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I picked them up, noticing that the lenses had been replaced by the kind in the triangular pair I had found there the night before.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