And there was the one you’d point at something and press a certain spot on it—not a button or a knob or anything as crass and mechanical as that, just a certain spot—and there’d be just a big blank spot in the landscape. But when you stopped pressing, the landscape would come back again, unchanged.

We filed it away in the darkest corner of the laboratory safe, with a big red tag on it marked: Dangerous! Don’t Monkey with This!

But most of the items we just drew blanks on. And it kept coming all the time. I piled the garage full of it and started dumping it in the basement. Some of it I was scared of and hauled out to the dump.

In the meantime, Lewis was having trouble with the emotion gauge. “It works,” he said. “The psychiatrist I gave it to to try out is enthusiastic about it. But it seems almost impossible to get it on the market.”

“ff it works,” I objected, handing him a can of beer, “it ought to sell.”

“In any other field, it might, but you don’t handle merchandise that way in the medical field. Before you can put something on the market, you have to have it nailed down with blueprints and theory and field tests and such. And we can’t.

We don’t know how it works. We don’t know why it works.

Until we do, no reputable medical supply house will take it on, no approved medical journal will advertise it, no practitioner will use it.”

“Then I guess it’s out.” I felt fairly blue about it, because it was the only thing we had that we knew how to use.

Lewis nodded and drank his beer and was glummer than ever.

Looking back on it, it’s funny how we found the gadget that made us all the money. Actually, it wasn’t Lewis but Helen who found it.

Helen is a good housewife. She’s always going after things with the vacuum and the dustcloth and she washes the woodwork so often and so furiously that we have to paint it every year.