Heave out the mop. Just have one of those in the house and…”
She threw herself into my arms.
“Oh, Joe! ”
We danced a jig, the two of us.
Then I sat around for a while, kicking myself for tying up with Lewis, wondering if maybe there wasn’t some way I could break the contract now that I had found something without any help from him. But I remembered all those clauses we had written in. It wouldn’t have been any use, anyhow, for Helen was already across the street, telling Marge about it.
So I phoned Lewis at the lab and he came tearing over.
We ran field tests.
The living-room was spotless from Bill just having walked through it, carrying the gadget, and the garage, where he had taken it momentarily, was spick-and-span. While we didn’t check it, I imagine that an area paralleling the path he had taken from the front door to the garage was the only place outdoors that didn’t have a speck of dust upon it.
We took the gadget down in the basement and cleaned that up. We sneaked over to a neighbour’s back yard, where we knew there was a lot of cement dust, held the gadget over it and in an instant there wasn’t any cement dust. There were just a few pebbles left and the pebbles, I suppose, you couldn’t rightly classify as dust.
We didn’t need to know any more.