Clifford Simak - Dusty Zebra - And Other Stories

Then, as quickly as it happened, it unhappened. I felt the tension snap off and the weight at the other end was gone and the rod had telescoped again and I held in my hand the thing that looked like a fountain pen.

I laid it down carefully on the desk, being very certain to make no more casting motions, and it wasn’t until then that I saw my hand was shaking.

I sat down, goggling at the thing that looked like the missing fountain pen and the other thing that looked like a Bildo-Block.

And it was then, while I was looking at the two of them, that I saw, out of the corner of my eye, the little white dot in the center of the desk.

It was on the exact spot where the bogus pen had lain and more than likely, I imagined, the exact spot where I’d found the Bildo-Block the night before. It was about a quarter of an inch in diameter and it looked like ivory.

I put out my thumb and rubbed it vigorously, but the dot would not rub off. I closed my eyes so the dot would have a chance to go away, and then opened them again, real quick, to surprise it if it hadn’t. It still was there.

I bent over the desk to examine it. I could see it was inlaid in the wood, and an excellent job of inlaying, too. I couldn’t find even the faintest line of division between the wood and the dot.

It hadn’t been there before; I was sure of that. If it had been, I would have noticed it. What’s more, Helen would have noticed it, for she’s hell on dirt and forever after things with a dusting cloth. And to cinch the fact that it had not been there before, no one I’ve ever heard of sold desks with single inlaid ivory dots.

And no one sold a thing that looked like a fountain pen but could become a fly rod, the business end of which disappeared and hooked a thing you couldn’t even see—and which, the next time, might bring in whatever it had caught instead of losing it.

Helen called to me from the living room. “Joe.”

“Yeah. What is it?”

“Did you talk to Bill?”

“Bill? About what?”

“About the trading.”

“No. I guess I forgot.”

“Well, you’ll have to. He’s at it again. He traded Jimmy out of that new bicycle. Gave him a lot of junk. I made him give back the bicycle.”

“I’ll have a talk with him,” I promised again.

But I’m afraid I wasn’t paying as close attention to the ethics of the situation as I should have been.

You couldn’t keep a thing around the house. You were always losing this or that. You knew just where you’d put it and you were sure it was there and then, when you went to look for it, it had disappeared.

It was happening everywhere—things being lost and never turning up.

But other things weren’t left in their places—at least not that you heard about.

Although maybe there had been times when things had been left that a man might pick up and examine and not know what they were and puzzle over, then toss in a corner somewhere and forget.

Maybe, I thought, the junkyards of the world were loaded with outlandish blocks and crazy fishing rods.

I got up and went into the living room, where Helen had turned on the television set.

She must have seen that something had me upset, because she asked, “What’s the matter now?”

“I can’t find the fountain pen.”

She laughed at me. “Honestly, Joe, you’re the limit. You’re always losing things.”

That night, I lay awake after Helen went to sleep and all I could think about was the dot upon the desk. A dot, perhaps, that said: Put it right here, pardner, and we will make a swap.

And, thinking of it, I wondered what would happen if someone moved the desk.

I lay there for a long time, trying not to worry, trying to tell myself it didn’t matter, that I was insane to think what I was thinking.

But I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

So I finally got up and sneaked out of the bedroom and, feeling like a thief in my own house, headed for the den.

I closed the door, turned on the desk lamp and took a quick look to see if the dot was still there.

It was.

I opened the desk drawer and hunted for a pencil and couldn’t find one, but I finally found one of Bill’s crayons. I got down on my knees and carefully marked the floor around the desk legs, so that, if the desk were moved, I could put it back again.

Then, pretending I had no particular purpose for doing it, I laid the crayon precisely on the dot.

In the morning, I sneaked a look into the den and the crayon was still there. I went to work a little easier in my mind, for by then I’d managed to convince myself that it was all imagination.

But that evening, after dinner, I went back into the den and the crayon was gone.

In its place was a triangular contraption with what appeared to be lenses set in each angle, and with a framework of some sort of metal, holding in place what apparently was a suction cup in the center of the triangle.

While I was looking at it, Helen came to the door. “Marge and I are going to see a movie,” she said. “Why don’t you go over and have a beer with Lewis?”

“With that stuffed shirt?”

“What’s the matter with Lewis?”

“Nothing, I guess.” I didn’t feel up to a family row right then.

“What’s that you’ve got?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Just something I found.”

“Well, don’t you start bringing home all sorts of junk, the way Bill does. One of you is enough to clutter up the house.”

I sat there, looking at the triangle, and the only thing I could figure out was that it might be a pair of glasses. The suction cup in the center might hold it on the wearer’s face and, while that might seem a funny way to wear a pair of glasses, it made sense when you thought about it. But if that were true, it meant that the wearer had three eyes, set in a triangle in his face.

I sat around for quite a while after Helen left, doing a lot of thinking. And what I was thinking was that even if I didn’t care too much about Lewis, he was the only man I knew who might be able to help me out.

So I put the bogus fountain pen and the three-eyed glasses in the drawer and put the counterfeit Bildo-Block in my pocket and went across the street.

Lewis had a bunch of blueprints spread out on the kitchen table, and he started to explain them to me. I did the best I could to act as if I understood them. Actually, I didn’t know head nor tail of it.

Finally, I was able to get a word in edgewise and I pulled the block out of my pocket and put it on the table.

“What is that?” I asked.

I expected him to say right off it was just a child’s block. But he didn’t. There must have been something about it to tip him off that it wasn’t just a simple block. That comes, of course, of having a technical education.

Lewis picked the block up and turned it around in his fingers. “What’s it made of?” he asked me, sounding excited.

I shook my head. “I don’t know what it is or what it’s made of or anything about it. I just found it.”

“This is something I’ve never seen before.” Then he spotted the depression in one side of it and I could see I had him hooked. “Let me take it down to the shop. We’ll see what we can learn.”

I knew what he was after, of course. If the block was something new, he wanted a chance to go over it—but that didn’t bother me any. I had a hunch he wouldn’t find out too much about it.

We had a couple more beers and I went home. I hunted up an old pair of spectacles and put them on the desk right over the dot.

I was listening to the news when Helen came in. She said she was glad I’d spent the evening with Lewis, that I should try to get to know him better and that, once I got to know him better, I might like him. She said, since she and Marge were such good friends, it was a shame Lewis and I didn’t hit it off.