The Wooden Bells 2/2 (The Trading Post)

The whole family arrived in the wood an hour after breakfast. There was the stump as promised, but now it had three bells on its surface.

“I don’t know what this thing is,” said dad “but it seems to want to swap bell shaped lumps of wood for something in your sandwiches, the people behind this must be intelligent, so let’s approach this scientifically.”

He took one of the sandwiches his wife had packed for the picnic and opened the paper taking every piece from it and laying them out individually on the surface of the stump. Then he began trying to move the bells. They wouldn’t move no matter how hard he tried, rather disappointedly everyone stood round and watched.

Ten minutes later it happened. One second the cucumber slices were there and the next they had vanished. They all reached out and pushed the bell nearest to them but only one moved.

“I think it’s trying to tell us that one sandwich worth of cucumber slices is worth one bell,” said dad, “Jack here’s some money, go to the greengrocer and see if you can buy half a dozen cucumbers.”

Jack took the money and ran off. When he returned there were still only three bells on the stump and both his parents were occasionally trying to move them without success. Without any further instructions from his dad he took one of the cucumbers from the bag and laid it on the stump.

To everyone’s surprise nothing happened. It was Mary who broke the silence after half an hour.

“Assuming that you’re correct,” she told her husband, “if you’d never seen a cucumber before where would you suppose the slices I put in the sandwiches come from?”

Dad grinned, “I think you might have hit the nail on the head old girl!” He opened his penknife and cut one of the cumbers in half before slicing a thin bit from the middle.

He laid the cut cucumber on the stump and stood back. Ten minutes later the cucumber disappeared and was replaced by ten bells.

“That proves my point,” said Mary, “The people on the other end seem to think one cucumber is worth ten bells!”

“I’ve got another nine cucumbers here,” said Jack, that’ll be a hundred bells in total.” What ever are we going to do with that lot?”

Dad just grinned. “We’re going to get rich!” he said. “Let’s say a bell worth one tenth of a cucumber can be sold for the price of say two hundred pounds. That’s still a fairly cheap vacuum cleaner that won’t be half as good as one of these things.”

For the next month or so the whole family traded cucumbers for bells. Dad had to use his car to load up the huge quantities of cucumbers they now required, while Mum put the cucumbers on the stump and Jack collected all the bells. Then as Jack was the most familiar with the internet he advertised them on line when they got home and they all sat back and watched the money roll in.

At the end of that time dad was looking happily at his bank account. But their next visit to the trading post altered all that. There was nothing left on the surface of the stump at all.

“Either they’ve run out of ‘bells’ at last,” said dad, “or there’s some sort of problem we don’t know about! In any case we’ve made our money and I suggest we just sit down and enjoy spending it.”

“I think I’ll come down here once a week just for old time’s sake,” said Jack, “you never know when something else might turn up”

The family returned home and made arrangements to dispose of their current supply of cucumbers.

Mary wasn’t quite so sure that this episode in their lives was over yet. “I wonder where all the dirt went? After all, we know we’re not the only ones selling them. Jack says they’re available in most countries all over the internet!”

Jack’s dad looked a bit shaken at this. “I suppose that could be the reason they’ve stopped trading! Come to think of it we don’t really know if the things were legal in the first place?”

He slowly began to worry more and more as the implications hit him. Just suppose the things were illegal? What would a civilisation capable of inventing the bells do to the people who had traded them to aliens? Come to that what would they do to the aliens?

He went through his conclusions with the family that night. Jack wanted to stay and see what happened but his parents agreed that it might be advisable to get away from the more developed parts of the country where most of the bells had been sold. They moved just in time, as the skies over most of the country darkened and the dust and dirt collected by the bells began to be returned.