The items I had brought with me from the lifeboat were a pocketful of little gray dominoes that were actually movie film, and a small projector to go with them. I didn't offer them for sale, direct. I made arrangements with an old acquaintance in the business of making pictures with low costume budgets for private showings; I set up the apparatus and projected my films, and he copied them in 35 mm. I told him that I'd smuggled them in from East Germany. He didn't think much of the Krauts, but he admitted you had to hand it to them technically; the special effects were absolutely top-notch. His favorite was one I called the Mammoth Hunt. I had twelve pictures altogether; with a little judicious cutting and a dubbed-in commentary, they made up into fast-moving twenty-minute short subjects. He got in touch with a friend in the distribution end in New York, and after a little cagy fencing over contract terms, we agreed on a deal that paid a hundred thousand for the twelve, with an option on another dozen at the same price. Within a week after the pictures hit the neighborhood theatres around Bayonne, New Jersey, in a cautious tryout, I had offers up to half a million for my next consignment, no questions asked. I left my pal Mickey to handle the details on a percentage basis, and headed back for Itzenca. The lifeboat was just as I'd left it; it would have been all right for another fifty years, as far as the danger of anybody stumbling over it was concerned. I explained to the crew I brought out with me that it was a fake rocket ship, a prop I was using for a film I was making, I let them wander all over it and get their curiosity out of their systems. The concensus was that it wouldn't fool anybody; no tail fins, no ray guns, and the instrument panel was a joke; but they figured that it was my money, so they went to work setting up a system of camouflage nets (part of the plot, I told them) and off-loading my cargo. A year after my homecoming, I had my island--a square mile of perfect climate, fifteen miles off the Peruvian coast--and a house that was tailored to my every whim by a mind-reading architect who made a fortune on the job--and earned it. The uppermost floor--almost a tower--was a strong-room, and it was there that I had stored my stock in trade. I had sold off the best of the hundred or so films I had picked out before leaving Foster, but there were plenty of other items. The projector itself was the big prize. The self-contained power unit converted nuclear energy to light with 99 percent efficiency. It scanned the "films", one molecular layer at a time, and projected a continuous picture--no sixteen-frames-a-second flicker here. The color and sound were absolutely life-like--with the result that I'd had a few complaints from my distributor that the Technicolor was kind of washed-out.