Guidance: This is a story about a man that invents a unique "tool" that turns out to have significant social implications. The story could be about the effect the invention has on its inventor and others about him.

There wasn't much to the little device. Or, at least it didn't appear that it was complex. But it would make Gyro famous. It looked like an irregular but shiny piece of stainless steel. Maybe you recall playing with mud as a child and squinching a piece of mud in the palm of your hand by tightly closing your fist around the mud. Upon opening your hand you would have found a longish shape with peaks and curves that was unique to you. This is what the gadget looked like.

Long before he conceived of this unique device, the making of gizmos to fill common needs had motivated his inventive drive. One of his early creations turned a whole unpeeled potato into hot tasty fries almost instantly with the flick of a switch, without any messy deep fryer. Revenue from this first product was what gave him the resources to make his later greater inventions. And many there were.

A big part of Gyro's success had to do with his ability to be very literal and direct in his approach to solving problems. One of his better known inventions was the self-driving screw. Why use a screwdriver, he reasoned, when the screw could do the whole job by itself. But his knack for invention wasn't all there was to his financial success. He had been fortunate as a boy to meet his mentor, the eccentric Cardigan Swedder. Not only was Cardigan Gyro's teacher and inspirer, but he was a marketing genius. He knew what people needed and how to reach them.

This particular morning, Gyro decided it was time to try out his device in the Ouside World. A first outing for one of his inventions was an important day for Gyro. In his mind the success of a First Outing Day determined the whole mood, the whole flavor of a creation. He marked this day in red in his "Developments Journal", then picked up the phone to call his girl, Ima the librarian.

Ima Jemm was one of Gyro's oldest friends. Once they had considered marriage, but only if Gyro cleaned up his laboratory (which was in his living room and kitchen) and if Ima gave away half her books (which filled her bedroom). They both realized each other's requests would remain unrequited, so they agreed to remain Best Friends. Gyro lived on the East end of South Street. Ima lived on the West end of North street.

Soon, Gyro was knocking "shave-and-a-haircut" on her front door. Ima invited him in. She cleared a pile of books off of a chair and bade him sit.

"Oh, let's see your latest!" She cooed.

Gyro pulled the beautiful stainless steel form from his pocket. Ima picked it up and looked at it, then fitted it into her hand, closed her hand around it and turned her fist over.

Her front door opened by itself as if opened by a poltergeist.

Gyro grinned. Success!!

"Well, what do you think?" He asked.

Ima stared at the door. Gyro rose and closed the door.

"Go on", he said, "Try it again."

Ima looked puzzled. But at his urging, she turned her fist over again. Again, the door swung open.

"Well!" She said, smiling at him. "I like it! How does it work?

Gyro beaming with his success, explained.

" Doors, you see, don't open because of being pushed or pulled open. A person develops a certain resonance with the door. The hand on the knob or handle is just a channel. The hand carries a resonance to express a continuous open space from the person's location to the space behind the door. This "Door Resonator" will do this from a distance. So, if one is a hurry, one doesn't have to stop to create a resonance, one can just keep moving. But, and this is the best party, I believe this will work on not only front doors, back doors and car doors, but on ANY door of ANY building.

"Would you care for breakfast at the cafe?" Gyro said as he rose. "Let's take a walk and test my creation."

Placing the Door Resonator in his coat pocket Gyro took Ima’s hand and walked out the open front door. As they descended the porch stairs Gyro reached into his pocket and rotated the device 180 degrees, and to their glee the front door closed behind them.

As they walked down North St. toward East Ave., Ima asked Gyro if the device might not inadvertently open nearby doors while it bounced around in his pocket. "Oh no!" Gyro said, "the Door Resonator requires the passive electrical energy from your hand in order to operate. See" he said as he twirled around in circles holding his empty hands high in the air. Ima looked from side to side to see if any of the front doors in the neighborhood had opened. "So, what would happen if one were to hold this nifty device in their hand and did an Irish Jig." Ima asked. Gyro looked at her incredulously wondering why anyone would do such a thing. He stammered a little as he thought of the possible consequences of such an act, realizing that he had not tested the device on multiple doors at one time. "I guess the only way to find out would be to try it out."

By this time Ima and Gyro had come to the corner of North St and East Ave.. On all Four Corners stood Victorian style houses with steep gable roofs with little wood cutout curly cue designs in the gable ends and at the porch post tops. Gyro held out the Door Resonator pointing it toward Ima’s feet. Chuckling he said: "Let’s see you do the jig". Smiling back at him she took the gizmo in her fist and began to twirl and dance around. One moment her hands high above her head and the next placed curtly on her hips as she shuffled and kicked up her feet, all the time twirling around and around. If it hadn’t been for the honking of automobile horns Ima might have danced all the way to South St.. When she whirled to a stop and peered around, to her amazement she saw doors open not only on the houses in her immediate view but on several stopped cars in the middle of the street. Some of them had all four doors gapping open. One driver stood forlorn aside his car scratching his head and peering into his wide-open trunk. Across the street at one of the big Victorian houses an elderly woman in her bathrobe looked around suspiciously, searching for the culprit that had opened not only her front door but also her side French doors and two yard gates.

Gyro quickly grabbed Ima’s hand and proceeded to lead her in the direction of The Itsy Bitsy Café.

Ignoring, as always, the life-threatening implications of the "C" placard in its front window, Gyro and Ima entered the crowded Itsy Bitsy café and took seats in their favorite booth. While they waited for Daisy, their favorite waitress, to appear and take their usual order for their favorite breakfasts, Ima scanned the noisy room for new faces.

"There's one there," she said, pointing out a slick-haired man who stood stiffly on a tabletop, his outstretched longnose automatic trained on a customer seated in a nearby booth. "And this couple behind us," she said in lowered voice. "I've seen her at The Felled Ox," she breathed, naming the dive currently favored by the local library crowd and its hangers-on, "The boy-- I'm sure he's far too young for her-- was in the library the other day. Borrowed 'Gerta Plain But Stacked'."

Gyro was preoccupied. "What do you think I should call the new device? Cardigan wants a more accessible name. I thought maybe "Mudfist-thingy". What do you say?"

Ima thought a moment and scribbled a few trial lines on a napkin. "I say we call it the 'Furd'. For Fanbelt's Universal Remote Door-Opener."

"I'd quite forgotten my surname was Fanbelt," chuckled the absent-minded creative marvel, then cocked an eyebrow: "But wouldn't it be a 'Furdo', then?"

"Too reminiscent of roadkill."

"Oh, yes." His face saddening, Gyro passed a moment in silence. "Well then, Furdo it is."

"You mean Furd."

"Of course."

The man who had been on the tabletop was now leaving the restaurant with a friend. As the two approached the front doors, Ima twisted her furd-empowered wrist in their direction. The doors flew open in their faces, throwing both men to the floor. Outside the Itsy Bitsy, a voice bellowed angrily, "Cut! Cut! Cuuuut!" At that moment Daisy arrived at the table, tablet poised.

"What'll it be, kids?" said Daisy distractedly, watching as the downed men were carried out on stretchers. Ima ordered her signature scrambled egg whites and blackberry hearts. Gyro ordered toast, slightly burned, the only way he'd ever known it.

After breakfast, Gyro and Ima went to visit Ima's crafty older sister Strata, who was working with Cardigan on the marketing of Gyro's line of self-preparing foods. The self-toasting bread had done well, once Cardigan had persuaded Gyro to lighten the final result, and the self-tossing salads, their gunpowder content now properly tuned, were beginning to show legs. Self-frying chicken was in the works, but some ethical questions remained to be worked out.

"Strata lives up on Vista Velveeta," said Ima, handing Gyro the Furd and taking him by the hand, "right across from the Drunken Uncle." Gyro, relieved of the need to look where he was going, watched passing traffic. A beat-up bobtail truck, driven by a gray-bearded geezer in a headband, caught his eye. The fading mattress ad on its side had been overpainted, replacing the original svelte sleeping beauty with a fetching Rubenesque nude who smiled out contentedly at Gyro from her resting place atop a billowy cloud. To one side of the cloud, a familiar cartoon character courted copyright action as he waved a professorial pointer toward the reclining beauty. Above his head a balloon read, "Don't laugh, son, your mother may be in here!"

Gyro thought this might well be true; he had last seen his own mother when he was 15, just before she left town abruptly with a trio of barbers.

It seldom turns out that a good barber is also a good tap dancer; it is even less often true that a tapdancing barber, however good at either, can produce creditable results doing both at once. When Gyro's mother, Franny Fanbelt, went to the barber shop that day to complain about just such results, all three dancing barbers at Rhythm 'n' Dos, Gyro's barber shop, fell in love with her in unison, and before she knew what was happening to her, she'd fallen under the intoxicating spell that only three tapdancing barbers can cast. They escorted her to a mobile tonsorial parlor of their own design, which they'd kept parked in the back alley for six years against just such a happy turn of events, and within hours she was bouncing down Baja with them into a new and irresistibly romantic lifestyle. This experience had left Gyro permanently saddened and in need of grooming.

Gyro was very curious. And, in this instance, a touch resentful. Raising his Furd-filled fist in the direction of the dilapidated van, he shouted testily, "Furd you!" and the truck's wide rear doors flew open.

"You're coming with me, you!" said a gruff, cliché-ridden voice behind Gyro. As the truck, its doors just opening, pulled away from the light, exposing a tantalizing glimpse of frilly mattress covers, Gyro's hands were grabbed and cuffed together behind him.

"Unhand him!" Ima implored, but presently she was having cop troubles of her own, and soon she and Gyro were being ceremoniously escorted (the police of Gooseville were nothing if not courtly) into a waiting police van, Miranda (not to mention Tiffany) rights ringing in their ears.

"Why, why have we been taken up in this manner?" asked Gyro when they'd been plunked down before Sergeant Why O'Really at the Northeast Precinct Police Station. (The ride in the paddywagon had been embarrassingly brief, since the station was on the corner of North and East, hence its name.)

O'Really looked Ima square in the eye (ignoring Gyro, who he'd known since they were both in kindergarten and had no great affection for after a rather ambitious crayon experiment of Gyro's had gone sour), banged his hand on the desk, and machine-gunned:

"Obstructing traffic, creating a nuisance, and dancing on Sunday. One phone call each. Take them away, Hank," and went back to his paperwork.

Ima and Gyro were hustled off to a nearby bank of pay phones by Officer Hank O'Heck. Meanwhile, Officer Gosh O'Golly leaned over O'Really's desk and queried, "Hey, Sarge, what did they do?"

"How the heck do I know?" yelled O'Really, banging his hand on his desk, resoundingly, causing O'Golly to jump a couple feet sideways and backwards. But begora, Gosh, doors were flapping, horns were honking, and Ms Jemm was smack dab in the middle of the mayhem doing a jig! And everybody in town knows that Gyro has a few gears loose. He's got to be involved somehow..."

At the payphones, Gyro and Ima waited patiently for O'Heck to uncuff them (at least temporarily) so they could make their phone calls. But O'Heck just stood by, eyes averted, skillfully whistling "Why Are Things In Glocca Mora?" and rocking on his feet. As the helpless pair continued to stare at him expectantly, a flush of embarrassment climbed up his neck and engulfed his ears 'till they throbbed purplely. At last he glanced at them and seeing them staring at him cast his eyes to the ground and swore with fervent mariolatrous sincerity for a moment or two. Then he looked up at them.

"We lost the key."

Pointlessly, but relishing the distraction of the officer's discomfiture, they both said "What?!"

Glaring resentfully toward the desk, where O'Golly and O'Really were deep in an esoteric discussion about the exact sort of jig Ima had been dancing, occasionally demonstrating to each other the different options, O'Heck said "We don't know where it got to, but it's been missing at least since Gosh came back from investigating a Questionable Doings call-in from the Merry Mischief Motel. I told the chief an awkward situation would be inevitable if we didn't get it replaced right away, but they just said 'Oh, it'll turn up, it'll turn up' and now here we are, and of course they gave me payphone duty, and, well, that's how it is" he ended lamely.

"Well, could you at least dial our numbers for us?" Ima asked.

O'Heck looked genuinely affronted. "Oh no, no, quite impossible, that. Aiding and Abetting you know, or Comforting and Consoling, or whatever it is. I suppose your lawyer could do it for you, if you have one." He looked around with exaggerated thoroughness but, as there was only O'Golly and O'Really, now dancing energetically together, inner arms around each other necks and outer arms in the air, O'Heck stepped back a pace or two and said "I'll just give you two a little privacy" and assumed an At Ease stance, staring professionally into space.

They both tried reaching with their arms behind them but the phones were too high. They looked at each other with the "Well, I'll guess we'll have to...", "Oh, all right then, let's get on with it" mutual glance familiar to all partners in misadventure. Ima stolidly lowered herself into a powerful-looking squat, and Gyro climbed onto her shoulders with obvious familiarity. She then hoisted him phoneward, staggering a bit from side to side as he got the range. There was a tense pause.

"What are you waiting for?" Ima said with just a slight groan in her voice.

"Well, do you suppose I should call Strata, or my sister Fanny?"

"Definitely Strata" Ima grunted. "She not only has more money, but she'll have more mind left after she gives these so-and-sos a piece of it."

"Good point" said Gyro, who had no illusions about his sister, or the rest of his family for that matter.

Now, as you may or may not recall, the diligent crew of the Northeast Precinct Station had never confiscated Gyro's invention. Due to its organic shape, it had been completely concealed in his fist the whole time. It was so perfectly fitted to the shape of his hand that even he had stopped thinking about it, and he was now completely engaged in trying to remember which of the two phone numbers revolving in his memory was that of Ima's crafty older sister. He finally picked the one whose numbers added up to a Svengali Prime ("That's your solution to everything!" Ima had often complained) and, painfully counting the holes around the dial for each number, began dialing.

The Northeast Precinct Station boasted a venerable pair of entry doors glazed with fanshell frosted glass and the letters "N.E." stenciled on each one in incomprehensibly ornate Gothic script. As Gyro dialled the third number, they both flew exuberantly inward, allowing a brisk morning breeze to begin re-arranging the precincts's paperwork, mostly upward.

And across from the payphones, a grim, grey painted door of iron bars led to the jailcells. When Gyro dialled the last number, it swung open and hit the wall with a loud clanging bang. And from inside came a series of echoing clang...clang...clangs.

The halls filled with cheers and shouts. Gyro craned his neck around to see what would later be known as The Running of the Thugs…an event which would be commemorated annually by a cross-town race in which entrants all wore black and white striped prison fashions.

"Tell Strata to meet us at the corner of Cross Road and Intersection and let’s get out of here!" yelled Ima above the din. Gyro jumped down and, kneeling by the hanging receiver, shouted the directive to Strata on the other end.

"This Neuron Phone you invented is simply wonderful, I instantly knew you were trying to reach me and here I am "thinking" back to you! chatted Strata, not realizing the emergency at hand, but then remembering the urgency of the Neuron paging signal, came back to the point, "I’m already there – read your horoscope in the paper this morning. Taurus, Pisces…Gyro’s…it was right there." The black oversized receiver swayed alone at the end of it’s cord – Gyro and Ima were gone, swept up in the vertically-challenged sea of black and white.

*****

Ima was looking at the Emergency Procedures card she had found in the pocket of the seat in front of her, Gyro was asleep next to her. She raised an eyebrow when she got to the line advising, "In the event of seizure by DEA agents, disavow all knowledge of anything." She replaced the card and looked out the window at the jungle passing thousands of feet below.

It had been Strata’s idea to get them out of the country until things cooled down. Unfortunately, the only plane headed directly out was bound for Brazil and piloted by two tanned, South Americans with sunglasses and slicked-back hair who, Gyro observed, possessed very nervous natures. They had demanded a fair amount of dinero…in cash of course, and had made a rather hurried take-off.

Ima glanced down at her wrist and silently thanked Strata for having thought to bring her assortment of hand-cuff keys…souvenirs of younger and wilder days. Gyro stirred next to her – the Furd still clutched in his hand. Just as Ima thought to remove it for safekeeping, his hand twitched left and then right in unconscious response to some twilight memory. "Furd you" he mumbled. Suddenly the door of the plane flew open, creating a sucking vortex. Gyro woke with a start and, before the baffled pilots could close the hydraulic door again, the Furd was ripped out of his hand and hurled into the skies above the trackless jungle.

The monkeys scattered, screeching, as the shiny object hit the leaf-littered jungle floor. There it lay, at the door of the yet undiscovered tomb of X’chop X’chop. Local natives were known to claim that the ancient Mayan ruler had led the bloodiest sacrificial reign in pre-Hispanic history. They also superstitiously believed that King X’chop X’chop still walked the halls of his tomb waiting to be released to re-ascend his throne. After recovering from their initial scare, the monkeys crawled slowly forward. One small, wiry individual darted forward and quickly snatched up the treasure for himself. As the others looked on in primal awe, he held out the mysterious object to observe it further – turning it first left then right in his hand…