The kid said, "It's all just selling junk to idiots. What kind of job is that for a man?" "Selling people stuff they can't be bothered to make for themselves is a time-honored way of making a living. There used to be professional portrait photographers who'd take a pic of your family for money. They were even considered artists. Besides, you don't have to sell stuff you download. You can invent stuff and print that." "Get over it. Those days are over. No one cares about inventions anymore." It nailed Perry between the eyes, like a slaughterhouse bolt. "Yeah, yeah," he said. He didn't want to talk to this kid any more than this kid wanted to talk to him. "Well, if I can't talk you out of it, it's your own business. . ." He started to rearrange his ticket-desk. The kid saw his opportunity for freedom and bolted. He was probably headed for his brother's stall and then the long walk to wherever he planned on spending his day. Everything was a long walk from here, or you could wait for the busses that ran on the hour during business-hours. Perry checked out the car, cleaned out the empties and the roaches and twists from the back seat, then parked it. A couple more people came by to ride his ride, and he took their money. Lester had just finished his largest-ever flattened-soda-can mechanical computer, it snaked back and forth across the whole of the old Wal-Mart solarium, sheets of pressboard with precision-cut gears mounted on aviation bearings -- Francis had helped him with those. All day, he'd been listening to the racket of it grinding through its mighty 0.001KHz calculations, dumping carloads of M&Ms into its output hopper. You programmed it with regulation baseballs, footballs, soccer-balls, and wiffleballs: dump them in the input hopper and they would be sorted into the correct chutes to trigger the operations. With a whopping one kilobit of memory, the thing could best any of the early vacuum tube computers without a single electrical component, and Lester was ready to finally declare victory over the cursed Univac. Perry let himself be coaxed into the work-room, deputizing Francis to man the ticket-desk, and watched admiringly as Lester put the machine through its paces. "You've done it," Perry said. "Well, I gotta blog it," Lester said. "Run some benchmarks, really test it out against the old monsters. I'm thinking of using it to brute-force the old Nazi Enigma code. That'll show those dirty Nazi bastards! We'll win the war yet!" Perry found himself giggling. "You're the best, man," he said to Lester. "It's good that there's at least one sane person around here." "Don't flatter yourself, Perry." "I was talking about *you*, Lester." "Uh-oh," Lester said. He scooped a double handful of brown M&Ms up from the output hopper and munched them. "It's not a good sign when you start accusing me of being the grownup in our partnership. Have some M&Ms and tell me about it."