Dusty Zebra: And Other Stories, Page 2

  Helen called to me from the living room. “Joe.”

  “Yeah. What is it?”

  “Did you talk to Bill?”

  “Bill? About what?”

  “About the trading.”

  “No. I guess I forgot.”

  “Well, you’ll have to. He’s at it again. He traded Jimmy out of that new bicycle. Gave him a lot of junk. I made him give back the bicycle.”

  “I’ll have a talk with him,” I promised again.

  But I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as close attention to the ethics of the situation as I should have been.

  You couldn’t keep a thing around the house. You were always losing this or that. You knew just where you’d put it and you were sure it was there and then, when you went to look for it, it had disappeared.

  It was happening everywhere—things being lost and never turning up.

  But other things weren’t left in their places—at least not that you heard about.

  Although maybe there had been times when things had been left that a man might pick up and examine and not know what they were and puzzle over, then toss in a corner somewhere and forget.

  Maybe, I thought, the junkyards of the world were loaded with outlandish blocks and crazy fishing rods.

  I got up and went into the living room, where Helen had turned on the television set.

  She must have seen that something had me upset, because she asked, “What’s the matter now?”

  “I can’t find the fountain pen.”

  She laughed at me. “Honestly, Joe, you’re the limit. You’re always losing things.”

  That night, I lay awake after Helen went to sleep and all I could think about was the dot upon the desk. A dot, perhaps, that said: Put it right here, pardner, and we will make a swap.

  And, thinking of it, I wondered what would happen if someone moved the desk.

  I lay there for a long time, trying not to worry, trying to tell myself it didn’t matter, that I was insane to think what I was thinking.

  But I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

  So I finally got up and sneaked out of the bedroom and, feeling like a thief in my own house, headed for the den.

  I closed the door, turned on the desk lamp and took a quick look to see if the dot was still there.

  It was.

  I opened the desk drawer and hunted for a pencil and couldn’t find one, but I finally found one of Bill’s crayons. I got down on my knees and carefully marked the floor around the desk legs, so that, if the desk were moved, I could put it back again.

  Then, pretending I had no particular purpose for doing it, I laid the crayon precisely on the dot.

  In the morning, I sneaked a look into the den and the crayon was still there. I went to work a little easier in my mind, for by then I’d managed to convince myself that it was all imagination.

  But that evening, after dinner, I went back into the den and the crayon was gone.

  In its place was a triangular contraption with what appeared to be lenses set in each angle, and with a framework of some sort of metal, holding in place what apparently was a suction cup in the center of the triangle.

  While I was looking at it, Helen came to the door. “Marge and I are going to see a movie,” she said. “Why don’t you go over and have a beer with Lewis?”

  “With that stuffed shirt?”

  “What’s the matter with Lewis?”

  “Nothing, I guess.” I didn’t feel up to a family row right then.

  “What’s that you’ve got?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Just something I found.”

  “Well, don’t you start bringing home all sorts of junk, the way Bill does. One of you is enough to clutter up the house.”

  I sat there, looking at the triangle, and the only thing I could figure out was that it might be a pair of glasses. The suction cup in the center might hold it on the wearer’s face and, while that might seem a funny way to wear a pair of glasses, it made sense when you thought about it. But if that were true, it meant that the wearer had three eyes, set in a triangle in his face.

  I sat around for quite a while after Helen left, doing a lot of thinking. And what I was thinking was that even if I didn’t care too much about Lewis, he was the only man I knew who might be able to help me out.

  So I put the bogus fountain pen and the three-eyed glasses in the drawer and put the counterfeit Bildo-Block in my pocket and went across the street.

  Lewis had a bunch of blueprints spread out on the kitchen table, and he started to explain them to me. I did the best I could to act as if I understood them. Actually, I didn’t know head nor tail of it.

  Finally, I was able to get a word in edgewise and I pulled the block out of my pocket and put it on the table.

  “What is that?” I asked.

  I expected him to say right off it was just a child’s block. But he didn’t. There must have been something about it to tip him off that it wasn’t just a simple block. That comes, of course, of having a technical education.

  Lewis picked the block up and turned it around in his fingers. “What’s it made of?” he asked me, sounding excited.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know what it is or what it’s made of or anything about it. I just found it.”

  “This is something I’ve never seen before.” Then he spotted the depression in one side of it and I could see I had him hooked. “Let me take it down to the shop. We’ll see what we can learn.”

  I knew what he was after, of course. If the block was something new, he wanted a chance to go over it—but that didn’t bother me any. I had a hunch he wouldn’t find out too much about it.

  We had a couple more beers and I went home. I hunted up an old pair of spectacles and put them on the desk right over the dot.

  I was listening to the news when Helen came in. She said she was glad I’d spent the evening with Lewis, that I should try to get to know him better and that, once I got to know him better, I might like him. She said, since she and Marge were such good friends, it was a shame Lewis and I didn’t hit it off.

  “Maybe we will,” I said and let it go at that.

  The next afternoon, Lewis called me at the office.

  “Where’d you get that thing?” he asked.

  “Found it,” I said.

  “Have any idea what it is?”

  “Nope,” I told him cheerfully. “That’s why I gave it to you.”

  “It’s powered in some way and it’s meant to measure something. That depression in the side must be a gauge. Color seems to be used as an indicator. At any rate, the color line in the depression keeps changing all the time. Not much, but enough so you can say there’s some change.”

  “Next thing is to find out what it’s measuring.”

  “Joe, do you know where you can get another of them?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s this way,” he said. “We’d like to get into this one, to see what makes it tick, but we can’t find any way to open it. We could break into it, probably, but we’re afraid to do that. We might damage it. Or it might explode. If we had another…”

  “Sorry, Lewis. I don’t know where to get another.”

  He had to let it go at that.

  I went home that evening grinning to myself, thinking about Lewis. The guy was fit to be tied. He wouldn’t sleep until he found out what the thing was, now that he’d started on it. It probably would keep him out of my hair for a week or so.

  I went into the den. The glasses still were on the desk. I stood there for a moment, looking at them, wondering what was wrong. Then I saw that the lenses had a pinkish shade.

  I picked them up, noticing that the lenses had been replaced by the kind in the triangular pair I had found there the night before.

  Just then, Helen came into the ro
om and I could tell, even before she spoke, that she had been waiting for me.

  “Joe Adams,” she demanded, “what have you been up to?”

  “Not a thing,” I told her.

  “Marge says you got Lewis all upset.”

  “It doesn’t take a lot to upset him.”

  “There’s something going on,” she insisted, “and I want to know what it is.”

  I knew I was licked. “I’ve been trading.”

  “Trading! After all I’ve said about Bill!”

  “But this is different.”

  “Trading is trading,” she said flatly.

  Bill came in the front door, but he must have heard his mother say “trading,” for he ducked out again. I yelled for him to come back.

  “I want both of you to sit down and listen to me,” I said. “You can ask questions and offer suggestions and give me hell after I’m through.”

  So we sat down, all three of us, and had a family powwow.

  It took quite a bit to make Helen believe what I had to tell, but I pointed out the dot in the desk and showed them the triangular glasses and the pair of glasses that had been refitted with the pink lenses and sent back to me. By that time, she was ready to admit there was something going on. Even so, she was fairly well burned up at me for marking up the floor around the desk legs.

  I didn’t show either her or Bill the pen that was a fishing rod, for I was scared of that. Flourish it around a bit and there was no telling what would happen.

  Bill was interested and excited, of course. This was trading, which was right down his alley.

  I cautioned both of them not to say a word about it. Bill wouldn’t, for he was hell on secrets and special codes. But bright and early in the morning, Helen would probably swear Marge to secrecy, then tell her all about it and there wasn’t a thing that I could do or say to stop her.

  Bill wanted to put the pink-lensed spectacles on right away, to see how they were different from any other kind. I wouldn’t let him. I wanted to put those specs on myself, but I was afraid to, if you want to know the truth.

  When Helen went out to the kitchen to get dinner, Bill and I held a strategy session. For a ten-year-old, Bill had a lot of good ideas. We agreed that we ought to get some system into the trading, because, as Bill pointed out, the idea of swapping sight unseen was a risky sort of business. A fellow ought to have some say in what he was getting in return.

  But to arrive at an understanding with whoever we were trading with meant that we’d have to set up some sort of communication system. And how do you communicate with someone you don’t know the first thing about, except that perhaps it has three eyes?

  Then Bill hit upon what seemed a right idea. What we needed, he said, was a catalogue. If you were going to trade with someone, the logical first step would be to let them know what you had to trade.

  To be worth anything in such a circumstance, it would have to be an illustrated catalogue. And even then it might be worthless, for how could we be sure that the Trader on the other side of the desk would know what a picture was? Maybe he’d never seen a picture before. Maybe he saw differently—not so much physically, although that was possible, too, but from a different viewpoint and with totally alien concepts.

  But it was the only thing we had to go on, so we settled down to work up a catalogue. Bill thought we should draw one, but neither of us was any good at drawing. I suggested illustrations from magazines. But that wasn’t too hot an idea, either, for pictures of items in the magazine ads are usually all prettied up, designed to catch the eye.

  Then Bill had a top-notch idea. “You know that kid dictionary Aunt Ethel gave me? Why don’t we send that to them? It’s got a lot of pictures and not much reading in it, and that’s important. The reading might confuse them.”

  So we went into his room and started looking through all the junk he had, searching for the dictionary. But we ran across one of the old ABC books he’d had when he was just a toddler and decided it was even better than the dictionary. It had good clear pictures and almost no reading at all. You know the kind of book I mean—A for apple, B for ball and so forth.

  We took the book into the den and put it on the desk, centering it on the dot, then went out to dinner.

  In the morning, the book had disappeared and that was a little odd. Up until then, nothing had disappeared from the desk until later in the day.

  Early that afternoon, Lewis called me up. “I’m coming down to see you, Joe. Is there a bar handy where the two of us can be alone?”

  I told him there was one only a block from me and said I’d meet him there.

  I got a few things cleared away, then left the office, figuring I’d go over to the bar and have a quick one before Lewis showed up.

  I don’t know how he did it, but he was there ahead of me, back in a corner booth. He must have broken every traffic regulation on the books.

  He had a couple of drinks waiting for us and was all huddled over, like a conspirator. He was a bit out of breath, as he had every right to be.

  “Marge told me,” he said.

  “I suspected she would.”

  “There could be a mint in it, Joe!”

  “That’s what I thought, too. That’s why I’m willing to give you ten per cent…”

  “Now look here,” squawked Lewis. “You can’t pull a deal like that. I wouldn’t touch it for less than fifty.”

  “I’m letting you in on it,” I said, “because you’re a neighbor. I don’t know beans about this technical business. I’m getting stuff I don’t understand and I need some help to find out what it is, but I can always go to someone else…”

  It took us three drinks to get the details settled—thirty-five per cent for him, sixty-five for me.

  “Now that that’s settled,” I said, “suppose you tell me what you found.”

  “Found?”

  “That block I gave you. You wouldn’t have torn down here and had the drinks all set up and waiting if you hadn’t found something.”

  “Well, as a matter of fact…”

  “Now just a minute,” I warned him. “We’re going to put this in the contract—any failure to provide full and complete analysis…”

  “What contract?”

  “We’re going to have a contract drawn up, so either of us can sue the other within an inch of his life for breaking it.”

  Which is a hell of a way to start out a business venture, but it’s the only way to handle a slippery little skate like Lewis.

  So he told me what he’d found. “It’s an emotions gauge. That’s awkward terminology, I know, but it’s the best I can think of.”

  “What does it do?”

  “It tells how happy you are or how sad or how much you hate someone.”

  “Oh, great,” I said, disappointed. “What good is a thing like that? I don’t need a gauge to tell me if I’m sore or glad or anything.”

  He waxed practically eloquent. “Don’t you see what an instrument like that would mean to psychiatrists? It would tell more about patients than they’d ever be willing to tell about themselves. It could be used in mental institutions and it might be important in gauging reactions for the entertainment business, politics, law-enforcement and Lord knows what else.”

  “No kidding! Then let’s start marketing!”

  “The only thing is…”

  “Yes?”

  “We can’t manufacture them,” he said frustratedly. “We haven’t got the materials and we don’t know how they’re made. You’ll have to trade for them.”

  “I can’t. Not right away, that is. First I’ve got to be able to make the Traders understand what I want, and then I’ll have to find out what they’re willing to trade them for.”

  “You have some other stuff?”

  “A few things.”

  “You better tur
n them over to me.”

  “Some that could be dangerous. Anyhow, it all belongs to me. I’ll give you what I want, when I want and…”

  We were off again.

  We finally wound up by adjourning to an attorney’s office. We wrote up a contract that is probably one of the legal curiosities of all time.

  I’m convinced the attorney thought, and still thinks, both of us are crazy, but that’s the least of my worries now.

  The contract said I was to turn over to Lewis, for his determination of its technical and merchandisable nature, at least 90 per cent of certain items, the source of which I alone controlled, and with the further understanding that said source was to remain at all times under my exclusive control. The other 10 per cent might, without prejudice, be withheld from his examination, with the party of the first part having sole authority to make determination of which items should constitute the withheld 10 per cent.

  Upon the 90 per cent of the items supplied him, the party of the second part was to make a detailed analysis, in writing, accompanied by such explanatory material as was necessary to the complete understanding of the party of the first part, within no more than three months after receipt, at the end of which time the items reverted solely to the ownership of the party of the first part. Except that such period of examination and determination might be extended, under a mutual agreement made in writing, for any stated time.

  Under no circumstances should the party of the second part conceal from the party of the first part any findings he might have made upon any of the items covered by the agreement, and that such concealment, should it occur, should be considered sufficient cause for action for the recovery of damages. That under certain conditions where some of the items might be found to be manufacturable, they could be manufactured under the terms of clauses A, B and C, section XII of this agreement.

  Provisions for a sales organization to market any of said items shall be set up and made a part of this agreement. That any proceeds from such sales shall be divided as follows: 65 per cent to the party of the first part (me, in case you’ve gotten lost, which is understandable), and 35 per cent to the party of the second part (Lewis); costs to be apportioned accordingly.