(Found) The dirt disappearing machine short story

[e_canuck]

I read a lot of sci fi in the '60s and '70s, including short stories, often in anthologies. I remember a fairly humourous one with a bit of an environmental message in it, I thought. Someone had invented a new improvement to the vacuum cleaner...a machine that made dirt and dust simply disappear. After a certain period of years, it suddenly all re-appeared in great heaps. You couldn't tell if the people at the receiving end of the dirt found a way to zap it back to the senders or if the dirt machine was simply forwarding the stuff into some future period. I'd like to read this again as I thought it was a good analogy for the pollution and problems we simply dump into the future and which will come back at us in volume and in ways that are overwhelming.

PS general web searching has got me nowhere in looking for this.

 

[otistdog]

Possibly "Litterbug" by Tony Morphett (which can be read online at archive.org)? Though I took at quick look at that, and I think that I've read the same story you're talking about, and I'm not sure that they're the same.

 

[Danny McG]

The Dusty Zebra by Simak?

Is it the story? @TheDustyZebra

 

[TheDustyZebra]

The Dusty Zebra by Simak?

Is it the story? @TheDustyZebra

It is indeed. Well, actually just Dusty Zebra. Although it wasn't really so much of an environmental message -- it was more in line with "where do the lost pens and socks go". Dude found a spot on his desk that would make things vanish if they were put there, and figured out that they were being taken into an alternate universe. He then worked out how to get someone there to send things in return, and one of those was the device that vanished dust. Except it all eventually came back.

 

[Danny McG]

It don't matter about no lousy steenkin 'The'

Still got the story nailed, job done

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Yeah, yeah, if I'd been paying attention I could have beaten you to it by six days.

 

[e_canuck]

Thanks, dannymcg, now I just need to track down the book. I've found an image form PDF through another post about the same story: .......
On physical page 38 of the downloadable PDF in image format is the Dusty Zebra story. Thanks very much.

https://ia800609.us.archive.org/6/items/galaxymagazine-1954-09/Galaxy_1954_09.pdf

 

[Danny McG]

Thanks, dannymcg, now I just need to track down the book.

It's available in lots of ebook anthologies.
Or are you a tree pulp purist?

 

[e_canuck]

I've now read the story, on page 38 through 50 of that scanned Sci Fi Mag (Galaxy, 1954--I was three years old when it was published), and what strikes me is that I only remembered what the story meant to me, and really nothing else about it. I likely read this in my teens, mid to late '60s in some kind of sci fi anthology. I didn't remember anything about the story except what happens at the end and the ecological boomerang effect that I decided was the moral of the story. I majored in creative writing for my BA and wrote intermittently off and on for years. I've had the experience of finding old stories of mine and marvelling that they may as well have been written by a stranger, for all that I recollect about them. Here's hoping that's not a harbinger of dementia. Thanks again for your help in tracking this down.