started feeding all sorts of stuff through the desk—scissors, dishes, shoes, jackknives, mucilage, cigars, paper clips, erasers, spoons—almost anything that was handy. It wasn’t the scientific way, I know, but we didn’t have the time to get very methodical about it and, until we had a chance to work out a more sensible programme, we figured we might as well try the shotgun method.
And the Trader started shooting things back at us. We’d sit for hours and feed stuff through to him and then he’d shoot stuff back at us and we had the damnedest pile of junk heaped all over the place you ever laid eyes on.
We rigged up a movie camera and took a lot of film of the spot on the desk where the exchange was going on. We spent a lot of time viewing that film, slowing it down and even stopping it, but it didn’t tell us anything at all. When the stuff disappeared or appeared, it just disappeared or appeared. One frame it would be there, the next frame it would be gone.
Lewis cancelled all his other work and used the lab for nothing but trying to puzzle out the gadgets that we got. Most of them we couldn’t crack at all. I imagine they were useful in some way, but we never managed to learn how.
There was the perfume bottle, for example. That is what we called it, anyhow. But there was a suspicion in our minds that the perfume was simply a secondary effect, that the so-called bottle was designed for some other purpose entirely.
Lewis and his boys were studying it down at the lab, trying to make out some rhyme or reason for it, and somehow they turned it on. They worked for three days, the last two in gas masks, trying to turn it off again. When the smell got so bad that people began calling the police, we took the contraption out into the country and buried it. Within a few days, all the vegetation in the area was dead. All the rest of the summer, the boys from the agricultural department at the university ran around, practically frothing at the mouth trying to find the cause.
There was the thing that might have been a clock of some sort, although it might just as easily have been something else.
If it was a clock, the Trader had a time system that would drive you nuts, for it would measure the minutes or hours or whatever they were like lightning for a while, then barely move for an entire day.
And there was the one you’d point at something and press a certain spot on it—not a button or a knob or anything as crass and mechanical as that, just a certain spot—and there’d be just a big blank spot in the landscape. But when you stopped pressing, the landscape would come back again, unchanged.
We filed it away in the darkest corner of the laboratory safe, with a big red tag on it marked:
But most of the items we just drew blanks on. And it kept coming all the time. I piled the garage full of it and started dumping it in the basement. Some of it I was scared of and hauled out to the dump.
In the meantime, Lewis was having trouble with the emotion gauge. “It works,” he said. “The psychiatrist I gave it to to try out is enthusiastic about it. But it seems almost impossible to get it on the market.”
“ff it works,” I objected, handing him a can of beer, “it ought to sell.”
“In any other field, it might, but you don’t handle merchandise that way in the medical field. Before you can put something on the market, you have to have it nailed down with blueprints and theory and field tests and such. And we can’t.
We don’t know how it works. We don’t know why it works.
Until we do, no reputable medical supply house will take it on, no approved medical journal will advertise it, no practitioner will use it.”
“Then I guess it’s out.” I felt fairly blue about it, because it was the only thing we had that we knew how to use.
Lewis nodded and drank his beer and was glummer than ever.
Looking back on it, it’s funny how we found the gadget that made us all the money. Actually, it wasn’t Lewis but Helen who found it.
Helen is a good housewife. She’s always going after things with the vacuum and the dustcloth and she washes the woodwork so often and so furiously that we have to paint it every year.
One night, we were sitting in the living-room, watching television.
“Joe,” she asked me, “did you dust the den?”
“Dust the den? What would I want to do that for?”
“Well, someone did. Maybe it was Bill.”
“Bill wouldn’t be caught dead with a dustdoth in his mitt.”
“I can’t understand it, Joe,” she said. “I went in there to dust it and it was absolutely dean. Everything just shone.”
Sgt. Friday was trying to get the facts out of someone and his sidekick was complaining about some relatives that had come to visit and I didn’t pay much attention at the time.
But the next day, I got to thinking about it and I couldn’t get it off my mind. I certainly hadn’t dusted the den and it was a cinch Bill hadn’t, yet someone had if Helen was ready to admit it was clean.
So, that evening, I went out into the street with a pail and shovelled up a pailful of dirt and brought it in the house.
Helen caught me as I was coming in the door. “What do you think you’re doing with that?”
“Experimenting,” I told her.
“Do it in the garage.”
“It isn’t possible,” I argued. “I have to find out who’s been dusting the den.”
I knew that, if my hunch failed, I’d have a lot to answer for when she followed me and stood in the doorway, ready to pounce.
There was a bunch of junk from the Trader standing on the desk and a lot more of it in one corner. I cleared off the desk and that was when Bill came in.
“What you doing, Dad?” he asked.
“Your father’s gone insane,” Helen explained quietly.
They stood there, watching me, while I took a handful of dirt and sprinkled it on the desk top.
It stayed there for just an instant—and then it was gone. The top of the desk was spotless.
“Bill,” I said, “take one of those gadgets out to the garage.”
“Which one?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
So he took one and I spread another handful of dirt and, in a second, it was gone.
Bill was back by that time and I sent him out with another gadget.
We kept on like that for quite a while and Bill was beginning to get disgusted with me. But finally I sprinkled the dirt and it stayed.
“Bill,” I said, “you remember the last thing you took out?”
“Sure.”
“Well, go out and bring it back again.”
He got it and, as soon as he reached the door of the den, the dirt disappeared.
“Well, that’s it,” I said.
“That’s what?” asked Helen.
I pointed to the contraption Bill had in his hand. “That.
Throw away your vacuum cleaner. Burn up the dustcloth.
Heave out the mop. Just have one of those in the house and…”
She threw herself into my arms.
“Oh,
We danced a jig, the two of us.
Then I sat around for a while, kicking myself for tying up with Lewis, wondering if maybe there wasn’t some way I could break the contract now that I had found something without any help from him. But I remembered all those clauses we had written in. It wouldn’t have been any use, anyhow, for Helen was already across the street, telling Marge about it.
So I phoned Lewis at the lab and he came tearing over.
We ran field tests.
