"I'm Joe Spade — about as intellectual a guy as you'll find all day. I invented Wotto and Voxo and a bunch of other stuff that nobody can get along without anymore. It's on account of I have so much stuff in my head that I sometimes go to a head-grifter. This day all of them I know is out of town when I call. Lots of times everybody I know is out of town when I call. I go to a new one. The glass in his door says he is a anapsychologist, which is a head-grifter in the popular speech. “I'm Joe Spade the man that got everything,” I tell him and slap him on the back in that hearty way of mine. There is a crunch sound and at first I think I have crack his rib. Then I see I have only broke his glasses so no harm done."  —R. A. Lafferty

“Lafferty essays the invention that goes out of control. Told in the first person by this anthropoid-type itinerant genius, it's about how he and his scholarly milquetoast buddy build a nullifier that can selectively dispose of anything useless. They run into trouble, though, when the machine takes this to include useless people. The style here is delightfully suited to the character, full of sly malapropisms, and misconstructions in every sense of the term.”

—Sheryl Smith, Riverside Quarterly Vol. 7 No. 2 (1982)