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A For Anything
 About the Book
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Preview
Chapter 1
A retired bank vice-president named Harry Breitfeller, who lived in a comfortable duplex in Santa Monica with his wife and other relatives, stepped out on the cement porch a little after nine one morning to pick up the mail. There were half a dozen envelopes, mostly bills, in the mailbox, and a whacking big cardboard carton on the porch under it.
Breitfeller picked up the carton, thinking it must be something his wife had ordered, but saw that his own name was on the label.
There was no return address. According to the postmark, the box had been mailed late the previous afternoon in Clearwater, which is about thirty-four miles northeast of Los Angeles.
Breitfeller could not think of anyone he knew in Clear-water. Remembering stories he had heard about bombs in the mail, he shook the box gingerly. It seemed too light to have a bomb in it, and it rattled.
He took the box inside and set it down, pulled up a chair, and put his half-smoked cigar carefully in an ashtray.
His wife, Madge, came in from the kitchen drying her hands. "What´s that?" she asked.
"Don´t know." Breitfeller had his pocket knife open, and was slitting the brown paper tape that sealed the carton.
"Well, who´s it from?"
"Don´t know," said Breitfeller again. He turned the two halves of the box top carefully back. Underneath was a little crumpled newspaper, and under that, something made of wood. Cottage lamps, was his first thought, but they were unstained and there were no shades, and no light sockets.
He pulled the two objects out of the carton and set them upright on the table. His wife looked over his shoulder, and so did her sister Ruth who had just followed her in from the kitchen. The objects were two identical wooden crosses. They were about a foot and a half high. Each one stood on a thick wooden base, and had some kind of wiring attached to the upright and crossarm. On the base of each one was a type-written paper, stapled down, which read:
THIS IS A GISMO
IT IS A DUPLICATING DEVICE-
IT WILL DUPLICATE ANYTHING-
EVEN ANOTHER GISMO.
TO OPERATE, SIMPLY ATTACH A SAMPLE
OF WHATEVER YOU WISH TO COPY
TO THE LEFT HAND ARM
OF THE GISMO, AS SHOWN.
(There was a careful, pen sketch in the margin.)
THEN PRESS THE SWITCH,
AND A COPY WILL APPEAR
ATTACHED TO THE RIGHT HAND ARM
OF THE GISMO.
WARNING:
DO NOT ALLOW THE OBJECT BEING COPIED
TO COME IN CONTACT WITH
ANYTHING ELSE.
Breitfeller read this through twice in silence, ignoring the heavy breathing of the two women leaning on his shoulders. He was a pink-faced man, rather popeyed and without very much chin, but stronger than he looked.
He inspected the two crosses unhurriedly, up-ending them to see if there was anything on the bottom, then examining each part of the wiring.
"It´s a trick," said Ruth over his shoulder. "A silly trick."
"Maybe," said Breitfeller, putting his cigar back in his mouth. He saw that the wires stapled to the crossarms of the two Gismos were really loops, and that the curicus little metal-and-glass blocks which hung from them were suspended by these loops.
There was just the one circuit, that looped over to one of the little metal-glass blocks on the left side and then looped over to the other on the right side. The rest of it, attached to the upright, was nothing but a pair of dry cells and an ordinary light switch.
Breitfeller thought he could build one of these himself, in half an hour, except for the little glass-metal blocks. He had never seen one of those before.
He leaned over the table and peered closer. The glass was a curious-looking cloudy stuff, possibly not glass but a plastic, and it was coated with copper on both sides. On the bottom side of each block there was a small copper hook. It looked to Breitfeller as if the glass or whatever it was would be plenty to insulate that hook from the feeble current that would go through the loop of wire: so the Gismo couldn´t actually do anything, much less what it was advertised to do. But when he looked at those little metal-glass-metal sandwiches, he wasn´t so sure.
His older son, Pete, came in saying, "Dad, I´m going to take the car over to Glendale this morning, okay? Whatcha got?"
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