“Of course, if you go too far, you’ll have an oversize car, but you could reduce it again,” said Slim. “Now in the morning we’ll hang out a parking sign and let them drive onto the main floor. You run the cars into the basement, and we’ll have this thing down under the ramp, out of sight.” Slim’s deep eyes were glowing. “We’ll make a million,” he said, rubbing his hands.

Well, by the end of the next day it began to look as if we had, indeed, solved the most urgent problem of modern civilization⁠—the parking problem. We had a sign out that said, Parking All Day 50c⁠—No one Turned Away , and by the end of the day we had taken in nearly five hundred dollars.

But it was a mankiller. I handed out claim checks and drove cars to the basement. Slim reduced them and hauled them across the room to a lineup. That was funny⁠—seeing a car shrink to three or four inches long. It was an irresistible impulse to pick it up, but when you tried, you changed your mind. The cars were practically as heavy in their small size as in their big size, and that made it something of a problem to get them moved around.

We had borrowed a toe-and-heel, a sort of crowbar with rollers on it, and with the reduced friction from the extremely small tires of the cars, it wasn’t too hard to move them, but it was still a mankiller to move a thousand in one day, and move each twice. We took turns at the reducer. I could handle them best by catching them under the front axle, but we decided to make them six inches long so it would be easier. The metal in its smaller size seemed as tough as it had been normally, but the parts were pretty small to get hold of with anything strong enough to handle them.

Slim solved this problem the second day when he put a long piece of gas-pipe on the heel-and-toe and shrank it considerably. The second day, too,