Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories Read online

  There were a lot more details, of course, but that gives you an idea.

  We got home from the attorney’s office, without either of us knifing the other, and found Marge over at my place. Lewis went in with me to have a look at the desk.

  Apparently the Trader had received the ABC book all right and had been able to understand why it was sent, for there, lying on the desk, was a picture cut out of the book. Well, not cut out, exactly—it looked more as though it had been burned out.

  The picture on the desk was Z for zebra.

  Lewis stared worriedly at it. “Now we’re really in a fix.”

  “Yeah,” I admitted. “I don’t know what the market price is, but they can’t be cheap.”

  “Figure it out—expedition, safari, cages, ship, rail, fodder, keeper. You think we can switch him to something else?”

  “I don’t see how. He’s put in his order.”

  Bill came wandering in and wanted to know what was up. When I glumly told him, he said cheerfully, “Aw, that’s the whole trick in trading, Pop. If you got a bum jackknife you want to trade, you unload it on somebody who doesn’t know what a good knife is like.”

  Lewis didn’t get it, but I did. “That’s right! He doesn’t know a zebra is an animal, or, if he does, how big it is!”

  “Sure,” Bill said confidently. “All he saw was a picture.”

  It was five o’clock then, but the three of us went uptown and shopped. Bill found a cheap bracelet charm about the size of the drawing in the book. When it comes to junk like that, my kid knows just where it’s sold and how much it costs. I considered making him a junior partner in charge of such emergencies, with about 10 per cent share or so—out of Lewis’s 35 per cent, of course—but I was sure Lewis wouldn’t hold still for that. I decided instead to give Bill a dollar a week allowance, said compensation to commence immediately upon our showing a profit.

  Well, we had Z for zebra—provided the Trader was satisfied with a little piece of costume jewelry. It was lucky, I thought, that it hadn’t been Z for zephyr.

  The rest of the alphabet was easy, yet I couldn’t help but kick myself over all the time we were wasting. Of all the unworthy catalogues we might have sent, that ABC book was the worst. But until the Trader had run through the whole list, I was afraid to send another for fear of confusing him.

  So I sent him an apple and a ball and a small doll for a girl and a toy cat and toy dog, and so on, and then I lay awake nights wondering what the Trader would make of them. I could picture him trying to learn the use of a rubber doll or cat.

  I’d given Lewis the two pairs of glasses, but had held back the fountain-pen fishing rod, for I was still scared of that one. He had turned over the emotion gauge to a psychiatrist to try out in his practice as a sort of field test.

  Marge and Helen, knowing that Lewis and I had entered into some kind of partnership, were practically inseparable now. Helen kept telling me how glad she was that I had finally recognized what a sterling fellow Lewis was. I suppose Lewis heard the same thing about me from Marge.

  Bill went around practically busting to do some bragging. But Bill is a great little businessman and he kept his mouth shut. I had told him about the allowance, of course.

  Lewis was all for trying to ask the Trader for a few more of the emotion gauges. He had a draftsman at the plant draw up a picture of the gauge and he wanted me to send it through to indicate that we were interested in it.

  But I told him not to try to rush things. While the emotion gauge might be a good deal, we should sample what the Trader had to offer before we made up our minds.

  The Trader, apparently certain now that someone was cooperating with him, had dropped his once-a-day trade schedule and was open for business around the clock. After he had run through the list in the ABC book, he sent back a couple of blank pages from the book with very crude drawings on them—drawings that looked as if they had been made with crumbly charcoal. Lewis drew a series of pictures, showing how a pencil worked, and we sent the Trader a ream of paper and a gross of sharpened pencils, then sat back to wait.

  We waited a week and were getting sort of edgy, when back came the entire ream of paper, with each sheet covered on both sides with all kinds of drawings. So we sent him a mail-order catalogue, figuring that would hold him for a while, and settled down to try to puzzle out the drawings he had made.

  There wasn’t a single thing that made any sense at all—not even to Lewis. He’d study some of the drawings, then pace up and down the room, pulling his hair and twitching his ears.

  Then he’d study the drawings some more.

  To me, it all looked plain Rube Goldbergish.

  Finally, we figured we might as well forget about the catalogue idea, for the time being at least, and we 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 program, 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: Dangerous! Don’t Monkey with This!

  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.”

  “If 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 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 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 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 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 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 mimeographed 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 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 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.