"Sled!"
"Uh-huh. Then because it said to drop it in the mail box if found, I
did. You got it, huh?"
Andrews nodded. "Yup," he said. "I got it! Peter Manton, you haven't
seen the end of this, yet."
Manton frowned slightly. "Why?" he asked.
"You've really built the Better Mousetrap, and you haven't seen the
people who are going to beat their path to your door. They haven't
really arrived yet. But they will!"
* * * * *
The first to arrive was the FBI. Then Peter Manton's domicile was
changed from a town in Illinois to a cold stone place in Washington.
Ted Harris faced the Court. "Here is the originator of the Plague of
Rats," he said. "And the saviour of the country at the same time. He is
in the position of a physician who poisons people so that he can save
them. A sort of stinking benefactor."
"Will you please explain to the Court?" demanded the Court.
"The field set up by the Better Mousetrap at the plane of cleavage
hurls anything that passes through it _backwards in time_. The
time-rate is indefinite and uncontrollable. However, this is why
Manton's trap was so effective. On Monday a plague of mice appears
in an apartment. The master of the place goes out and rents one of
the Better Mousetraps. He places it in his apartment and during the
time it is there it hurls mice backward in time to create the plague!
Naturally, the trap will be removed as soon as the mice stop--and
because the trap will be removed in a few days, the trap itself stops
the flow of mice."
"But how far back--?"
"There's little correlation. It just hurls. It is aimless and
uncontrollable. In one case, a key tag went back several months."
"But how come nothing was known of this?" demanded the Court.
Tag Harris smiled. "When I have something that will utterly destroy
something, I do not place anything valuable near it," he said. "In
Manton's own laboratory the boys dropped spare parts through it. In
hardware stores all over the country the clerks were dropping screws
and nuts and the like. Most of this stuff fell to the floor and was
swept up a few days to a week before."
Tag Harris held up a scrap of newspaper. The date was four days in the
future.
"Proof," he said. "I'll be sending that to myself later."
"And the tagged mice--the duplications?"
"Animals that had gone through the time-trap twice and were living
their lives in parallel. You see, your honor, not only did Manton's
Better Mousetrap hurl mice back in time, but it could hurl the same
mouse back to the same era several times--and the Plague of Rats was a
Man-Made Plague."
* * * * *