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.”