Over the River and Through the Woods

by Clifford D. Simak

  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 was 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 late 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 percent…”

  “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—35 percent for him, 65 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 turn 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 percent of certain items, the source of which I alone controlled, and with the further understanding the said source was to remain at all times under my exclusive control. The other 10 percent 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 percent.

  Upon the 90 percent 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 a 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 percent to the party of the first part (me, in case you’ve gotten lost, which is understandable), and 35 percent to the party of the second part (Lewis); costs to be apportioned accordingly.

  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 percent share or so—out of Lewis’s 35 percent, 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 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 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 canceled 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.”