understand," he said, "that an idea sometimes comes to you in the matter of a second. It just pops from nowhere. It has no apparent point of origin. Try as you may, you cannot trace it back to anything you did or heard or read. Somehow, I suppose, if you dug deep enough, you'd find its genesis, but there are few of us who are trained to do that sort of digging.

"But the point is that most ideas are no more than a germ, a tiny starting point. An idea may be good and valid, but it will take some nursing. It has to be developed. You must think about it and turn it around and around and look at it from every angle and weigh it and consider it before you can mould it into something useful.

"But this wasn't the way with these ideas that I got. They sprang forth full and round and completely developed. I didn't have to do any thinking about them. They just popped into my mind and I didn't need to do another thing about them. There they were, all ready for one's use. I'd wake up in the morning and I'd have a new idea, a new mass of knowledge in my brain. I'd go for a walk and come back with another. They came in bunches, as if someone had sown a crop of them inside my brain and they had lain there for a while and then begun to sprout."

"The gadgets?" I said.

He looked at me curiously. "Yes, "the gadgets. What do you know about them?"

"Nothing," I told him. "I just knew that when the bottom fell out of the farm machinery business you started making gadgets. I don't know what kind of gadgets."

He didn't tell me what kind of gadgets. He went on talking about those strange ideas. "I didn't realize at first what was happening. Then, as the ideas came piling in on me, I knew there was something strange about it. I knew that it was unlikely that I'd think of any one of them, let alone the many that I had. More than likely I'd never have thought of them at all, for I have no imagination and I am not inventive. I tried to tell myself that it was just barely possible I might have thought of two or three of them, but even that would have been most unlikely. But of more than two or three of them I knew I was not capable. I was forced, finally, to admit that I had been the recipient of some sort of outside help."

"What kind of outside help?"

"I don't know," he said. "Even now I don't."

"But it didn't stop you from using these ideas."

"I am a practical man," he said. "Intensely practical. I suppose some people might even say hard-headed. But consider this: the business was gone. Not my business, mind you, but the family business, the business my grandfather had started and my father had handed on to me. It wasn't my business; it was a business I held in trust. There is a great distinction.

"You could see a business you had built yourself go gurgling down the drain and still stand the blow of it, telling yourself that you had been successful once and you could start over and be successful once again. But it's different with a family business.