"Know what that is?" I asked.
"Slug for a halfdec slot machine?"
"Nope. Know what I can do with it?"
He didn't say.
"I'm going to open Uncle Izzy's ship from the _inside_."
* * * * *
Rene lighted a fresh cigarette from the old one and let the smoke out
of his nose. It gave rather the impression of a bull resting between
picadors.
"Can you show me, on the outside, approximately where the button is
that you push on the inside to unseal the ship?" I inquired casually.
"I can show you exactly."
He pointed to a spot next to the entrance port. I wet my finger and
made a mark in the dust so I could get it just right. Then I found a
sharp stone and cut around the edges of the lead. As I slipped off the
back half of the coinlike affair, I clapped it over the finger mark.
The entrance port swung open.
If I'd had a feather, I would have taken great pleasure in knocking
Rene over with it.
"It'd be worth a million dollars," he breathed, "to know how you did
that."
"Oh, a lot less than that," I said airily.
"Well? Explain!"
"Uncle Isadore had it set up," I told him, using the same patiently
impatient tone he used on me. "He knew I'd recognize that lead coin.
There was a cuff link in it."
"A cuff link!"
"A studs and neck clasp man has to know about cuff links, too. This
happens to be an expensive cuff link, but worth only about a year's
salary, not a million dollars. They're held together by a jazzed-up
electromagnetic force rather than by a clasp. This force is so strong
it would take a derrick to pull them apart. The idea is to keep you
from losing one. If you drop it to the floor, you just wave the mate
around a little and it pops up through the air."
"How do you get them apart?"
"Just slip them sideways, like a magnet. You can sheathe them in
lead, like the one I found, to cut down the attraction. This is how
they're packaged. You don't know about them because they're not
advertised--that keeps them a luxury item, you know."
"So your Uncle Isadore pasted one of them on the port button."
"He didn't have to paste. All he had to do was stick it on. All I had
to do was line up the mate to it and the attractive force pushed the
button."
"That's very neat," Rene said. "But why the hell didn't he just leave
the port open? He'd hardly do this sort of thing with his dying gasp."
"I'm not sure," I admitted. "As a matter of fact, I wonder why he
radared _me_ if he really wanted to be rescued. He had plenty of
friends who could rescue him more reliably."
* * * * *
I had an inkling of what had been on Uncle Isadore's mind. Although
Uncle Izzy had had three--or was it four?--wives, he'd very carefully
had no children. And it had occurred to him at an advanced age to take
an interest in me.
He'd sent me through two years of general studies and reluctantly let
me specialize in studs and neck clasps.
"You were a grilch hop expert in Middle School," he had told me. "How
come you're getting so stuffy?"
"Because I can't be an adolescent all my life, Uncle Isadore," I had
replied stiffly. "I would like to get into some solid line of work and
be a good citizen."
"Phooey!" he'd said. But he had let me do what I'd wanted. It was
because of this that I had felt duty bound to answer his call for help.
I'd _not_ felt duty bound to take all the opportunities he'd tried to
force on me when I got out of school. Mining the semi-solid seas of
Alphard kappa. Fur trading on Procyon beta. And a hundred others, all
obviously doomed to failure unless there was one lucky chance.
"But I'm _happy_ here with my little room and my little job," I kept
telling Uncle Isadore.
"You only think you're happy because you don't know any better," he
kept telling me.
Only, now that he was dead, he seemed to have me where he wanted me.
Now that nothing could matter to him any longer.
"Maybe he was getting senile," Rene suggested.
"Uncle Izzy always said he'd rather die than--he _did_ die," I replied,
suddenly recalling myself to the present and the open outside port of
the ship. I realized how reluctant I was to go in. It was one thing to
admit Uncle Izzy was dead--I cherished no great affection for him--but
it was something else to have to face his dead body.
"Would you mind going in first?" I asked Rene.
He shrugged and shouldered the inside door open.
He came out, his face a study in perplexity. "Not here!" he said. "This
is the first time I've been wrong in fifteen years!"
"That's because it's the first time you've been up against Uncle Izzy.
He must have closed the port behind him the same way I opened it."
I climbed through the door, feeling immensely relieved. I realized then
what had really been worrying me. If the gods had abandoned Isadore at
the last, what did they have in mind for the rest of us mere mortals?
I kicked at my mind irritably, knowing these were young thoughts. But
then I _am_ young, I explained to myself.
* * * * *
The inside of the ship was neat and empty. Stuck on the instrument
panel with a vaccup was a note, in Uncle Izzy's flowery script.
_My boy. I have died of boredom. Do not look for the remains. I
have hidden my body to avoid the banality of a decent burial.
I bequeath you my entire fortune. Find it._