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, 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 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.
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!”