Year of the Jackpot First Page

Year Of The Jackpot
by
Robert A Heinlein
At first Potiphar Breen did not notice the*girl who was
undressing.
She was standing at a bus stop only ten feet away. He
was indoors but that would not have kept him from notic-
ing; he was seated in a drugstore booth adjacent to the bus
stop; there was nothing between Potiphar and the young
lady but plate glass and an occasional pedestrian.
Nevertheless he did not look up when she began to peel.
Propped up in front of him was a Los Angeles Times; beside
it, still unopened, were the Herald-Express and the Daily
News. He was scanning the newspaper carefully but the
headline stories got only a passing glance. He noted the
maximum and minimum temperatures in Brownsville, Texas
and entered them in a neat black notebook; he did the
same with the closing prices of three blue chips and two
dogs on the New York Exchange, as well as the total number
of shares. He then began a rapid sifting of minor news
stories, from time to time entering briefs of them in his little
book; the items he recorded seemed randomly unrelated
among them a publicity release in which Miss National
Cottage Cheese Week announced that she intended to
marry and have twelve children by a man who could prove
that he had been a life-long vegetarian, a circumstantial but
wildly unlikely flying saucer report, and a call for prayers
for rain throughout Southern California.
Potiphar had just written down the names and addresses
of three residents of Watts, California who had been miracu-
lously healed at a tent meeting of the God-is-AII First Truth
Brethren by the Reverend Dickie Bottomley, the eight-year-
old evangelist, and was preparing to tackle the Herald-Ex-
press, when he glanced over his reading glasses and saw the
amateur ecdysiast on the street comer outside. He stood up,
placed his glasses in their case, folded the newspapers and
put them carefully in his right coat pocket, counted out the
exact amount of his check and added twenty-five cents. He
then took his raincoat from a hook, placed it over his arm,
and went outside.
By now the girl was practically down to the buff. It
seemed to Potiphar Breen that she had quite a lot of buff.
Nevertheless she had not pulled much of a house. The cor-
ner newsboy had stopped hawking his disasters and was