“Then all we have to do is fire it back at them.”
He shook his head. “Not a chance. The gadget works one way now from them to us.” He coughed and looked wildly at me.
“Think of it! A couple of million of those gadgets, picking up dust from a couple of million homes, stores and factories—some of them operating for two whole years! Joe, what are we going to do?”
“We’re going to hole up somewhere till this well, blows over.”
Being of a nasty legal turn of mind, he probably foresaw even then the countless lawsuits that would avalanche on us.
Personally, I was more scared of being mobbed by angry women.
But that’s all past history. We hid out till people had quieted down and then began trying to settle the suits out of court. We had a lot of money and were able to pay off most of them. The judgements against us still outstanding don’t amount to more than a few hundred thousand. We could wipe that out pretty quickly if we’d just hit on something else as profitable as the cleaning gadget.
Lewis is working hard at it, but he isn’t having any luck. And the Trader is gone now. As soon as we dared come home, I went into the house and had a look at the desk. The inlaid dot was gone. I tried putting something where it had been, but nothing happened.
What scared the Trader off? I’d give a lot to know. Meanwhile, there are some commercial prospects.
The rose-tinted glasses, for instance, that we call the Happiness Lenses. Put them on and you’re happy as a clam. Almost every person on the face of the Earth would like a pair of them, so they could forget their troubles for a while. They would probably play hob with the liquor business.