Andrews nodded. "Yup," he said. "I got it! Peter Manton, you haven't seen the end of this, yet."
Manton frowned slightly. "Why?" he asked.
"You've really built the Better Mousetrap, and you haven't seen the people who are going to beat their path to your door. They haven't really arrived yet. But they will!"
The first to arrive was the FBI. Then Peter Manton's domicile was changed from a town in Illinois to a cold stone place in Washington.
Ted Harris faced the Court. "Here is the originator of the Plague of Rats," he said. "And the saviour of the country at the same time. He is in the position of a physician who poisons people so that he can save them. A sort of stinking benefactor."
"Will you please explain to the Court?" demanded the Court.
"The field set up by the Better Mousetrap at the plane of cleavage hurls anything that passes through it backwards in time. The time-rate is indefinite and uncontrollable. However, this is why Manton's trap was so effective. On Monday a plague of mice appears in an apartment. The master of the place goes out and rents one of the Better Mousetraps. He places it in his apartment and during the time it is there it hurls mice backward in time to create the plague! Naturally, the trap will be removed as soon as the mice stop—and because the trap will be removed in a few days, the trap itself stops the flow of mice."
"But how far back—?"
"There's little correlation. It just hurls. It is aimless and uncontrollable. In one case, a key tag went back several months."