That night, Lewis and I sat around the kitchen table, drinking beer, and neither of us too happy. I could see a lot of trouble ahead in getting the gadgets sold. Lewis, it seemed, was still worrying about what happened to the dust.
He had taken one of the dust-collectors apart and the only thing he could find out about it was that there was some feeble force-field operating inside of it—feeble yet strong enough to play hell with the electrical circuits and fancy metering machinery he has at the lab. As soon as he found out what was happening, he slapped the cover back on as quick as he could and then everything was all right. The cover was a shield against the force-field.
“That dust must be getting thrown into another dimension,” he told me, looking like a hound-dog that had lost a coon track.
“Maybe not. It could be winding up in one of those dust clouds way out in space.” He shook his head.
“You can’t tell me,” I said, “that the Trader is crazy enough to sell us a gadget that will throw dust back into his face.”
“You miss the point entirely. The Trader is operating from another dimension. He must be. And ff there are two dimensions, his and ours, there may be others. The Trader must have used these dust-collectors himself—not for the same purpose we intend, perhaps, but they get rid of something that he doesn’t want around. So, necessarily, they’d have to be rigged to get rid of it in a dimension other than his.”
We sat there drinking beer and I started turning over that business about different dimensions in my head. I couldn’t grasp the concept. Maybe Lewis was right about me being a pragmatist. If you can’t see it or touch it or even guess what it would be like, how can you believe there might be another dimension 9. I couldn’t.
So I started to talk about marketing the dust-collector and before Lewis went home that night, we’d decided that the only thing left to do was sell it door to door. We even agreed to charge $12.50 for it. The zebras figured out to four cents each and we would pay our salesmen ten per cent commission, which would leave us a profit of $11.21 apiece.
I put an ad in the paper for salesmen and the next day we had several applicants. We started them out on a trial run.
Those gadgets sold like hot cakes and we knew we were in!