More months passed, and the peace which was raging all over the world continued, but Peter Manton's laboratory was disbanded. Much of the stuff was sold as scrap, and among it was the Better Mousetrap. It no longer worked. Its magnets were mere bits of metal alloy; its permanent wax-electrets were discharged. The crystal no longer vibrated molecularly, and besides, the wire loop was crushed beneath a pile of scrap metal.
The next time Peter Manton remembered his Better Mousetrap was when a friend of his mentioned that he wanted to move.
"Move?" asked Peter. "Where to?"
"That's the point," grumbled Tony Andrews. "There's no place. But I'm not going to stay where I am!"
"It looks like a nice enough place. What's wrong?"
"Mice. The place is lousy with 'em."
"Oh? Thought that was a fairly respectable place."
"It was," replied Andrews. "But lately—the mouse population has increased. Probably due to the lack of traps created by the war."
Peter nodded. "We had a mousetrap at the lab," he said with a fond smile of reminiscence. Then he told Tony about it, and the other man blinked hungrily. "That good?" he exclaimed.
Peter nodded.