"You mean here to the hotel," Mr. Steariot said, "or to Earth?"
"Earth," Fred said, dismally.
"My second," Mr. Steariot said. "First trip I wound up near Leningrad.
Terrible time. I thought they'd talk English, but they don't, and they
thought I was an American, and two of their officials got into the
saucer with me, and the only way I could save myself was to take off
with them. They're on Venus now."
"This accounts," Mr. Mason broke in, "for the way those two high
Russian officials suddenly disappeared from sight three years ago. You
remember? Everybody thought they'd been liquidated."
Fred Daniels looked around the room. A hollow, frightening feeling had
come upon him. There were hundreds of questions he could have asked,
and yet he wanted nothing so much as to be away from there.
His wife Alice, though, was constrained to learn more about Mr.
Steariot. She said, "Mr. Steariot, may I ask you something?"
"By all means," Mr. Steariot said, and blinked owlishly at her.
"Do you," Alice said to him, "carry any money?"
It was, Fred Daniels realized, a marvelous question. If there were sham
here, this would be the quickest way to--
"Why, of course." Mr. Steariot said, and reached for his wallet.
"Let's see--health insurance--saucer driver's license--here, my dear.
A five-djino bill." He extracted a yellow banknote and handed it to
Alice. The banknote, slightly larger than an American dollar bill, was
remarkably similar in other particulars. It had upon it a picture of a
flying saucer, the figure 5, and, spelled out, "FIVE DJINOS".
"Let me sign it for you," Mr. Steariot said, taking out a pen. "You can
have it for a souvenier."
"Like the short snorters in the war," Mr. Mason, the hotel manager,
said. "You remember them, Mr. Daniels? Where people got famous
signatures on five and ten and twenty-dollar bills and exchanged them
and what not, and they called them short snorters?"
"I remember," Fred Daniels said. "Something like that."
"Five djinos on Venus," Mr. Steariot said, signing his name with a
flourish, "is worth about twenty dollars here on Earth. No official
rate of exchange, of course, but from what I've seen, that's about what
I'd judge. Here you go." He handed the bill over.
"Well, wait, then," Fred Daniels said. "I ought to sign one of _our_
bills for _you_."
"Ah, no need for that," Mr. Steariot said. "No doubt you need twenty
dollars worse than I need five djinos."
"Don't be ridiculous," Fred said, a little stiffly; and, by now
committed, he went into his wallet and came out with a twenty dollar
bill. He signed his name to it, using Mr. Steariot's fountain pen.
"Wonderful," Mr. Steariot said. "How nice to have met you both."
* * * * *
"I feel very badly about this," Mr. Mason, the hotel manager, said to
Fred and Alice. The three of them were on the porch outside. "This
short snorter business always seems to happen whenever I introduce Mr.
Steariot to anyone. Dr. Phelps at the Institute gave him fifty dollars.
Can you imagine that?"
"It's interesting in its way," Fred said. "It just occurred to me: Mr.
Steariot can spend Earth money here, but we can't spend Venus money."
"That's true," Mr. Mason said. "On the other hand, Mr. Steariot has
never once, to my knowledge, been the one to bring up the subject. I
think it's quite painful to him, really. But the same thing inevitably
occurs to everybody he meets. You know, let's see the color of your
money. I guess people are pretty much the same everywhere--that
is, everywhere on _Earth_. They judge everything in terms of money,
including whether you've even been born on Earth! 'Let's see your
money,' they say to Mr. Steariot, and out he comes with one of those
damn five-djino bills, and we're off."
"You know," Alice Daniels said thoughtfully, "in a way it's a lesson.
Isn't it, Fred? I mean, everybody is money conscious. Maybe too much
so. I'm not sorry it cost us twenty dollars to meet Mr. Steariot."
"You may be right," Fred said to her. "You may be right. Who knows,
some day this five-djino bill may be a very valuable--"
"There you go again," Alice cut in. "Always putting it in terms of
money."
"But _you're_ the one," Fred said, "who thought to ask him about it in
the first place."
"Don't quarrel," Mr. Mason, the hotel manager, said to them. "After
all, for you it's just a vacation. For me, I've got this man sitting in
my lounge day in and day out doing crossword puzzles and trading short
snorters with my guests. Nobody really believes he's from Venus--nobody
important, anyway. It's a little frightening, when you're trying to run
a happy hotel. Sometimes I wish he'd go back to wherever he came from."
"Well," Fred said, "he's bound to leave one of these days."
"Maybe," Mr. Mason said doubtfully. "Offhand, though, I'd say the way
he's taking it in, he can't afford to."