I WAS CONVINCED that Guppa and Mrs. Jones would be unbeatable on “Fantastic Contraptions.” All they had to do was add some windflowers to one of Guppa’s ideas, and they’d have a winner. From my point of view, the work was all but done, the prize all but won, once I brought them together. I knew that Guppa even had a suitable gadget nearly ready. He hadn’t said anything to me about it yet, probably because he didn’t want me to see something that wasn’t perfected, but I’d seen him fiddling around with it in the garden, and sometimes, in the evenings, after he’d gone home to Gumma, I went out and looked it over. It was a device for watering the garden automatically. It got the job done, but that was about all you could say for it.
How my idea of a satisfactory gadget had changed! It wasn’t enough any longer to get the intended job done, it also had to get my job done: it had to win on “Fantastic Contraptions,” and to do that it had to amuse Flo and Freddie and their audience. So far, the watering machine was only halfway there. It consisted of a number of trash-can lids, inverted, suspended from posts at spots in the garden where they would catch water that fell into them, rainwater or water from the lawn sprinklers Guppa had placed here and there. Each lid was hanging from a cord that ran through a set of pulleys to the valve of a toilet tank, which controlled the flow of water to a sprinkler that covered the area of the garden that included that particular trash-can lid. The principle was similar to—but the reverse of—the method that fills a toilet tank to a certain level. In a toilet tank (and you can confirm this in the privacy of your own home), a floating ball rises with the rising water. Through a set of rods and pivots, the ball is linked to a valve. As the ball rises, the valve closes. In Guppa’s gadget, the trash-can lid fell as it filled with water and rose as the water in it evaporated. A full lid closed the valve, and a dry one opened it. It was a fine gadget as far as it went. It was effective, but it wasn’t attractive or funny.
I wanted so much to just walk right up to Guppa and propose that he and Mrs. Jones collaborate, but I wasn’t sure what my opening line ought to be.
This business of opening lines is always problematic, as Guppa himself had often told me. In his line of business—selling Studebakers, that is, not inventing gadgets or farming—it was the first step on the road to success or failure. “The right words lead to a sale,” he used to say. “The wrong ones lead out the door.” I didn’t want to open with the wrong line and see Guppa’s chances for victory and fame walk, as it were, out the door, so I fretted a great deal about the opening line, and when you consider the effect of adding my fretting about that to my fretting about my general science paper, you won’t be surprised to know that I wasn’t sleeping well and bags had begun to form under my eleven-year-old eyes.
[to be continued]
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