The man leaned forward slightly and said, “Was there something, sir?”
Connor was taken aback by the quaintness of the greeting, but he strode to the counter, brought the ruby egg from his pocket and banged it down.
“Tell Mr. Smith I’m not satisfied with this thing,” he said in an angry voice. “And tell him I demand a repayment.”
The tall man’s composure seemed to shatter. He picked up the egg, half-turned toward an inner door, then paused and examined the egg more closely.
“Just a minute,” he said. “This isn’t…”
“Isn’t what?”
The man looked accusingly at Connor. “I’ve no idea what this object is, and we haven’t got a Mr. Smith.”
“Know what this object is?” Connor produced his revolver. He had seen and heard enough.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“No?” Connor aimed the revolver at the other man’s face and, aware that the safety catch was on, gave the trigger an obvious squeeze. The tall man shrank against the wall. Connor muttered furiously, clicked the safety off, and raised the gun again.
“Don’t!” The man shook his head. “I beseech you.”
Connor had never been beseeched in his life, but he did not allow the curious turn of speech to distract him. He said, “I want to see Mr. Smith.”
“I’ll take you to him. If you will follow me…”
They went through to the rear of the premises and down a flight of stairs which had inconveniently high risers and narrow treads. Noting that his guide was descending with ease, Connor glanced down and saw that the tall man had abnormally small feet. There was another peculiarity about his gait, but it was not until they had reached the basement floor and were moving along a corridor that Connor realized what it was. Within the chalk-stripe trousers, the tall man’s knees appeared to be a good two-thirds of the way down his legs. Cool fingers of unease touched Connor’s brow.
“Here we are, sir.” The black-clad figure before him pushed open a door.
Beyond it was a large, brightly lit room, and at one side was another tall, cadaverous man dressed like a funeral director. He too had ice-smooth gray hair, and he was carefully putting an antique oil painting into the dark rectangular opening of a wall safe.
Without turning his head, he said, “What is it, Toynbee?”
Connor slammed the door shut behind himself. “I want to talk to you, Smith.”
Smith gave a violent start but continued gently sliding the gold-framed painting into the wall. When it had disappeared, he turned to face Connor. He had a down-curved mouth and—even more disturbingly—his knees, also, seemed to be in the wrong place. If these people come from the future, Connor thought, why are they made differently from us? His mind shied away from the new thought and plunged into irrelevant speculations about the kind of chairs Smith and Toynbee must use… if any. He realized he had seen no seats or stools about the place. With a growing coldness in his veins, Connor recalled his earlier impression that Toynbee had been standing behind the counter for hours, without moving.
“… welcome to what money we have,” Smith was saying, “but there’s nothing else here worth taking.”
“I don’t think he’s a thief.” Toynbee went and stood beside him.
“Not a thief! Then what does he want? What is…?”
“Just for starters,” Connor put in, “I want an explanation.”
“Of what?”
“Of your entire operation here.”
Smith looked mildly exasperated. He gestured at the wooden crates which filled much of the room. “It’s a perfectly normal agency set-up handling various industrial products on a…”
“I mean the operation whereby you supply rich people with cigarette lighters that nobody on this Earth could manufacture.”
“Cigarette lighters—”
“The red, egg-shaped ones which have no works but light when they’re wet and stand upright without support.”
Smith shook his head. “I wish I could get into something like that.”
“And the television sets which are too good. And the clocks and cigars and all the other things which are so perfect that people who can afford it are willing to pay eight hundred sixty-four thousand dollars every forty-three days for them—even though the goodies are charged with an essence field which fades out and converts them to junk if they fall into the hands of anybody who isn’t in the club.”
“I don’t understand a word of this.”
“It’s no use, Mr. Smith,” Toynbee said. “Somebody has talked.”
Smith gave him a venomous stare. “You just did, you fool!” In his anger, Smith moved closer to Toynbee, so that his body was no longer shielding the wall safe. Connor noticed for the first time that it was exceptionally large, and it occurred to him that a basement storeroom was an odd place for that particular type of safe. He looked at it more closely. The darkness of the interior revealed no trace of the oil painting he had just seen loaded into it. And, far into the tunnel-like blackness, a bright green star was throwing off expanding rings of light, rings which faded as they grew.
Connor made a new effort to retain his grasp of the situation. He pointed to the safe and said, casually, “I assume that’s a two-way transporter.”
Smith was visibly shaken. “All right,” he said, after a tense silence, “who talked to you?”
“Nobody.” Connor felt he could get Angela into trouble of some kind by mentioning her name.
Toynbee cleared his throat. “I’ll bet it was that Miss Lomond. I’ve always said you can’t trust the nouveau riche —the proper instincts aren’t sufficiently ingrained.”
Smith nodded agreement. “You are right. She got a replacement table lighter, television and clock—the things this… person has just mentioned. She said they had been detuned by someone who broke into her house.”
“She must have told him everything she knew.”
“And broken her contract—make a note of that, Mr. Toynbee.”
“Hold on a minute,” Connor said loudly, brandishing the revolver to remind them he was in control. “Nobody’s going to make a note of anything till I get the answers I want. These products you deal in—do they come from the future or—somewhere?”
“From somewhere,” Smith told him. “Actually, they come from a short distance in the future as well, but—as far as you are concerned—the important thing is that they are transported over many light years. The time difference is incidental, and quite difficult to prove.”
“They’re from another planet?”
“Yes.”
“You, too?”
“Of course.”
“You bring advanced products to Earth in secret and sell or rent them to rich people?”
“Yes. Only smaller stuff comes here, of course—larger items, like the television sets, come in at main receivers in other cities. The details of the operation may be surprising, but surely the general principles of commerce are well known to you.”
“That’s exactly what’s bothering me,” Connor said. “I don’t give a damn about other worlds and matter transmitters, but I can’t see why you go to all this trouble. Earth currency would be of no value on… wherever you come from. You’re ahead on technology, so there is nothing…” Connor stopped talking as he remembered what Smith had been feeding into the black rectangle. An old oil painting.