"Mmm, I suppose you're right," he said. "My Orion was stolen a year ago when I accidentally cut off the burglar photocell. The police never did find it and I've been trying ever since to get another one." "This is the first time I've tried," I said. "My car...." "Ssh," he interrupted. "Here they come." A procession of new cars, led by a beautiful green Solar convertible, inched its way along the row of hopeful buyers, all of us with our credit ratings and car histories pinned to our lapels. Each car's robot mechanism recorded our statistics, took our pictures, noted our heights, weights and appearances, then began to correlate the data. By government order the robot mechanism was directed to select its most promising future owner. A sobersides bank president, for example, might dearly love to change his big black Galaxy sedan for a low-slung Charioteer sports car, but sports cars were planned with crew-cutted college boys in mind, so the bank president would be likely to end up with another big Galaxy. Of course, the payment rate was fixed and the contracts were almost always for 40 years. A tie salesman might want a Galaxy to make an impression on his neighbors, but he'd probably wind up with a Proton or a Thunderflash like I had. I was a tie salesman. The Solar came abreast of me. I stood straight and smiling as it began to note my statistics. It flashed a 23 when it was done. Not so good. That put me in the 23 percentile rank of its desirability. The next car, a rhinestone Ford, gave me a 28. I was rated 22, 31, 14 (by a Galaxy), 27, 35 and 30 by the next six cars. That was the way it went for the whole procession. I received the highest rating, 58, from an experimental model Proton that was no longer in production, but I knew it was rating everybody higher and I was pretty gloomy. Imagine my surprise when my name was called out as one of the possible choices. I went into the broker's office and was told the Proton would select me if I would get rid of all but ten years of my Thunderflash contract. That meant I had to find someone to take my car and 27 years of my contract, since I had been paying for three years of the 40. The price of the Proton, the broker told me, was scaled down to a 30-year contract because it was an off-model. But who would take my heap with a 27-year contract attached to it? The broker said Grinning Gregory might go for five years, just out of the goodness of his big, big, big heart. I wouldn't get that kind of a deal anywhere else, the broker said. Maybe I wouldn't, but that didn't do me much good. I needed someone to take 27 years. Harry! Why didn't I think of Harry before? He didn't have a car yet. Skinflint Harry didn't want to sign the standard 40-year contract for a car and he had been shopping around for second-hand cars. Besides, good old Harry knew how crazy I was about Jenny. He had even taken her out a couple of times.