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. I tossed it casually in the air and showed it to Rene. "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."