Madball by Fredric Brown Read Free Book Online Page B

group of people started by and Mr. King didn't look at Sammy any more; he was looking at the people and talking into the microphone. "This way, boys, this way to the sex show, and only a dime to see ... "
    And Sammy wandered off. Still with three thin dimes he went back and spent one of them for his fifth cotton candy, and the model show was ballying again and Miss Trixie was on the platform and he watched her some more. Wondering what the most wonderful thing on earth was and how much money he'd have to have for her to show it to him.
    Certainly, from the way Mr. King had spoken, it would be more than the two dimes he had left. Probably it meant paper money, folding money, and Sammy had never had a piece of paper money in his life, ever. Not of his own, anyway; sometimes when he was sent on an errand he was given paper money to buy something and brought back change from it. Maybe if he saved all the money, the hard money, people gave him once in a while for doing errands until he got a lot of it, a whole handful of it, somebody would give him paper money for it. But that didn't seem likely. People gave you hard money in change out of folding money but why should they give you paper money for hard money?
    No, it just didn't seem likely that he'd ever have folding money, not unless he stole it. And Jesse had told him not to steal. Jesse had said, "There ain't nuttin' wrong with stealing, kid, if you can get away with it. But you're too Goddam dumb to know what yuh can get away with and what yuh can't. So lay off or yuh'll get in trouble. Get me?" And Sammy always tried to do what Jesse told him because Jesse fed him and took care of him so he could never get paper money by stealing it.
    He finished his cotton candy and, although he still had two more dimes left, he didn't seem to want any more of it just then. And Trixie had gone inside the model show top because they weren't ballying any more. The show must be going on inside now and he wished he could go inside and see it because he wondered just how they posed in there and what they did, but he remembered Jesse had told him never to go in there. And anyway maybe his two dimes wouldn't be enough.
    He wandered the midway again and because he might as well do something with his two dimes he rode twice on the merry-go-round, which next to cotton candy was his favorite way of spending money people gave him for doing errands, although he rode the merry-go-round only if he'd had all the cotton candy he wanted or if the Cotton Candy Lady wasn't in her booth.
    After that he didn't have any more money to worry about and he just wandered. On the midway for a while and then around behind the tops. Back where the trailers and the trucks and the living tops were. He wanted to find someone to talk to but everybody must have been busy on the midway because he couldn't find anybody.
    There was a light on, though, in one of the trailers. Mr. Evans's trailer. He knocked on the door and when there wasn't any answer he tried the knob and it wasn't locked, so he went in. Mr. Evans wouldn't care and Mr. Evans always had magazines with pictures in them and he'd already let Sammy look at pictures in those magazines so he wouldn't care if Sammy looked at them again.
    But there weren't any magazines lying out in sight so they must be in one of the cabinets built into the wall of the trailer. He opened a cabinet door at random and it was the right cabinet the first time. The magazines were there.
    He took them over to the table and sat looking at them for a while, at the pictures of strange places and people doing strange things. Some of the pictures were interesting but most of them weren't. When he had looked at pictures long enough and found himself getting restless he wanted to put the magazines away but now he couldn't remember exactly which cabinet he'd opened and found them in. He should have left it open, but he'd closed it again. It could have been any one of several.
    But he'd know it because