The living-room was spotless from Bill just having walked through it, carrying the gadget, and the garage, where he had taken it momentarily, was spick-and-span. While we didn’t check it, I imagine that an area paralleling the path he had taken from the front door to the garage was the only place outdoors that didn’t have a speck of dust upon it.
We took the gadget down in the basement and cleaned that up. We sneaked over to a neighbour’s back yard, where we knew there was a lot of cement dust, held the gadget over it and in an instant there wasn’t any cement dust. There were just a few pebbles left and the pebbles, I suppose, you couldn’t rightly classify as dust.
We didn’t need to know any more.
Back at the house, I broke open a bottle of Scotch I’d been saving, while Lewis sat down at the kitchen table and drew a sketch of the gadget.
We had a drink, then went into the den and put the drawing on the desk. The drawing disappeared and we waited. In a few minutes, another one of the gadgets appeared. We waited for a while and nothing happened.
“We’ve got to let him know we want a lot of them,” I said.
“There’s no way we can,” said Lewis. “We don’t know his mathematical symbols, he doesn’t know ours, and there’s no sure-fire way to teach him. He doesn’t know a single word of our language and we don’t know a word of his.”
We went back to the kitchen and had another drink.
Lewis sat down and drew a row the gadgets across a sheet of paper, then sketched in representations of others behind them so that, when you looked at it, you could see that there were hundreds of them.
We sent that through.
Fourteen gadgets came back—the exact number Lewis had sketched in the first row.
Apparently the Trader had no idea of perspective. The lines that Lewis had drawn to represent the other gadgets behind the first row didn’t mean a thing to him.
We went back to the kitchen and had a few more drinks.
“We’ll need thousands of the things,” said Lewis, holding his head in his hands. “I can’t sit here day and night, drawing them.”
“You may have to do that,” I said, enjoying myself.
“There must be another way.”
“Why not draw a bunch of them, then mimeograph the drawing?” I suggested. “We could send the mimeographer sheets through to him in bundles.”
I hated to say it, because I was still enamoured of the idea o: sticking Lewis somewhere off in a corner, sentenced to a lifetime of drawing the same thing over and over.
“That might work,” said Lewis, brightening annoyingly “It’s just simple enough…”
“Practical is the word,” I snapped. “If it were simple, you’d have thought of it.”
“I leave things like that to detail men.”
“You’d better!”
It took a while and a whole bottle before we calmed down.
Next day, we bought a mimeograph machine and Lewis drew a stencil with twenty-five of the gadgets on it. We ran through a hundred sheets and sent them through the desk.
It worked—we were busy for several hours, getting those gadgets out of the way as they poured through to us.
I’m afraid we never stopped to think about what the Trader might want in return for the dust-collectors. We were so excited that we forgot, for the moment, that this was a commercial proposition and not just something gratis.
But the next afternoon, back came the mimeographed sheets we’d sent through and, on the reverse side of each of them, the Trader had drawn twenty-five representations of the zebra on the bracelet charm.
And there we were, faced with the necessity of getting together pronto, twenty-five hundred of those silly zebras.
I tore down to the store where rd gotten the bracelet, but all they had in stock were two dozen of the things. They said they didn’t think they could order any more. The number, they said, had been discontinued.
The name of the company that made them was stamped on the inside of the bracelet and, as soon as I got home, I put in a long distance call.
I finally got hold of the production manager. “You know those bracelets you put out?”
“We put out millions of ’em. Which one are you talking about?”
“The one with the zebra on it.”
He thought a moment. “Yeah, we did. Quite a while ago. We don’t make them any more. In this business…”
“I need at least twenty-five hundred of them.”
”Twenty-five hundred bracelets?”
“No, just the zebras.”
“Look, is this a gag?”
“It’s no gag, mister,” I said. “I need those zebras. I’m willing to pay for them.”
“We haven’t any in stock.”
“Couldn’t you make them?”
“Not just twenty-five hundred of them. Wouldn’t be worth it to put through a special order for so few. If it was fifty thousand, say, we might consider it.”
“All right, then,” I said. “How much for fifty thousand?”
He named a price and we haggled some, but I was in no position to do much bargaining. We finally agreed on a price I knew was way too high, considering the fact that the entire bracelet, with the zebra and a lot of other junk, had only retailed at 39 cents.
“And hold the order open,” I told him. “We might want more of them.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just one thing—would you mind telling me what you want with fifty thousand zebras?”
“Yes, I would,” I said and hung up.
I suppose he thought I was off my rocker, but who cared what he thought?
It took ten days to get that shipment of fifty thousand zebras and I sweated out every minute of it. Then there was the job of getting them under cover when it came and, in case you don’t know, fifty thousand zebras, even when they’re only bracelet charms, take up room.
But first I took out twenty-five hundred and sent them through the desk.
For the ten days since we’d gotten the dust-collectors, we’d sent nothing through and there had been no sign from the Trader that he might be getting impatient. I wouldn’t have blamed him a bit if he’d done something, like sending through his equivalent of a bomb, to express his dissatisfaction at our slow delivery. I’ve often wondered what he thought of the long delay—if he hadn’t suspected we were reneging on the bargain.
All this time, I had been smoking too much and gnawing my fingernails and I’d figured that Lewis was just as busy seeing what could be done about marketing the dusters.
But when I mentioned it to him he just looked blank. “You know, Joe, I’ve been doing a lot of worrying.”
“We haven’t a thing to worry about now,” I said, “except getting these things sold.”
“But the dust must go somewhere,” he fretted.
“The dust?”
“Sure, the dust these things collect. Remember we picked up an entire pile of cement dust? What I want to know is where it all went. The gadget itself isn’t big enough to hold it. It isn’t big enough to hold even a week’s collection of dust from the average house. That’s what worries me—where does it go?”
“I don’t care where. It goes, doesn’t it?”
“That’s the pragmatic view,” he said scornfully.
It turned out that Lewis hadn’t done a thing about marketing, so I got busy.
But I ran into the same trouble we’d had trying to sell the emotion gauge.
The dust collector wasn’t patented and it didn’t have a brand name. There was no fancy label stuck on it and it didn’t bear a manufacturer’s imprint. And when anybody asked me how it worked, I couldn’t answer.
One wholesaler did make me a ridiculous offer. I laughed in his face and walked out.
That night, Lewis and I sat around the kitchen table, drinking beer, and neither of us too happy. I could see a
