So far, the big idea had just eluded him. The Mark Spitz gold medal memorial key chains hadn't made it. Battlestar Galáctica boardgames had bombed. No one had wanted his pirated eight-track tape of the background music from King Kong II.

He had printed up 20,000 Elvis Presley T-shirts, couldn't sell them, and had unloaded them for a dime on the dollar. Two weeks later, Elvis Presley had died, the T-shirts were worth their weight in gold, but they then belonged to someone else.

In desperation, he had developed a racetrack betting system based on the biorhythms of horses, but when he found out that it only lost money, he stopped playing it and tried to sell it by direct mail to gamblers. No one bought it.

When the balance in his bank account was down

to $20,000, from the half-million he had been left by his father, Solly Martin decided it was time to rethink his career as a businessman.

He decided he had lost the common touch. He was so brilliant, so far ahead of bis time, so advanced beyond the rabble, that he had forgotten to stay in touch with what they thought and believed. He would move immediately to reestablish his contact with the buying public.

He told his mother, "I'm going to open a store."

His Uncle Nathan looked up from his plate. "He's going to sell sand to Arabs," he told Solly's mother. "Open a branch in Iran. Sell Stars of David. A businessman yet."

He attacked the last helpless kreplach which skidded around the plate away from his fork.

"Yeah," Solly said. "Well, maybe that's not such a bad idea. Think of all the Stars of David you could sell to people who want to burn them in demonstrations and things. Want to deface them. You ever think of that?"

"No, thank God," his uncle said. "If I thought of things like that, I would be sleeping in the street, making soup in an empty tomato can, Mister Businessman. Hah!" He looked at Solly and showed his yellowed teeth.