"You'll have to pay for it," he warned. "Once it's open, I can't carry
it in my ship and I'll have to get another."
"Okay, okay! I'll _pay_ for it."
* * * * *
He handed me a synthetic affair that looked like a meshed rope, wound
tight, about the size of a Venusian cigar.
"This is a ladder?" I asked incredulously, but he had shut the door in
my face.
I slipped the cellophane off and unrolled it. It seemed to unroll
endlessly. When it was ten feet long and four feet wide, I stopped
unrolling. Sure enough, it hardened into a ladder in about ten minutes.
It was so strong I couldn't begin to bend it over my knee.
I set it against the side of the ship and began to investigate the view
ports. The first two were sealed tight as a drum.
The third slipped off in my hands and clattered over the side of the
ship onto the rocks.
I was almost afraid to look through the "glass" beneath. I needn't have
been. I could see absolutely nothing. It was space-black inside.
I went back to Rene's ship for a flashlight. He was unimpressed by my
discovery.
"Even if you could break the glass, which you can't," he said, "you
still couldn't get through that little porthole. Here's the flash. You
won't be able to see anything."
He came with me this time. Not because he was interested, but because
he wanted another cigarette and never smoked in the ship.
He was right. I couldn't see a darned thing in the ship with the
flashlight. But I found something--a little lead object that looked
like a coin. It had rolled into a corner of the port.
Now I don't like adventure. I don't like strange planets. All I've ever
asked of life was my little four-by-six cubby in the Brooklyn Bloc and
my job. A job I know inside out. It's a comfortable, happy, harmless
way to live and I test 10:9 on job adjustment.
All the same, it was a thrill to discover a clue that Rene would have
thrown away if he'd been the one looking.