Kettlewell said, "Someone has to feed your brother, you know." "I'll do it," she said. She forked up some of his oatmeal and attempted to get it into the little boy's face. "Presents!" Kettlewell dug through the luggage-cluster under the table and came up with an overstuffed diaper bag, then pawed through it for a long time, urged on by his daughter who kept chanting "Presents! Presents! Presents!" while attempting to feed her little brother. Eva and Lester and Suzanne took up the chant. They were drawing stares from nearby tables, but Perry didn't mind. He was laughing so hard his sides hurt. Finally Kettlewell held a paper bag aloft triumphantly, then clapped a hand over his daughter's mouth and shushed the rest. "You guys are really hard to shop for," he said. "What the hell do you get for two guys who not only have everything, but *make* everything?" Suzanne nodded. "Damned right. We spent a whole day looking for something." "What is it?" "Well," Kettlewell said. "We figured that it should be something useful, not decorative. You guys have decorative coming out of your asses. So that left us with tools. We wanted to find you a tool that you didn't have, and that you would appreciate." Suzanne picked up the story. "I thought we should get you an antique tool, something so well-made that it was still usable. But to be useful, it had to be something no one had improved on, and that had in fact been degraded by modern manufacturing techniques. "At first we looked at old tape-measures, but I remembered that you guys were mostly using keychain laser range-finders these days. Screwdrivers, pliers, and hammers were all out -- I couldn't find a damned thing that looked any better than what you had around here. The state of the art is genuinely progressing. "There were a lot of nice old brass spirit-levels and hand-lathed plumb-bobs but they were more decorative than useful by a damned sight. Great old steel work-helmets looked cool, but they weighed about a hundred times what the safety helmets around here weigh. "We were going to give in and try to bring you guys a big goddamned tube-amp, or maybe some Inuit glass knives, but I didn't see you having much of a use for either. "Which is how we came to give up on tools per se and switched over to leisure -- sports tools. There was a much richer vein. Wooden bats, oh yes, and real pigskin footballs that had nice idiosyncratic spin that you'd have to learn to compensate for. But when we found these, we knew we'd hit pay-dirt." She picked up Kettlewell's paper sack with a flourish and unzipped it. A moment later she presented them with two identical packages wrapped in coarse linen paper hand-stamped with Victorian woodcuts of sporting men swinging bats and charging the line with pigskins under their arms. "Ta-dah!" The kids echoed it. "These are the best presents," the little girl confided in Perry as he picked delicately at the exquisite paper.