Over the River and Through the Woods

“Bill wouldn’t be caught dead with a dustcloth in his mitt.”

  “I can’t understand it, Joe,” she said. “I went in there to dust it and it was absolutely clean. 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 shoveled 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 are 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 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, Joe!”

  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 he 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.

  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 spic 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 neighbor’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 surefire 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 of 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 mimeograph sheets through to him in bundles.”

  I hated to say it, because I was still enamored of the idea of 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 use.

  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 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 I’d 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 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 if 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? 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 percent 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 hotcakes 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 he 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 if they’re thrown in the clink for running afoul of some obscure village ordinance. There are more worrisome angles to it than you can ever 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 the 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 sing of it. He seemed perfectly happy to send us dust collectors so long as we sent him zebras.

  The neighbors 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, they 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 busting 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 neighborh
ood 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 the 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 at 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 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 judgments 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.