lot of trouble ahead in getting the gadgets sold. Lewis, it seemed, was still worrying about what happened to the dust.
He had taken one of the dust-collectors apart and the only thing he could find out about it was that there was some feeble force-field operating inside of it—feeble yet strong enough to play hell with the electrical circuits and fancy metering machinery he has at the lab. As soon as he found out what was happening, he slapped the cover back on as quick as he could and then everything was all right. The cover was a shield against the force-field.
“That dust must be getting thrown into another dimension,” he told me, looking like a hound-dog that had lost a coon track.
“Maybe not. It could be winding up in one of those dust clouds way out in space.” He shook his head.
“You can’t tell me,” I said, “that the Trader is crazy enough to sell us a gadget that will throw dust back into his face.”
“You miss the point entirely. The Trader is operating from another dimension. He must be. And ff there are two dimensions, his and ours, there may be others. The Trader must have used these dust-collectors himself—not for the same purpose we intend, perhaps, but they get rid of something that he doesn’t want around. So, necessarily, they’d have to be rigged to get rid of it in a dimension other than his.”
We sat there drinking beer and I started turning over that business about different dimensions in my head. I couldn’t grasp the concept. Maybe Lewis was right about me being a pragmatist. If you can’t see it or touch it or even guess what it would be like, how can you believe there might be another dimension 9. I couldn’t.
So I started to talk about marketing the dust-collector and before Lewis went home that night, we’d decided that the only thing left to do was sell it door to door. We even agreed to charge $12.50 for it. The zebras figured out to four cents each and we would pay our salesmen ten per cent commission, which would leave us a profit of $11.21 apiece.
I put an ad in the paper for salesmen and the next day we had several applicants. We started them out on a trial run.
Those gadgets sold like hot cakes and we knew we were in!
I quit my job and settled down to handling the sales end,while Lewis went back to the lab and started going through the pile of junk we had gotten from the Trader.
There are a lot of headaches running a sales campaign. You have to map out territories for your salesmen, get clearance from Better Business Bureaus, bail out your men ff they’re thrown in the clink for running afoul of some obscure village ordinance. There are more worrisome angles to it than you can imagine.
But in a couple of months’ time, things were running pretty smoothly. We had the state well covered and were branching out into others. I had ordered another fifty thousand zebras and told them to expect re-orders—and the desk top was a busy place. It got to a point, finally, where I had to hire three men full-time, paying them plenty not to talk, to man that desk top twenty-four hours a day. We’d send through zebras for eight hours, then take away dust gadgets for eight hours, then feed through zebras for another eight.
If the Trader had any qualms about what was happening, he gave no sign of it. He seemed perfectly happy to send us dust collectors so long as we sent him zebras.
The neighbours were curious and somewhat upset at first, but finally they got used to it. If I could have moved to some other location, I would have, for the house was more an office than a home and we had practically no family life at all. But if we wanted to stay in business, we had to stay right where we were because it was the only place we had contact with the Trader.
The money kept rolling in and I turned the management of it over to Helen and Marge. The income tax boys gave us a rough time when we didn’t show any manufacturing expenses, but since we weren’t inclined to argue over what we had to pay, couldn’t do anything about it.
Lewis was wearing himself down to a nubbin at the lab, but he wasn’t finding anything that we could use.
But he still did some worrying now and then about where all that dust was going. And he was right, probably for the first time in his life.
One afternoon, a couple of years after we’d started selling the dust-collectors, I had been uptown to attend to some banking difficulties that Helen and Marge had gotten all bollixed up.
I’d no more than pulled into the driveway when Helen came bursting out of the house. She was covered with dust, her face streaked with it, and she was the maddest-looking woman I have ever seen.
“You’ve got to do something about it, Joe!” she shrieked.
“About what?”
“The dust! It’s pouring into the house!”
“Where is it pouring from?”
“From everywhere!”
I could see she’d opened all the windows and there was dust pouring out of them, almost like a smoke cloud. I got out of the car and took a quick look up and down the street. Every house in the block had its windows open and there was dust coming out of all of them and the neighbourhood was boiling with angry, screaming women.
“Where’s Bill?” I asked.
“Out back.”
I ran around the house and called him and he came running.
Marge had come across the street and, if anything, she was about six degrees sorer about all the dust than Helen was.
“Get in the car,” I said.
“Where are we going?” Marge demanded.
“Out to pick up Lewis.”
I must have sounded like nothing to trifle with, for they piled in and I got out of there as fast as the car would take us.
The homes and factories and stores that had bought the gadget were gushing so much dust, visibility wouldn’t be worth a damn before long.
I had to wade through about two feet of dust on the laboratory floor to get to Lewis’s office and hold a handkerchief over my nose to keep from suffocating.
Inside the car we got our faces wiped off and most of the dust hacked out of our throats. I could see then that Lewis was about three shades paler than usual, although, to tell the truth, he always was a pasty-looking creature.
“It’s the creatures from that third dimension,” he said anxiously. “The place where we were sending all the dust. They got sick and tired of having it pour in on them and they got it figured out and now they’re firing the dust right back at us.”
“Now calm down. We’re just jumping to the conclusion that this was caused by our gadget.”
“I checked, Joe. It was. The dust is coming out in jets from every single place where we sent it through. No place else.”
“Then all we have to do is fire it back at them.”
He shook his head. “Not a chance. The gadget works one way now from them to us.” He coughed and looked wildly at me.
“Think of it! A couple of million of those gadgets, picking up dust from a couple of million homes, stores and factories—some of them operating for two whole years! Joe, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to hole up somewhere till this well, blows over.”
Being of a nasty legal turn of mind, he probably foresaw even then the countless lawsuits that would avalanche on us.
Personally, I was more scared of being mobbed by angry women.
But that’s all past history. We hid out till people had quieted down and then began trying to settle the suits out of court. We had a lot of money and were able to pay off most of them. The judgements against us still outstanding don’t amount to more than a few hundred thousand. We could wipe that out pretty quickly if we’d just hit on something else as profitable as the cleaning gadget.
Lewis is working hard at it, but he isn’t having any luck. And the Trader is gone now. As soon as we dared come home, I went into the house and had a look at the desk. The inlaid dot was gone. I tried putting something
